2014 Leaf Pop Century Perfectly Cast Carrie Fisher Autograph

This weekend the Salt Lake Comic Con FanXperience will be going on in Utah, a few hours down the road from me. We thought about attending, but it's hard to justify the cost based on the guest list and the ridiculous prices they want for the opportunity to meet celebrities. There also isn't a lot of information about the Artist Alley or other vendors who will be attending. Okay, they must have posted information about the Artist Alley sometime this past week, because there's a list of artists on the convention page now. But a week out doesn't give me time to look at the list and decide if it's worth going. I need time to research artists, pre-commission sketches, and also to build up enough positive anticipation that it will overcome my dread of crowds and social interactions.

The main draws for the Salt Lake Comic Con FanXperience would be Carrie Fisher and Felicia Day, but the prices for autographs and photo opportunities (no asking for an autograph during a photo op) are pretty high, and they come in addition to the cost of passes to get into the event itself. From what I hear you might have enough time to say, "Hi," while your item is signed/photo is taken before the handlers whisk you away. So you're basically dropping a few hundred dollars to stand in the general area of a celebrity. I couldn't bring myself to do it, especially with the artist list not being released in a timely manner.

After ruling out the Salt Lake event, we debated the merits of the Emerald City Comic Con, which is an event I think we've been to 3 times. It's hard for me to keep the years straight. Maybe we went in 2004, 2006, and 2012. That 2012 might have been 2013. I am pretty sure we went once before we got married, once before we had kids, and once after we'd had all three of our kids. Anyway, the Emerald City Comic Con starts working on the guest list for the next show as soon as the current show ends, so there is plenty of time to get ready. The 2015 guest list is pretty stacked, and as far as I can tell it is a more traditional comic book convention. We ultimately decided against going this year, but we will probably make a smaller-scale trip down to Utah or something this year instead and plan to go to the ECCC in another year or two.

With the Salt Lake event on my mind I took a look at what Carrie Fisher had available on eBay. I found this 2014 Leaf Pop Century Perfectly Cast autograph up for auction and I put in a bid to see what it might go for. Her Topps Star Wars autographs go for huge money all the time, so I didn't have extremely high hopes for this one, especially given that it is numbered # 18 / 25. But there wasn't a whole lot of bidding activity and I got it for about 25% of what I paid for my other Carrie Fisher autograph, and the price I paid for that card was one of the lowest I saw on Carrie Fisher's Topps autographs all year. Looking at some of the closed listings tells me that my ending price was right in the ballpark for this card, but after watching her Topps listings for the last year or so it seems like a shame that these go for so little.

This one is not from an officially-licensed Star Wars product and the ink runs off of the sticker quite a bit in places, but she is depicted on the card as her Star Wars character and the role is mentioned in the text on the back, so I don't really have a problem with the lack of licensing. I guess the design is a little hokey, too, but the illustration and autograph do a good job of pulling the eye away from the clip art in the background. All in all I am very happy with the card and I feel like I got a pretty nice deal on it.