I’ll be heading off early tomorrow morning (far too early) for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con International, which will run through Sunday. I’ve heard that there will be anywhere from 150,000 to 175,000 people in attendance, a far cry from my first few conventions, at which the membership never even hit four figures.

As far as I know, no pictures exist of me from my first convention, which was the 1970 installment of Phil Seuling’s famed July 4th New York Comic Art Convention, back when I was only 15. But since I was tall even then, and always sat front-row center so as not to miss a single word at any panel, multiple shots of me at Phil’s 1971 convention ended up being published.

Click here to see the one I already shared with you, which ended up getting published in the con’s 1972 program book. But above is a second image from that same weekend, possibly from the con’s opening ceremonies, which was originally published in the February 1972 issue of Fantastic Fanzine Special #2, an early Gary Groth magazine. If you compare this image with that first one I shared, you’ll see that I was probably in the same seat for both pictures. I doubt I got up from that chair the entire day. Once you nab the best seat in the house at a con, you don’t give it up!

But that’s not the only image from that period of time. Here’s yet another picture of me with Phil Seuling, this one originally published in the September 1971 issue of Comic Fandom Monthly, edited by Joe Brancatelli. That’s Phil in the far left, and I’m dead center. As you can see, I’ve still got the long hair and headband!

This photo was taken at the Nathan’s Famous on Times Square sometime in 1971. The event was basically a small dealer’s room tucked away in the back corner of the restaurant ‘s basement.

If I’m remembering correctly, this was a precursor to the Second Sundays that Phil used to run monthly at the Statler-Hilton Hotel. I wrote and published a con report on the first Second Sunday in my own fanzine, Call It Fate and if I can ever dig out a copy, I should be able to pin down an exact date. But I seem to recall that Phil was testing the waters with this event, attempting to learn whether those Second Sundays would be economically feasible.

I remember picking up sketches and autographs at Nathan’s from Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, Alan Weiss, Gerry Conway, and others. I still have them all. Maybe you’ll get to see them someday. (Bizarrely, I would end up working under three of those four people years later at Marvel Comics.)

Both of the photos above show me 37 years ago at the age of 16. Somehow, I don’t think that any photo taken at the coming convention over the next four days will carry as much psychic weight when looked back on 37 years from now, when I’m 90.

But you never know—I could be wrong. Make sure to check back with me then!