The ticket rationing system of San Diego Comic Con is well-known; it's why we only got two days there this year, and considered ourselves lucky to get that much. It worked out well in many ways. Four solid days of walking from one end of the convention center to the other every waking hour is too much. I'm not sure quite how big the convention center is, but on Thursday this year, it worked out to six and a half miles of walking. The other vicissitudes of a four-day run include staying in a backwater Hotel Du Seed (usual daily rate $40, Comic Con daily rate $150) for three nights, the morning run for the trolley and the evening London-tube-style crush on the trolley back, and of course the abominable drive from Orange County to San Diego and back.
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| Carlsbad Lagoon from the train |
This year we took Amtrak. It takes about half an hour longer than driving but you don't have to pay $25 to park at the end, and there's no stress. Just sit down and watch the Pacific drift by in air-conditioned, wi-fi supplied, 120v power-available comfort. And if you go business class, for an extra $11, you get a snack kit with about ten small items to unwrap and sample, almost as much fun in itself as a Comic Con exclusive Funko Pop or something, along with a free glass of wine. On Thursday we took the coach down and business class back in the evening. We Jack-Spratted the goodies. STB had twenty-five piece of carbohydrate to unpack and gobble on the train back, and I had eight ounces (two packs) of olives and four ounces (two packs) of cheese spread and two glasses of basic Chardonnay. (STB called it my Rubbish Mediterranean Diet and indeed I paid gastro-intestinally for it the next day.)
For the Sunday travel, we booked too late to get business class, but due to a little bird telling us what's what, we got on the train back at the right stop to get a seat. Literally hundreds of people who did not know the (not very) secret had to stand. It didn't help that Del Mar fair started the same day, so all the people who got on there, and all the people who got on at Legoland, also had to stand.
That's the logistics. So what the what happened at Comic Con itself?
We don't usually go to the big panels. Jodie Whittaker was there for Doctor Who. Bryan Cranston was there for Breaking Bad. Bob Odenkirk for Better Call Saul. All kinds of big names were on panels in the giant room known as Hall H. But the line for Hall H is literally more than 12 hours long, so the only way in is to start lining up the day before and miss literally everything in the whole con until you're inside, when, presumably, you do not give up your seat except under threat of death. And once inside, you find, you may be seventy or 100 rows back from the stage and watching the action on video screens, just like being at home. Yes, you 'see' Jodie Whittaker in person, about the size of a pinhead. If you want to see her speak, you're just watching the screen.
We just go to the smaller panels in rooms ranging from 100 to 1,000 people. Oh, and the dealers' floor. Comic-Con has a huge exhibition. There are about 5,500 lots, though some dealers are on huge lots with multiple numbers so there may not be that many exhibitors. These range from premieres of new sci-fi shows with giant robots, explosions and earsplitting audio to tiny pitches from first-time authors of self-published books sitting behind a table with a vinyl banner showcasing their name and the cover, and a few dozen of their books in piles. Comic books range from dollar an issue to the serious auctioneers who have bullet-proof glass booths showcasing issues valued at $10,000 or more. There are figurines from bobbleheads to mass-produced figurines to exclusive handmade sculptures to props used in movies with little price tags attached. (The tags are little. The prices are large.) The whole floor heaves with literally 100,000 people attempting to thread through the whole exhibition without any traffic lights or lane markings to aid them. Occasionally whole rows or columns come to a halt because a line for an exclusive item is being marched somewhere or compacted to save space. It's like driving a mule cart in Cairo traffic, except you don't have a mule or a cart, and every fifth or sixth person you are trying to pass, undertake or get around is an 8-foot robot or smol dinosaur costume operated by a rapidly-deteriorating six year old human.
After being in this strangely post-apocalyptic crush for a few hours, you can go to the mezzanine, buy a burrito or some loaded nachos, and sit down to watch it happen to other people a couple of feet below you for a while. The existence of the mezzanine, with its quiet cafe, fandom panels and tables for groups like the SCA and Furries, is a bit secret (or maybe nobody likes the SCA or Furries) and I won't blow it except to say that the word 'mezzanine' is not particularly obscure, so you could look it up and then find the actual place if you really wanted. Outside the door of this quiet area, the SCA organizes swordfights.
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| Sword fight outside the mezzanine area |
Many would-be exhibitors have realized that paying for a Comic-Con pitch and spending three and a half days behind a literal moat of living, shuffling humans is not the best way to obtain attention. Instead they book empty stores, bars, Petco Park, parking lots, tram stop rain shelters, the street, pedicabs, random homeless people, glamorous models, teams of actors on the street costumed as zombies, etc., and put on full shows with them, outside the convention center. Somewhere in this unadvertised mass it is quite possible to see the biggest names and extravaganzas of the con without actually paying for a con ticket. If you're short of cash, try this method.
In the past I would have recommended Tides, a tiny sit-down cafe hidden behind a billboard at the far north end of the convention center. Alas, they changed their format this year and instead of buying usual cafeteria fare from a till operative, they've changed to charging you $25 before you go in the room (clutching your one paper plate) where you're faced with three or so metal buckets filled with sugared meat and dried tofu along with "teriyaki sauce" (brown sugar-water), rice and some bitter salad greens. That was the "Asian buffet". Apparently the next day's was a "Mediterranean buffet" and the next day some other thing, but I'm sure they were all sugared meat and bitter greens. In mitigation, the carrot cake was splendid and STB said the chocolate cake was good too. If you like sugar, it might be the cafe for you.
The panels: this is what we did between this people watching.
Thursday Panels
Writing and Drawing the Past
As with many con panels, it's sometimes hard to reconstruct why people put the panel together they did. Jen Wang, for instance, was talking about/promoting
The Prince and the Dressmaker, which looks enchanting. We learned it's about a prince in Paris in the past who likes wearing dresses, which didn't seem to require as much historical accuracy as fellow panel-member
Jason Lutes' Berlin, which is about the Weimar Republic. Is TPatD about
Chevalier d'Eon? No, it's made up. She did a lot of research, but technically it's not historical fiction. Jason Lutes said he'd spent over twenty years researching material and drawing Berlin. I was going to ask him during the Q&A if he preferred first-hand accounts or translations. No need. He said right out during the panel that he couldn't read German. Dude. In 20 years you can learn to read German. German kids do it in six. I did learn something new - that historical comic book artists use a lot of old postcards as references, and postcards are/were heavily airbrushed.
2001: A Space Odyssey 50th Anniversary Panel
The panel included Dave Bowman and Frank Poole (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood) and others. It's always great fun to listen to actors from classic movies tell their stories about how they came up with their characters and lines. This pair's banter is well-honed, but it's good to hear and the upcoming remastered 2001 looks amazing. It'll be available from October 30.
The Treasury of British Comics: Can a Forgotten Archive Teach Us About Comics in the 21st Century?
I assumed this would be about "a treasury of comics" in the same way that there is always a "bumper book of fairy tales" or a "monster book of spells" - i.e. a phrase meaning "a lot" in our golden childhood lexicon and in Harry Potter (same thing). It didn't. There is actually a whole bunch (technical term) of British comics from the non-IPC (non-Leo Baxendale) stable that was about to be dis-treasured, and these guys bought the whole lot. I believe they said 61,000 pages of things like Bunty, Jinty, Misty and Whizzer and Chips. I remember them very well. These are being reissued but being unassuming British people, they didn't quite make clear to me in what format or what name you can obtain them. I particularly enjoyed them talking about comic book character Faceache without realizing the American audience don't know the slang term "face ache" meaning a miserable person you don't want to be seen with. The audience probably just heard it as "argle-bargle" and assumed it meant, I don't know, cavey cavey or something.
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| Misty, girls' horror comic |
A Celebration of Mary Shelley
The creator of Frankenstein (and his monster) was a 17 year old who lived with her married boyfriend and
lived quite
a life. The panel had quite a lot to say about her and about the different editions of Frankenstein. Spoiler: yes, she did write it by herself.
Sunday Panels
The Beatles: Yellow Submarine Surfaces in a New Graphic Novel
This looks like a fun book to pick up. Unfortunately, by the time we realized we'd been sent to the wrong part of the exhibition area, it was sold out. (It goes on unlimited sale next month.) The panel was interesting mainly because the Americans on the panel had studied the movie Yellow Submarine in much the same way that academics study Hittite potsherds. They'd carefully transcribed the words and thought hard about what colors were "psychedelic" and (although I ironically didn't ask to check) it certainly seemed they'd never thought to ask an English person, a Liverpudlian, or an old person who has taken acid, or even
Alan Aldridge (who only passed away last year) about what any of it might mean/might have looked like. At one point Bill Morrison said he'd spent ages trying to figure out what George Harrison said about the Blue Meanies' dogs (in the film) and eventually worked out it was "Cavey, cavey," which, Bill said, "was some kind of English expression." Well, nearly. It's from 'cave canem'- Latin for Beware of the Dog. I guess it is "English" as we pronounce the "v" as "veh" rather than "weh", but it's hardly a long-lost Anglo-Saxon expostulation.
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CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?
curid=118606 Photo by Radomil 01.10.2004 |
Enter the Fun Zone: New Immersive Arcades and eSports Stadiums
An exciting panel on the future of augmented reality - for STB. For me, a chance to catch up on my Twitter. I was astonished to learn that most leisure activities (like going to the movies) cost around 15c a minute. Interactive media can charge up to $10 a minute. Quite a business opportunity.
Inside the Comic Con Museum
There's going to be a Comic-Con museum, folks! (And that's it.)
How I Got Here: Paths to Comics
An odd one this as I think of Cory Doctorow and Nalo Hopkinson as second if not first tier writers, and yet this was not fully attended. Hopkinson I could have listened to for hours and Doctorow told a funny story about his dad's fairy tales, which started out in Grimm world and always ended with the proletariat seizing control of the means of production.
Wally Wingert: I Was Cosplay Before Cosplay Was Cool!
He has been dressing up as TV characters since he was 4, and had entertaining tales to tell about it.
