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“The line [on day one] was three times this long by the time they opened the doors,” said Ivan Martin, a 40-something comic book collector.

The MCBA puts on two major conventions a year. This one is Fallcon, the larger of the two, and it boasts some big names from all over the comic book industry. The convention is a chance for famous artists, writers and publishing houses to meet and greet their adoring public. Here, those who create comics are celebrities.

“Minnesota has a long history of producing comic creators in disproportionate number to our population,” said Nick Post, who works at the Source, a comics and gaming store on Larpenteur Avenue in Falcon Heights and helped organize the convention.

Comic vendors, shops and even independent collectors can sell their wares at Fallcon (for a nominal fee, of course). Attendees come from around the Midwest in hopes of making rare finds and getting signatures from their favorite writers.

Over time, it becomes clear that this is not (as it once appeared), an ordinary line. Like concertgoers, attendees of a political convention, or church members, those who wait in this queue are tied to one another, though most don’t know each other. They are tied together by their love of graphic storytelling, comic books, and by a community that only gathers together for these conventions.

“This is my people!” Torrey Winter, a collector from the area, proclaims to his wife, who has come along for the ride despite the fact that she doesn’t collect comic books. Winter is here as much for the atmosphere of the convention and the community itself as he is to buy comics.

As the doors open and the fans enter the building, it becomes evident that Winter’s “people” come in various shapes and sizes. They’re impossible to identify just by looking at them. There are, as some might expect, a fair number of middle-aged white males with beards in the crowd at Fallcon, but there are also comic readers that break those typical paradigms.

College students who look like they’ve just arrived from an indie rock show, men and women from a plethora of different races and children from ages five to 14 all wander the booths together. It quickly becomes apparent that comic collectors don’t all live in their mothers’ basements.

Conventions like Fallcon give writers like Page an opportunity to network and to support one another. It’s not easy to make it into one of the larger publishing houses like Marvel and DC, so independent writers use conventions to cross-promote, get new ideas and expand their fan base.

“Sometimes to the general public it looks like these events are about commerce, but they’re really about community,” said Post.

Looking over the crowd from a balcony above the main floor, there’s no denying that Fallcon is a community. For these fans, the convention is not about how someone dresses or even what kind of comics they read, whether indie romances or epoch super-powered struggles. Many of these people have only one thing in common, but that’s still one: comics.