Blue Milk Special

Looks like dianogas aren’t the only thing Leonardo forgot to warn his new friends about! We first met Leonardo, Dash Rendar’s contact in the Coruscant underworld, in last week’s strip. He is currently leading our brave band of heroes through the sewers of Coruscant that run below, and into, Xizor’s palace. Those sewers have some unsavory denizens like the dianoga beast that Luke first encountered on the Death Star. This time around Luke isn’t taking any crap from it. And Dash isn’t going to take any crap from mutant rats either! Click here to see the Brothers Hildebrandt’s take on the scene.

Last weekend was a big one for Blue Milk Special. Celebration Europe II took place in Essen, Germany and Blue Milk Special was a small part of it, thanks to Jedipedia.net. But most of all, thanks to Michael Stipp, the guy responsible for translating almost all of our strips so far into Deutsch. We provided some upscaled pinup art to Michael to decorate the Jedipedia.net booth along with the exclusive BMS print, featuring Kyle Katarn and Mace Windu, among others. That print made it into the hands of many Star Wars alumni including Anthony Daniels, pictured right. –>

Has my vote for coolest BMS related picture of the year!

I now hand today’s blog over to Michael for his CEII report…

Michael Stipp:

It was a very busy weekend. The first positive impression was after I just arrived on Friday morning, Jeremy Bulloch was in the hotel lobby and took a quick photo with some of us. It was very quick and spontaneous for all people. But let’s start with the beginning.

Some of our team arrived on Thursday and began the setup of our booth – just to find a largely unprepared spot in the Sandcrawler hall with no movable walls or electricity, so they had to organize everything together with our booth neighbor and partner Magnus from Mission Orange.

We had a quite large team of about 20 people over the three days so that our 3x3m booth was almost always very busy. The hall was also the most, clogged with narrow walkways between the fan group setups, so that there wasn’t particularly much room in front of our booth. The constant unnerving noise from the R2-D2 Builders Club right in front of our booth drove us nearly crazy – you couldn’t run from it and every 5 minutes a droid “blew up” acoustically like R2 does in the movies. – -Editor: Leanne HATES that sound- –

I didn’t get to watch many of the panels, but we attended Leland Chee’s and Pablo Hidalgo’s panel about the Lucasfilm Holocron database. After detailing about Chee’s history with Lucasfilm and a closer look at an example from the Holocron itself, they did a Q&A where they also mentioned us from Jedipedia being in the audience. Another panel I attended at least for 10 minutes was the art of Iain McCaig, who did a great job answering the people’s questions in a very humorous way.

What I did most over the course of the weekend was going to the stars and trying to get their autographs – not in the usual way with paying and so on, but together with one of the BMS Jedipedia posters, our PR and photo guy Moritz and Daniela and her son (sometimes also with Magnus) to get the actors, artists, authors and producers to sign the poster. Why you ask? Well, we want to auction it for charity next year at Jedi-Con 2014, for the Children’s Hospiz Sternenbrücke (“Starbridge”) in Hamburg, for which Magnus is also collecting. Through his experience and significance with getting the stars to subscribe for his charity, he really helped us to get to some of the more reluctant guests. It was also great to have a joined booth with him, so we were able to help each other out when necessary.

Encounters with the stars on location had some highlights, especially the visit of Anthony Daniels at our booth, who was asked to come by of one of our members’ mother – quick thinking on her part, because she met him walking through the autograph hall right after the convention opened on Sunday morning. After he signed the poster he was was surrounded again by many other people who wanted to take pictures with him – it was like he was the prey of wild animals. I really can feel with those headliners that they are reluctant to wander the convention halls at all.

We also had great talks with the lesser known individuals like John Morton (a Boba Fett double), who is in the security business nowadays and talked with us about his career and his daughter who still works for Lucasfilm in the technical department. When we went back to the hotel he was just talking with her in front of the entrance and as we passed them, he greeted us and said to her “Those are the people I just told you about.” On Saturday morning, he also approached us during breakfast and asked if we had a good night. A really nice guy. We also met other stars like Daniel Logan and Mike Edmonds during breakfast that day, with Daniel Logan – totally being the entertainer he is – using his loud voice to entertain the people even at breakfast. On Sunday morning, Temuera Morrison (Jango Fett himself) greeted us friendly during breakfast and joined us on the lobby couches later on. I had the pleasure to share an elevator with Peter Mayhew and his wife, while Daniela joined Femi Taylor (Oola) more than once for elevator rides. That played out great, when we visited her to sign the poster late on Sunday afternoon.

It was also great to talk with the artists, who were very supportive of our cause, especially Brian Rood told us to contact him if we ever needed his help for charity or to interview him. Some of them also already knew of Blue Milk Special and were happy to see and sign the exclusive poster we showed them. IIRC, Joe Corroney and Matt Busch were two of them. I also talked to Randy Stradley from Dark Horse Comics about the exclusive art you gave us, and I think he also already had seen some of BMS before.

As I already told you, Mary Franklin – -Editor: Mary is the show organizer- – really liked our posters, which she confirmed again when she visited our booth on Sunday. She even said that she forwarded the BMS poster arts to Steve Sansweet, who was very impressed and liked them a lot. We made sure to subscribe him in advance as the auction host for next year when we sell the poster for charity. He came by our booth late on Saturday, where we gave him one of the Jedipedia posters, for which he was very thankful. We already knew Steve from the last two Jedi-Cons, so it was especially easy to get in touch with him again.

I was really lucky when some of our team members intercepted Leland Chee (Keeper of the Holocron) after his last panel on Sunday afternoon and escorted him back to our booth where we had about 20 minutes to chat with him about the problems of a German wiki and various translations give us, our cooperation with the German OSWFC and our articles in the German fanzine as well as taking some photos with him. He was very eager to hear about our experiences and valued and thanked us for the effort we take to make the wiki a success.

All in all, the 3 days just flew by – you just arrived on Friday and then everybody packs up their booth materials on Sunday afternoon and you realize for yourself that you wanted to see so many things and talk to so many people but you were sooooo busy that you just managed to do a few things on the list you planned before the event. It would have really been great if you two would have been able to attend, but I hope I could give you some insights on how busy a weekend it was.

Best wishes and many thanks again to you and Leanne from

Michael
and the whole Jedipeda.net team

Thanks so much, Michael! Leanne and I owe you a hug!

Below is the scan of the signed poster. How many signatures do you recognize?