Editor’s Note: Didja miss Part 1 and Part 2? Gee, if only there was an easy way to find them…
So Comic-Con has started circling a weird kind of cultural singularity: more people want to attend to see movie stars, so they add more movie stars, which makes more people want to attend, ad infinitum. Which causes we comic book readers to bitch, if only because stutterwalking like an Egyptian with a seizure disorder around 60,000 people on the floor at any given time, even if you are the most even-tempered Yoda-speaking Jedi-wannabe? Rage, it will make you become crazy with.
Even the furries seem to have abandoned Comic-Con as being too unwieldy to get their yiff on… although I anticipate they will resurge the minute the con announces an appearance by Zach Galifianakis.
And it’s easy to complain about it, except for the small fact that the OLD Comic-Con, the one that’s all about the COMICS, MAAAAN? Yeah, that’s still there. It’s easy to miss it, what with the hoards wandering around, slack-jawed and stinking with dehydration, hoping to catch a glimpse of the talented and talented Olivia Munn (Called such because she only has two talents. Three if you include the silicone), but trust a Comic-Con vet: it still exists. But you have to WANT IT.
For every mob of Twi-Hards with a set of squishy panties over sparkly vampires? There’s a comic book related panel that you can just walk into. There’s a comic artist willing to give you a free sketch and a short conversation for every star-struck nerd herding up hoping to bump into Natalie Portman (And by “bump into”, I of course mean, “Meet her and she will see the inner beauty hidden beneath this terrible acne and she will come back to my apartment and love my Queen Amidala action figure collection and she will take me by the hand and lead me to my futon and OHHHH GOOODDDD… thank God I brought clean underpants… and by ‘clean’ I of course mean ‘underpants I haven’t jacked into yet.'”).
Don’t want to be trampled by Trekkies hoping to get Wil Wheaton’s autograph at the ABC / Big Bang Theory booth while muttering “Don’t tell Wil your Usenet handle was CrushWesley69 on alt.Wesley.Crusher.die.die.die” to themselves? Swing by any comic company’s booth (Except for Marvel’s, which is now officially nothing but a Marvel Studios movie hype booth every year) and get a book signed… or if you’re looking for an AUTHENTIC, old school comic convention celebrity meetup, Gil Gerard and Erin Gray are signing in the general autograph area for the cost of a Big Mac, and might blow you for the cost of a rare cheeseburger and an Arrogant Bastard Ale.
Comic-Con has grown probably beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, but comic book fans who are there for the actual comics should give them more credit than they’re getting: they haven’t let it grow over the original comic book convention that it started as. It’s there if you want it, and it’s better than any other comic book convention in the world.
For myself, all I can say is that when I was in high school, my prized possession was my Steve Dallas Bloom County t-shirt, partly because Bloom County was one of the most popular comic strips in the world at the time, partly because Steve Dallas merchandise wasn’t nearly as easy to get as Opus merch, and partly because Steve was smoking a cigarette on the shirt and that drove my mom bugfuck nuts.
And if you’d told me twenty years ago that there would be a convention where not only would the notoriously publicity-shy creator of Bloom County would be speaking, but where I could walk right up to the man, get an autograph and a handshake and tell him how much his work affected me?
Yeah; strip away the movie and TV shit, and THAT’S Comic-Con. And THAT’S what I bought next year’s tickets for.
Well, that and cheap high-test beer, an ocean view, and a police department that treats me like an actual criminal now and again. I have a reputation and a self-image to think about.
[tags]San Diego Comic-Con 2010, Nerd Prom, Berkeley Breathed, Bloom County, Steve Dallas, dark humor, satire[/tags]
