Wizard World Philly was held this past weekend In Philadelphia and Yodasnews again was there to cover the event. To start, there was a great improvement over last year with the way WizKids did the exclusives. Last year half of the convention floor was lines waiting to get exclusives and it made it a nightmare to move around. This year they did the lottery system each day, and at 1pm the numbers were posted and if your number was selected, you had the right to buy one the 2 exclusives.

For a Movie Year, outside of the vendors, there was not many Star Wars related items around. But you could score the Yoda and Vader gumball machines that we showed you a few months ago on the Target.com site for only 15 bucks each!  That was honestly the only new star wars items I saw. MR was not there this year, nor were Gentle Giant, Code 3 or Hasbro.

They did have a nice group of Star Wars Actors in the Signing Area, Kenny Baker, Peter Mayhew, Jeremy Bulloch and Jerome Blake were all on hand to sign autographs ($20 per item). I think Mr. Blake was having a bad time, while the other three had long lines, in all the time we were there, no one person was in line for Mr. Blake.

Peter was very nice and spoke to me for a few minutes about ROTS and posed for a picture. Kenny cracked me up because there was a line about 20 deep behind me, yet he and his wife spoke to us for about 15 minutes and he added some very cool unique items to my autograph, this was the first time I met Kenny in person and it was a true pleasure!

Wizards did have a booth set up to teach you how to play various games and if you sat in one Star Wars session (about 20 minutes), you earned a Mini from ROTS! If you completed all 4 stations there, you got to pick from some very cool prizes!

Another Big event from the convention was the debut of a new comic book called The Freshman from TopCow, created by  Hugh Sterbakov and Seth Green (yes, that Seth Green) and written by Sterbakov. A cool connection we found out when talking with Sterbakov was that all 6 covers were done by Rodolfo Migliari who did cover art for numerous Star Wars comics as well as inserts for the last  few sets of Star Wars Trading Cards just to name a few! Look for an exclusive interview in the coming weeks when we sit down with the writers and co-creators and learn more about this new comic!

The Vendors seemed to be all over the place this year, it seemed like more space was given to then and less to the artists and companies. My initial impression was that anything with a Star Wars logo on it was triple the amount, but if you looked around, you could find some nice deals. I scored a double sided large size ROTS Poster for $15.  The Vader and C-3PO large busts could be found for as low as $100! You could even find every figure up to #50 from the ROTS line as well as boxes of the "recalled" Target Cases, Clone Troopers, Lava Vaders and more!

All in all it was a great time, we got to meet some great people and the crew from Yodasnews was even interviewed and featured on the local news station here (CN8). They spoke to me and the crew for about 15 minutes but only a small clip was shown but it was still lots of fun! We also would like to thank the great folks at Upper Deck for the shirts they gave to the whole crew! Please check out some snapshots of the floor!