This past Wednesday (April 20th), I made the trip to Kidrobot LA in Santa Monica for the Gary Baseman signing of the heavily anticipated blue Dumb Luck NYC edition. Even though the signing wasn’t scheduled till 7pm, I left early (to avoid rush hour traffic) and got to the store around 4 PM. I figured that I could just keep an eye out on the store and wait till a line started forming before worrying too much about it. Wrong! Three nice folks (turns out also from Irvine) promptly formed a line, so I followed suit. This was at 4:15 !
The line started growing quite quickly, and by 5pm was already at least 30 or so deep (almost past the Levi’s store next door — stores being an indication of line length, with Borders being the rule-of-thumb "cutoff" mark used by some KR employees). The line reached Borders by 6 at the very latest. Looking back at the line was interesting — the crowd was definitely skewed older, easily 35-40 and up. Also, it did appear that some people had brought several members of their family — perhaps to increase the number of toys they could buy since they were limited to one per person. The four of us at the front of the line figured that many of the people in line were "flippers" — people who were planning on immediately listing their signed toy on Ebay for considerably more than the retail price of $80. A quick trip to Ebay reveals several of these signed toys for auction. Given the length of the line and tremendously limited supply (67 down from the original estimate of 75), people motivated by proft DID prevent some fans and collectors from getting a toy.
While we were waiting in line, the cool KR staff quickly took down the Kozik smorkin Dunny display and put up this amusing Dumb Luck window display:
The KR doors opened very promptly at 7PM and I quickly bought Baseman’s Dumb Luck book and one of the NYC DL’s. At the time, the bunnies were stacked next to the counter — but this supply would quickly run out thereby disappointing many fans still deep in line.
Gary was friendly as always. He signed the NYC DL (#87 /300) and then took the time to personalize the title page of his book with a drawing of Toby 🙂 I felt a little bad that his work on the title page was slowing up the line, but not that bad!
I had a great time, but it’s unfortunate that several die-hard fans did not get a chance to buy a signed DL due to limited supplies and "line crashers" who came at the last moment and entered the line with friends who were reserving places for them. KR is thinking about implementing a ticket system with the hopes of preventing such problems in the future.
Hand-done Toby Drawing
Signed Dumb Luck Nyc
