Sorry things have gone quiet since Friday morning, but remember Rocky IV, and the savage beating that Ivan Drago laid down on Rocky? Well, Comic Con is Drago. And I am Adrian.
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Friday
“Do you want to try and get into the Watchmen panel?” my girl asked on the shuttle to the convention center?
“Fuck that. That’s one of the biggest panels of the convention, and it starts in an hour. People have been lining up around the building for that fucker since the doors opened, and I don;t feel like standing in the California sun for that long listening to you bitch about heatstroke just to not get in.”
“I’m not bitching, it’s a legitimate medical condition,” she said indignantly.
“So’s alcoholism, but we haven’t let that get in the way of enjoying the Con for the past three years, and… Jesus Christ, what’s that stench? Is that… foreshadowing?”
“Look: the shuttle drops us off right in front of Hall H. Why don’t we check it out, and if the line sucks, we’ll hit the floor?”
“Fine. But barring a miracle, we’re not getting in there.”
Miracles come in many forms. Sometimes, they come in the form of a clearly flustered kid, in over his head, trying to maintain a line of 10,000 people. After three years attending Comic Con, you learn what lines are supposed to look like, and this one was wrong. And yet, oh so right.
The Red Shirt kid had allowed the line to twist back on itself, back in front of the convention center, leading to a vulnerable spot at the pivot point, close to the door, that looked enough like the front of the line that one could reasonably explain it at a bail hearing for inciting a riot. When the more experienced Orange Shirts saw what he had done, there would be hell to pay… but no one ever got rich or saw advance Watchmen footage by failing to exploit fools.
“See the place where the line twists back? Go now!” I whispered. Sure enough, we jumped 90 percent of the line without any of the confused attendees making a peep. Three minutes later, and Orange Shirt came over, shouting at the kid, and telling the poor, doomed morons behind us, “You’re not in line! Please proceed to the back of the Convention Center! You will know you are at the back of the line when you find yourself in Tijuana!”
We wound up being two of the last three people admitted to the panel. Later, we saw the Red Shirt back in civilian clothes, begging for a laminate. I’m sure his discharge ceremony was dignified and beautiful.
The panel itself was worth the treachery, due to the new footage of the movie they showed. As a comic geek going back into the 70’s, whose read Watchmen more than almost any comic book, there was not a single shot in the footage that I couldn’t place directly back to the book. The 6,000 assembled geeks were so impressed that many of the questions asked of Zack Snyder, the director, were for him to play the damn clip again. And considering the panel also included the ability to address Carla Gugino and her tits, that should tell you something. It looks like Zack got this one right.
There were other good panels throughout the rest of the day (Although I will admit now that I had a clean, uninterrupted shot at Rob Liefeld and failed to take it. It will forever be my secret shame), but around seven, we had to wrap it up. We had arranged to meet a friend of a friend for drinks after the con; a woman that my buddy Tim refers to as “Ann the Anvil”.
What could possibly go wrong?
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Saturday
“I think I’m still drunk,” my girl moaned, which brought back hazy memories of cab jumping from bar to bar just to catch up to The Anvil, and then joyous hours of deep black stout, terrible laughter at the expense of others, and single malt scotch… and then mournful giggling that, despite the damage, we had represented Boston well… and a hazy recollection that one of us said, “I think I’m gonna throw up.”
My girl and are are very good at what we do. I don’t remember hearing that phrase from either of us since 2001. So, believe the rumors: Ann the Anvil is fun. She is also extremely dangerous.
None of which solved the problem that the convention doors were opening in half an hour, and my girl was fetal and shivering. After an hour of tending to her the best I could, she made me go on without her, with a promise that she would catch up later. So I went off to Saturday at Comic Con, which I described last year as “Nerdpocalypse…” Except this year, with a complete sellout of every day of events, every day is Nerdpocalypse.
I learned something very important yesterday: Comic Con is awesome, but when you’re by yourself, it is significantly less so. Yeah, there are still freaks in weird costumes to take pictures of, but when you’re laughing at them with someone, you’re in the spirit of comic Con. When you’re standing there by yourself laughing at them, you’re a collosal dildo.
After an hour of aimlessly shuffling the floor alone, I decided to hit a DC Comics panel, but I was halted for a good ten minutes, waiting for the line going into The Office’s panel to enter one of the big rooms… which, right there, is the one problem with Comic Con that might cause it to collapse under it’s own weight. This is a convention for comic books. What the fuck was the cast of The Office doing there? And why were hundreds of Comic Con attendees lined up to see it, while I was able to walk into a DC Comics event with no trouble whatsoever?
Don’t get me wrong: it’s fun to see the Hollywood types around; it’s what separates Comic Con from the annual convention in the Boston Radisson function room. But for the love of Christ, can we keep the celebrities on point? Between this and last year’s Dane Cook / Good Luck Chuck debacle, going to Comic Con is becoming dangerously close to being like going out to a brothel and having the girls try to sell you Amway products.
My girl eventually recovered enough to join me in the afternoon, and we hit a panel and walked the floor for a while, but the damage from Rolling With The Anvil was too great. We had to flee, and found ourselves back at the hotel, mutely staring at South Park reruns and miserably failing to drink.
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You’ll notice there are no pictures here today, and that’s because I’m on a schedule. The convention center opens at 9:30, and Tim Sale, the guy who does the painting for Heroes, will be booking ten custom inkwashed drawings today, and I want mine to be one of them., so I don’t have time to be fucking around with the Linux version of MS Paint.
I’ll upload more pictures to the Photo Dump either before 9:30 this morning, or barring that, later this evening.
Now, if you’ll excuse me: today is the last day of the convention, which means the geeks will be swarming the floor and battling for bargains from retailers who don’t want to haul their shit back from San Diego. Which means, God willing, I’ll be able to present you with real pictures of honest to God Nerd Rage.
And some of those pictures may be of me.
UPDATE: 20 new pictures are up in the Photo Dump. I’m off to the Con.
[tags]San Diego Comic Con 2008, Nerd Prom[/tags]
