The usual plethora of products greeted you as you entered the flea market zone. It covered the left third of the Lampeter Room, from front to back.

Imagine my surprise when one of Tibor's brood showed up in the flea market in full armor. Shawn asked someone at the fair if he could come up and have his picture taken, which I did. I swear that 12-year-old kid could sell snow to eskimos in the winter in Alaska. Since no horde of angry Renaissance re-enactors descended on the MagWeb.com booth, everything turned out OK. That's quite a leap to trust some kid with a set of clothes and armor. The flea market stretched all the way back to the windows.

Surprisingly, I didn't pick up any lead/plastic/pewter, but did pick up a few magazines at various sellers (occupational hazard, not to mention deep interest) as well as a book or two here and there. For example, I had the first two volumes of Pictorial History of WWII, but never could find any more. Lo and behold, there were the other three I had been looking for. I skipped the Navy and AF specific add-ons.

There was a goodly amount of fantasy for sale. Evidently, Games Workshop really makes an inroads on kids, but it seems dads are the ones selling the old stuff off. I saw more and more of the clix things for sci-fi. The figures are fairly nice. Mike Vogell is a big fan of the system/figures and that night was showing me and a few others how it worked. Evidently charging things and ramming them is often a good tactic. I think the numbers on the wheel should be larger. I didn't play the system, just watched a moment.

More Historicon 2003

Introduction
Dealer Area
The Vince Show: Apache Longbow Pilot Back from Iraq
Flea Market
Hanging Around and A Sample of Conversations
Renaissance Fair and Flair
Painting Competition (monstrously slow: 736K)
Conclusion

This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com