Oversized Convention Bags – Rusty Staples

Over the past year or so Leonia and I have been steadily going through all our stuff and consigning a heck of lot of it to the recycling bin or charity shop because we don’t want to burden whoever comes after us with a house crammed with thousands of books, comics, CDs, magazines, fanzines, DVDs and so on that are of no interest to them, and in the process I recently came across our collection of San Diego Comic Con bags.

Members attending the famous SDCC are given large vinyl bags — usually supplied by Warner Bros. to advertise their movies, TV shows and comics — in which to store their purchases. There’s often more than once bag from which to choose: in 2014, they had thirteen different bags.

Leonia and I have attended SDCC three times, and thus we have acquired three such bags, each roughly 50cm across by 57cm deep (that’s about 20″ by 22.5″ in US dollars).

From the 2008 San Diego Comic Con, the very nice Watchmen bag. (We actually managed to acquire a third one of these which we gave to a Watchmen-obsessed friend.)

From 2011, The Big Bang Theory. This one is a bit wider than the others thanks to an extra section on the side in which rolled-up posters can be stored.

Both of these come with velcro pads keep them closed and removeable shoulder straps, but the 2014 bag stepped up the game with metal button fasteners and twin non-removable straps on the back so the bearer can turn it onto a giant backpack which makes it much easier to inconvenience other pedestrians while wandering around San Diego…

… And just look at that Batman on front of the 2014 bag, created by combining the original cover for Detective Comics #27 (Batman’s first appearance) and Greg Capullo’s iconic drawing for the cover of Batman #0 in 2012! I absolutely love this image!

We don’t need actually this as a bag (we’ve got two of ’em) and I don’t want to bin it because that Batman image is just so cool. Sure, there are some folds and creases, but they’re not deep and I reckon they’ll flatten out inside a frame. And speaking of which, we also have a bunch of old picture frames in the “must do something with this lot one day” pile, and one of them is 41.7cm by 51.8cm (16.5″ by 20.5″), which should be just about the right size… with a bit of luck.

First step is to separate the front piece from the rest of the bag. The parts of the bag are actually stitched together rather than glued, so with careful application of a blade it’s relatively simple to slice through the threads.

The cover on the front of the bag is at an angle…

… but I want it properly square in the frame, so that means some careful trimming. As it happens, the long arm of my carpenter’s square is 5.2cm wide, and that times two plus the width of the cover (30.5cm) comes to 40.9cm, which is a tad wider than the visible area of the picture frame — bang on target, in other words.

With the sides trimmed, now I need to focus on the height. Unfortunately, because I’m effectively turning the picture at an angle it’s going to be very close. Plus these metal button fastener things are in the way.

I could slice off the bit with the fasteners but then I’d lose even more of the image.

Luckily, to reinforce the vinyl around the fasteners there’s actually a nice wide hem folded over… Removing the fasteners was a simple matter of using my trusty pliers (the very first tool I ever bought for myself!) to snip them off.

With the fasteners out of the way — some of the bits pinged off across the room and disappeared somewhere: they’ll turn up eventually — I was able to unfold the top hem and thus get back enough space for the picture to fit in the frame.

I was so happy that it was going to work that I forgot to photograph the trimming of the top and bottom, so you’ll have to picture that stage for yourself.

Anyway, here’s the finished thing…

… I’m pretty pleased with how it came out: a very nice framed Greg Capullo Batman poster for absolutely free!

No idea what I’m going to do with the thing, mind you: there’s not a lot of room on any of the walls… At least, not until we start purging the artwork, too.