I've said it before and I'll say it again, the San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) really is the Nerd Mecca. It's the holiest site of geekdom, and to try to describe all of ones experiences at the Con is akin to trying to describe colors to a blind person . . . words alone just can't do it. It's so vast and all encompassing that geeks and nerds from around the world make an annual pilgramage to the sunny city of San Diego just so they can bask in its glory. So much happens there that it really is damn near impossible to explain everything that you see and experience at the Con, but as an incredibly amateur nerd blogger I will do my best to describe the greatness that is SDCC with the rather paltry excuse of a vocabulary I possess anyways.
Here we go!
Wednesday
2:00pm: I left my mundane day job as a low level cubicle dweller in Orange County, Ca., hopped in my car and got on the freeway headed for San Diego. My goal was to get to the convention center by around 4pm to 4:30pm in order to pick up my badge early so I could get into what is technically called Preview Night which was to begin at 6pm. Preview Night as a concept started a few years ago and was originally intended to be a bonus perk and reward for those Con faithful who ponied up the cash for a four day pass in advance. It allowed them early access to the exhibit hall floor, sort of a sneak peek if you will, where one could wander the convention hall early in what was supposed to be a relatively small crowd. This, of course, was before the days of 4 day passes selling out months in advance. Nowadays, preview night is basically the official start of Comic Con where a crowd just as big as every other day takes to the Con floor and blocks you from seeing all of the cool stuff you want to get to. They really should stop calling it preview night, as the name doesn't properly fit the event any more. But more on that in a bit.
2:30pm: I'm only 30 minuts out from Orange County, and the nerdiness has already begun. As I'm driving down the 5 freeway through Camp Pendleton, I pull up behind a small black car that is covered with Spider-man stickers and advertisements for a comic book store from somewhere up near Los Angeles. It's not the stickers or the ads that make me first notice the car though, it's the two foot tall bust of Spider-man (in his black costume) that is affixed to the top of the car.
Obviously, these people are my people. They're heading to SD too, so naturally I had to share with them that we had mutual a goal. I pulled up ahead of them and gave them a beautiful view of the Imperial Stormtrooper and Imperial Logo stickers that decorate the rear of my car. I then pulled up alongside the Spider-car long enough to wave at my fellow geeky travellers. They waved back. I then pulled away and continued on my way south.
I'm still an hour outside of San Diego, and I'm already making nerdy friends. This is why I love Comic Con.
4:00pm: I arrive at the Trolley station at a shopping mall just north of downtown SD. Years of prior Con experience has taught me that you do not attempt to park anywhere near downtown during preview night. It's too expensive to make the couple of hours the floor is open worth it, and god help you trying to find an open spot if you are arriving as late as I am. Yes, the con technically doesn't start for another two hours, but most people have been here since either yesterday or this morning and are already parked and in line waiting to get in. The trolley has always faithfully served me in the past. It is cheap, efficient and has always dropped me off at the convention center in around 30 minutes or so.
4:50pm: It appears that after years of faithful service, the Trolley has finally failed me. I am still sitting at the platform waiting for a red line train. They are supposed to come every 15 minutes, but somehow I have been here for 45 minutes now and I haven't seen a single one. It's ok though, I have my book (Bret "The Hitman" Hart's autobiography) to keep me entertained and I keep thinking back to the only good line from Episode One that I still quote regularly to people almost every day . . .
"Patience young Padawan!"
Thank you Qui-Gon, you make me a better person.
5:20pm: I finally arrive at the San Diego Convention Center. Due to the lateness of my arrival from the Trolley's tardiness, I am fully prepared to find a long line for registration waiting for me and have accepted the fact that I will probably not make it onto the exhibit hall floor until sometime around 8pm.
5:25pm: I am utterly shocked with the ease of my registration this year. As opposed to the previous few years where the pre-registration line for 4 day pass holders is wrapped a mile long around the building, this year there is no line at all. In what can only be described as a stroke of brilliance, the folks at Comic Con must have started the registration process many hours earlier than they have in the past. As a result, I walked right in through the door to Hall C, made it up the escalators and walked all the way into the convention's registration room without stopping once. When I finally did stop, it was at the registers to get my pass, and there was only one person in front of me.
I would like to take this moment to personally thank whomever was in charge of pre-registration this year. They were doing a brilliant job and my hat goes off to them. It's not easy having to deal with the massive amount of people they have to process each day. I was so happy by this turn of events that by the time I got my pass and met up with my friend Gin, I didn't even care that the Elite security guards were being total douchebags to the people who were waiting for the doors to open. They gave me a hard time for standing near a door, so I moved when asked, and then immediately returned to the door once they had left the area. The small inconvenience they presented, and the bad attitude they approached every situation with couldn't damper my spirits. I got my badge in less than five minutes, that's something I wouldn't have believed possible not even 20 minutes earlier. I didn't care what the security people did. For me, Con was off to an amazing start.
6:00pm: The doors open and everyone rushes them like a toy store during the Cabbage Patch Kids fiasco of the 1980's. Everyone is pushing and shoving to be the first ones onto the floor. As we make it through the giant doors though, we are greeted by the site of an already massive crowd that had somehow magically made it into the Con before it even opened. Where these people came from, I have no idea but within minutes the hallways were jam packed and the big movie booths were already surrounded by unruly mobs of people trying to get whatever freebies they could.
Me? I had one goal in mind . . . Tribbles. The Paramount booth had advertised that they were going to be giving out free Tribbles during the Con, and I was determined to get one. I made a bee line to their booth and was told by a scantily clad booth babe that they wouldn't be giving out Tribbles until tomorrow at 1:30pm. I'm so amused that people still use booth babes. It's one of the few hold overs from Con's classic days that I can't believe hasn't gone the way of the dodo yet. Booth babes made sense back in the day when admittedly the majority of the Con's attendance was male. Nowadays though with women making up a solid 40% to 50% of attendees, I would have figured that companies would have stopped using big boobed airheaded bimbos to hock their products. Apparently, I am wrong.
Anyways, there were no Tribbles to be had. I vowed that I would get one the next day though and proceeded on to what has become another Comic Con tradition of mine, getting a free bag from the Snoopy booth. For the third year straight now, the people who run the Charlie Brown and Snoopy booth host a scavenger hunt where you have to collect signatures from different boothes to win a free Snoopy bag. They only give out 50 each day though, so you have to move really fast to get one. Gin and I headed over to their booth right away, got our cards, and literally started running through the hall (when we could) in our attempt to get the bag.
A few short minutes later we returned to the Snoopy booth with the required signatures and were rewarded with our kickass free bags. This year's bag featured Woodstock.
6:30pm: The rest of preview night was spent meeting up with friends and wandering the sales floor. I was just browsing at this point and taking pictures. Walking the exhibit hall floor at SDCC is a massive undertaking if you wish to see all of it. It can take hours to get from one end of the floor to the other. It's best to start at one end and do a zig zag pattern through the aisles until you've reached the other wall. Preview night is nowhere near long enough though to allow one to walk the whole floor. In the next few hours me managed to see just under half of the sales floor. Before we knew it, 9pm had rolled around and we were getting kicked out of the hall.
10:00pm: After leaving the convention, I joined my friends Gin, Sarah and Aaron for dinner at a place called Studio Diner which is a restaurant with a movie studio theme. They have awesome milkshakes. Our conversation covered different topics such as what we were looking forward to most this year at Con, what panels we wanted to see, etc. We also couldn't believe that it now costs $100 to reserve a 4 day pass for next year's SDCC. This year's pass was $65 if purchased at the prior year's Con. The year before that it was $50 and the year before that it was $40. In three year's time, the price of a 4 day pass to the Con has gone up by more than 100%. I estimate that in the next two to three years, a Con pass will run around $150. It's a damn good thing I'm going pro. Hopefully next year I can get a press pass. $100 is just a little too steep for my blood.
Midnight: Time for bed. Tomorrow will be an incredibly long day, but it's going to be awesome.
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