I’ve been a Wil Wheaton fan since I started reading his blog a couple of years ago. He’s a great writer who is funny, smart, and consistently gracious to his fans. In addition to his blog and a variety of print and online columns, Wil also writes and sells books of personal essays that are funny and touching and well worth buying (you can get them from Amazon or through links on his blog).

Anyway, for a while, his blog had a photo of Wil wearing a sweater with a clown face. You can follow that link to the full story, but essentially he put it on because a fan asked him to do it. Rstevens (creator of the Diesel Sweeties comic strip) saw the photo (and the look on Wil’s face) and decided to print a limited run of t-shirts with that same graphic on them, but in his own 8-bit format. Obviously, I had to get one!

When Phoenix Comicon came around this year, Wil was once again invited to be a special guest and read from one of his books. He actually did lots more than that – sitting on several panels, and helping to arrange a massive group game of Rock Band that was essentially (in Wil’s words) “a lot of geeks having a lot of fun pretending to be rock stars on a real stage playing for a real audience.”

So I drove up from Tucson specifically for the Phoenix Comicon (more posts on the rest of this, later), and of course I had to wear my clown-face t-shirt at least one day. By coincidence (fate? kismet? GMTA? whatever you want to call it)… Wil was wearing the same shirt on that same day! A couple of people asked me about the shirt, so I got to tell the story a couple of times, which was a kind of a cool ice breaker. My favorite was the guy who looked at me (while I was by myself) and said “Hey! You match!” I knew what he meant, but his friends thought he was nuts until he explained.

There you have it – not the 1,000 words I was aiming for, but enough to let you know what’s going on in the picture in the previous post.