On November 12, 2018 the world lost a cultural icon when it was announced that Stan Lee had died. For almost 80 years Stan had influenced countless minds with his stories as well as created numerous iconic characters.

Fast forward 8 months and I see that Dean Rullan AKA Redinkedpanda and his wife, Gladys are doing a tribute gallery to Stan near my house at Upland’s Cooper Museum.

I’ve actually known Dean and his wife Gladys for quite a few years. Gladys is really good friends with both of my parents and my Dad worked with both Dean and Gladys. Usually they get around to a lot of the bigger conventions in California so whenever we’re at a convention and we know they have a table set up in the artist alley we usually try to make a point to stop by their table and say hi.

I also remember Dean offering to get me into San Diego Comic Con one year by letting me have one of his spare exhibitor/vendor pass. It was really tempting but me being the socially awkward introvert that I am, I didn’t want to run around SDCC by myself and I didn’t want to impose by asking if he could get my cousin in as well.

Anyway, like I said between the fact that this exhibition was so close to my house and seeing how my family is such good friends with both Gladys and Dean I decided to check it out.

The exhibition was smaller than I expected with only a few pieces on display. No disrespect to Gladys and Dean, they tried as hard as they could and honestly between what I learned in my professional career as well as watching both the Hulu and Netflix documentaries on the Fyre Festival, putting together a successful event can be difficult, even if you had the resources and reputation to back it up and promote, there’s still a chance you won’t have the turn out you were hoping for and even then, if you look at events like Fyre Festival, DashCon, and TanaCon if you don’t plan your event right it could turn into a massive clusterfuck.

There were some artists selling some of their work at the exhibition but I don’t know the rule when it comes to artists who are trying to sell their work at exhibitions. Some are cool with it, some aren’t, and like I said since I’m a socially awkward introvert I don’t have the confidence to straight up and ask. My lack of confidence also caused me to rush this. I don’t know why, I was on the verge of having a panic attack or something and I just really wanted to get out of there. At first, I was tempted to not bother taking pictures and just leave but eventually I decided that I needed the pictures more than I needed to leave so I ended up pulling out my camera and snapping some photos.

You can thank my dad and my dog for getting me to snap photos. I brought my dog to this thing because I’m in the process of trying to get him trained to be a hearing dog for my mom and I know part of the training process is getting him socialized and trained so that he can be in public and not be going crazy while I brought my dad with me because I knew realistically it would be hard for me to snap photos and try to control a super-energetic corgi. If it wasn’t for them I would have reverted to shy me and just walked out of there without snapping any photos, but luckily they got me to stay long enough to realize that I should try to get some photos of out of this.

Anyway, enjoy the pics!