Chicago: C2E2!

Don't forget: I'll be appearing at C2E2 this weekend--April 16-18.
Artists Alley: D10

I'm not even sure when Beanworld last set up at a convention in its hometown:
1997 or '98 I think.

Long time.

So long ago, that perhaps the only
FREE Beanworld Action Figures in the line up
were the Beans on the top top tier.

The History of the Beanworld Action Figure

Chapter Two

After the publication of the first issue of Tales of the Beanworld in early 1985, I went out onto the convention circuit. I set up at Chicago ComiCon (I had attended every convention since its premiere in 1976) and all the monthly Chicago mini-cons.

Cory and I went to San Diego Comic Con, Motor City Con in Detroit, and the Dallas Bulldog Con. Like everyone else, I sat behind a skirted card table talking to fans about my book, handing out fliers and selling issues and sketching.

Here I am in the 80s at San Diego as Mr. Quagmire glares at the camera.

If I remember this correctly, at roughly the same time, Mike Friedrich's StarReach Productions was hosting a series of regional trade shows. These shows were for retailers only--theoretically no fans were allowed. Eclipse publisher, Dean Mullaney, and probably Beau Smith, were setting up at the Chicago stop of the trade show tour. I was invited to sit in and attempt to raise visibility of Beanworld to comic book retailers that weren't ordering my book.

Dean recommended that I find some sort of hook that would allow people to notice me as they meandered past my table. As I recall, he said something like "How about giving out little bags of jelly beans?"

A excellent suggestion I thought.
And I knew immediately what I was going to do.
I was going to make that cut-out magazine photo of the spoonful-of-beans-with-eyes picture become a real thing.

I went to the supermarket and surveyed the various bags of dried legumes. I decided that I liked the size and color of Great Northern lima beans the best and took a bag home. With my trusty Faber-Castell technical pens, I dotted some eyes on the beans exactly as I had a dozen years before with the magazine photo.

I went to the trade show and set up. I put the newly "eyed" lima beans in a little translucent plastic Tupperware hamburger dish with a sign that said something like:

FREE BEANS.
FOR THINKING ABOUT--NOT EATING!

It was a bit of a silly riff on Levi-Strauss' observation that in all cultures--some plants and animals are for eating and some are for thinking about --often being taboo.

The beans-with-eyes were a hit.
Retailers would look into the dish, pick up a bean and ask me what the deal was.
That allowed me to try to get them to "think" about Beanworld.

The first attempts looked like this--black ink on beans!

The History of the Beanworld Action Figure

Chapter One

Re-creation of the picture before

Sometime in 1973, when I was working at Lithographics, Inc. in Canton CT, I found a little picture in the recipe section of TV Guide of a white spoon containing a mound of kidney beans.

For reasons that are totally fogged in memory, I cut the photo out of the magazine, dotted some eyes onto the beans, took it to work and taped it to the wall by my work station.

I've mocked up these two rudimentary facsimiles to show, how simple a transformation it was. One moment it was a recipe illustration. The next it was a doorway into what would one day become part of the Beanworld.

Re-creation of the picture after

For almost the next twenty years, at whatever place I might be employed, the photo of the spoon of beans was always part of the decoration of my work space.

The photo above was taken somewhere in the early 1980's while I was an art director at Sander Allen Advertising in Chicago IL. The fellow on the left is Sal Garcia. We worked together for about 5 years, During that time, he was one of the only people who understood what I was attempting to do with Beanworld.

The guy on the right is me. Inside the circle that the arrow is pointing to--is the spoonful-of-beans-with-eyes picture. Also of note at about 1 o'clock--upper right from the circle is a PMT of the "Beware the Fog" drawing that was printed in Larry Marder's Beanworld Book One trade paperback.

Out of all the treasures housed in the Beanworld Archives--this little picture is the one artifact that hasn't surfaced since I left Illinois in the mid-1990's. I find it impossible to believe that I've actually lost it--but it is quite misplaced!