The other major negative thing about Comic Con that it’s easy to forget (And I’m already beginning to forget after a just under a week home, finally having adjusted to the reverse jet lag) just how Goddamned exhausting it is. The other day I used the term “fatigue hysteria”, and it’s not just some clever hyperbole. By Sunday at Comic Con, you begin to see more and more stretchers steered by paramedics being pushed around the convention center, and they no longer appear amused by my desperate puling for morphine.
On Thursday, when you see a family rushing hurriedly, wide-eyed and excited, you know it’s because someone like John Barrowman from Torchwood or Jonathan Frakes is signing somewhere. The same sight on Sunday means you know they’ve seen a place to sit the fuck down.
Sunday was the first time I’ve ever seen something like the picture on the left at Comic Con, and it was only by the grace of God that I wasn’t asked to stand in that line. Not because I was armed, but because I was loudly muttering support for the extermination of all Mandalorians when I passed the station, due to an obese Boba Fett having clipped my ankle with his plastic gun. Extermination is a concept that, by the last day, makes the Red Shirts nervous… unless you’re wearing a Dalek costume. Then they ask to take your picture.
Comic Con is four days, eight hours a day, that you spend on your feet, and not in a good way. It’s four days of shuffling in lines in the sun, only to get inside to stand in other lines. If you decide to take a break from the lines and walk the floor, it’s not so much an enjoyable stroll as it is a constant tactical nightmare of plotting routes through the crowd, stutter walking to avoid trampling the Cutest Littlest Jedi, and maintaining the mental discipline required to not intentionally trample the fiftieth Cutest Little Jedi of the day.
Want to get to the Marvel Comics booth to get Brian Michael Bendis to sign your copy of Secret Invasion 1? It’s just over there, not 100 yards away. All you have to do to get there is negotiate a defensive gauntlet that would make Brett Favre not only embrace the concept of retirement, but perhaps the concept of quiet and dignified euthenasia.
It will take you fifteen minutes to negotiate the crowd, assuming that no one with a nice rack dressed as Spider-Woman strikes a pose, causing a sudden snarl of thirty drooling fanboys with cameras who have stopped dead in their tracks for a picture. And when you finally get there, you will remember that Bendis is too smart to brave Comic Con, and you’ll be a little freer with the swinging elbow the next time you turn a blind corner.
“But Rob,” you may be saying to yourself, “Isn’t a panel a good place to take a seat and recharge your batteries?” Sure it is. Hall H has 6,500 comfortable, padded seats, good air conditioning, and even water coolers to get your hydration levels normalized. And all you need to do to get in is negotiate this:
Keep in mind that, when I took this picture, I still had an hour to wait to get into the hall… and I was one of the last three people admitted for that panel. Which means that 6,497 people were already in Hall H while these roughly 10,000 poor bastards were waiting outside for a shot at seeing Watchmen footage.
And you can say what you want about the must-vaunted mild San Diego climate, but to put it bluntly: the only reason Joey Ramone was able to sing about “the warm California sun” was because he was a pale New Yorker, and thus never had to stand outside in it and feel his Speed Stick melt, drip down his arms and soak the waistband of his underpants. And all of this while people with low blood sugar, hydration levels and social skill mutter about “Goddamned carpetbaggers ruining the Con,” and your badge reads “Boston MA” in big Ariel Bold. My girl and I found ourselves drilling to scream, “I’m not a cosplayer; these people are just beating me with PVC pipe; help me!” if we felt ourselves being jerked out of line by a mob of angry creative anachronists.
It’s a week later, and my left ankle is still so screwed up that I need to remind myself to start down stairs with my right foot so I don’t put myself into the hospital. My bank account is lighter by no less than 2 g’s, and I’ve grown weary of explaining the meaning behind my brand new Monroeville Zombies hockey jersey to my co-workers. After a week of restaurant and take-out food, I have given up on the idea of every taking a solid dump again. I am spent and Comic Con did it to me. When friends ask me what it is about Comic Con that makes me want to go back year after year, I go into brainlock, mutter about generic fun and needing a cigarette, and limp away quickly.
Why the fuck do I do this to myself?
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The program said that it was a panel about the love of comic books, hosted by Dan Didio, the editor in chief of DC Comics. “This is perfect,” I told my girl, “I can finally look Didio in the face, tell him that my favorite moment in comic books was when DC set up the 900 number to vote to kill Robin, and now that he’s brought the little fucker back to life, that I want my fucking two dollars back. We’re going to that panel.”
“Good. Fine. Whatever,” my girl, still a little green from the terrible encounter with Ann the Anvil not 36 hours earlier, said. “If it means I can get off my feet, I’d go to a panel called ‘This Way To The Showers’ in a fucking cinderblock building next to the train station.”
Most of the DC panels were in mid-sized rooms in the main convention area, but this one was in one of the closets that, the day before, had been used to exhibit Flash Shockwave snuff animation made by emo kids. It seated maybe a hundred, and it wasn’t even full by the time Didio took the stage, hoarse from four days of hyping up fanboys.
“This panel isn’t about DC Comics, or any upcoming projects we’re doing, or anything like that,” Didio said. “Since I’ve been with DC, whenever we get into deadline pressure or something that gets us frustrated with the work we’re doing, we find ourselves talking about why we got into comics in the first place. What our first book was, and what our favorite story was, and what the silliest thing we ever read was… and we find that just talking about it gets us energized and excited about comics again.
“There’s a reason I do this panel on Sundays,” he continued, “We’ve all been here, what? Four, five days? We’re all exhausted. And by now, all the Hollywood panels are over. The place closes up for the year in a couple of hours. And while I could do this on Friday or Saturday and draw a bigger crowd, I do it on a Sunday for you. Because you’re still here.
“If you’re still here this late, it’s not because you’re into movies or TV, it’s because you love comics. And you’re the people I want to talk to, because you’re our people, and I thought it would be fun to remind ourselves exactly why we love comics as much as we do.”
And, as I looked around the room, I realized that Dan was right. I recognized people who had lined up to ask questions at comic panels throughout the con; panels that were directly opposite the big Hollywood panels that were happening in Hall H or Ballroom 20. Compared to how they (and I) looked on Thursday, they were the walking wounded, but they were the ones who were there to see their favorite creators and find out what was happening, and who got just as excited (if not more so) to find out things like Neil Gaiman writing a Batman book at the end of Final Crisis as they were to be in the same room with Carla Gugino’s jugs (Although if I’d seen half as many boners, I would have fled to Tijuana).
Dan started by asking people to put their hands up if they’d been reading comics for five years… then ten… then fifteen… and I realized when my hand was one of only about ten that was still up when he reached thirty years why I go back to Comic Con year after year, and will continue to go despite age, poverty or grievous orthopedic injury: Because I love comic books, and despite the exhaustion, crowds and overall hype over Hollywood panels, there is no greater celebration of the comic art form than the San Diego Comic Convention.
Every question of that panel reinforced it:
- What made you interested in comics (Spidey Super Stories on The Electric Company and the Shazam live action show)?
- What was your first comic book (Marvel Team Up issue 41, with Spider-Man and Scarlet Witch, a copy of which I own to this day)?
- What was your favorite crossover (DC’s Invasion, because it was the first one where I had a job and could afford a bunch of the books)?
- What was the silliest comic story you ever read (Marvel’s U.S. 1, about an engineering genius… who worked as a long-haul trucker, who designed a weaponized truck that could be remote-controlled by a silver dollar… all built on the salary of, well, a long-haul trucker. And I relate this with the scorn that only a person who owned and loved all twelve issues of the Team America comic book can muster)?
Harvey Pekar once said, “Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.” Of course, he also thought that someone might be interested in reading about his inability to keep his apartment clean, but even a blind squirrel with depressed narcissism can find a nut sometimes.
Part of why I find the people who attend Comic Con just to haunt the movie and TV panels to get a glimpse of the next blockbuster comic book based magnum opus so Goddamned annoying is pure and simple scorn: these people might be excited to see Spider-Man swing through Manhattan, but fuck them. I saw that happen when I was five years old, and I see it again every month when a new issue comes out. There was thunderous applause at the Watchmen panel when Rorschach’s mask changed patterns, but I saw that when I was sixteen and couldn’t believe that comics were actually growing up with me. A massive crowd gathered when Carmen Electra was signing some damn thing, but I saw ridiculous breasts that defy gravity and physics and dead, empty eyes the first time I bought a Jim Lee X-Men comic.
However, even while I bitch about the movie fanboys just as vehemently as the San Diego locals bitch about outsiders flying in and fucking up their convention, the fact of the matter is that because of the movie, DC Comics is finding it impossible to keep the Watchmen graphic novel printed fast enough to meet demand. The rumor is that people are so desperate to get their hands on Watchmen that the original issues, which you could easily find in the quarter bin a year ago (Because Watchmen has never been out of print, there was no value in the original comic book issues) are now going for five bucks a whack, just because people can’t find the fucking book (I actually have two. The bidding will start at a hi-def picture of Carla Gugino’s tits).
There was a time, not ten years ago, when people were predicting the demise of the monthly comic book because people were more interested in going to the movies. Now, people who like movies are discovering the comic books that so many of those movies come from. Which means that those same movie freaks I spent last week vehemently cursing are boosting my obsession, guaranteeing not only that I can get my weekly fix, but that each year, Comic Con will be more and more populated by comic book enthusiasts.
Which, by nature of a fixed admission policy, means that each year Comic Con will be less and less populated by furries.
As comic writer Warren Ellis once said: the future is, inherently, a good thing. I’m already planning for next year.
[tags]San Diego Comic Con 2008, Nerd Prom, Watchmen, Jim Lee, Warren Ellis, Carla Gugino, Dan Didio, DC Comics[/tags]
And now for your moment of pathos…. Nice read.