I Survived Comic-Con 2010

I return victorious from my first visit to Comic-Con! I made it through three days (Thursday through Saturday), eleven panels, the Hall H line (twice) the Ballroom 20 line (once), had some wonderful surprises, terrible disappointments, saw so much, missed so much, collected swag, stood for photos, took photos, and paid unconscionable prices for bottled water and soft pretzels. This post will just be initial thoughts on the convention-going experience. I'll have three follow-up posts over the next few days detailing the content of the panels I managed to see.

I have no idea how many people attended, but the estimates I've heard are in the ten to twenty thousand range, which sounds about right. I was warned that Comic-Con was going to be immense, but I wasn't prepared for it. The Convention Center is massive, so certain areas seemed deceptively empty, but then you'd turn a corner and find five thousand people lining up for a presentation, or show up early for a smaller panel for an obscure artist, only to find the room filled to capacity ten minutes after you sat down. There was no possible way to see everything, or even a fraction of everything. There were at least fifteen things going on at once – a dozen panels and presentations, film screenings, off-site events, the madness of the exhibition hall, parties in the evenings, unannounced skulduggery, and general mayhem.

I went with a trio of other friends and we quickly gave up on trying to stay together. Our priorities turned out to be completely divergent and I think I only sat through a single panel with one friend, and briefly hit the exhibition hall with the other. All of Wednesday we were plotting out our schedules, making choices between the panels we wanted to see, trying to calculate how much of a gap would be necessary to leave between events, and trying to work in time for lunch and photo-taking and other activities. Any mistake in time management could have dire consequences, such as my failure to queue up for Ballroom 20 on Friday until almost noon, which meant I missed the "Big Bang Theory" panel and nearly didn't make it into the Joss Whedon Experience – after three hours in line. Eventually I adjusted my schedule to aim for panels immediately preceding the ones I actually wanted to attend.

I regret not being able to stay for much of the night programming because my ride left promptly at 7PM every evening, except on Saturday night when one of my friends and I arranged to stay until 8Pm for the "Mythbusters" panel. I was so exhausted by the end of most days, though, I don't think I would have had enough steam to go on for much longer. Also, not having any access to the Internet over the weekend, I wasn't very good about keeping on top of the convention gossip. I was vaguely aware that there were street parties and preview screenings of "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" going on in nearby theaters and would have loved to crash something, but alas I couldn't ferret out any details until long after they were over. Cell-phone reception was dodgy and I had to resort to a lot of text messaging, the first time I've ever had to rely on it so heavily.

The place where the massive numbers of people was most apparent was the exhibition floor, where the various film, television, video game, anime, comics, retailers, and artists all set up booths. The bigger commercial exhibitors had massive, elaborate displays. Lucasfilm had several "Clone Wars" Star Wars character statutes. Marvel brought props from the new "Thor" film, including Odin's throne. Warner Brothers had the horcruxes from "Harry Potter." Disney sent along a light-cycle and Recognizer from "TRON," with several costumed actors to pose for photos. This was also where all the freebies were being distributed, and there were lines were running all over the floor, often for simple things like T-shirts and buttons that I didn't think were worth getting excited over.

I found free T-shirts being given away at a booth promoting the film "Red" that required vouchers in order to get in line for them. The vouchers were being given away on the opposite side of the floor, which also required a line. And that particular line was capped at a certain length, so there was an unofficial line to get into the voucher line. All for a T-shirt. I heard some grumblings that the ever-increasing numbers of attendees and ravenous demand for merchandise were forcing exhibitors to cut back on their giveaways or engineer all these hoops for people to jump through in order to collect them. But from my POV, lots of stuff was still free and it was up to the individual attendee to decide whether or not to get in the lines and play the games or not. Like everything else at the convention, it was all about time management and prioritizing.

I didn't have much room to take a lot of the swag home, so I was extremely selective about what I picked up and ended up giving away a lot of things, like the gigantic bags that were handed out at the Registration tables with our events guides and souvenir books. Free issues of "Wired," "Empire" and "Entertainment Weekly" went to one friend for airport reading. Another got all my key chains. I went to the trouble of buying poster tubes, but they were too big and awkward for carry-ons, so I ended up converting a larger poster into a smaller tube that got my prints home unsquished. I think my favorite freebies were the button-pins that DC was giving away, all emblazoned with the symbols of their various superheroes. I went through the lines twice and ended up with almost two full sets – the second time they were out of the Flash logo buttons. I didn't make many purchases, but I did make a point to pick up something from Doug TenNapel, whose panels I couldn't make it to, and Bill Plympton, whose panel I did make it to.

All in all I was extremely impressed with the organization and the security of the convention. There were delays, such as an autograph line being held up for nearly forty minutes because the fire marshal couldn't be located for line approvals on Saturday, and there were dire mistakes in programming, such as the aforementioned "Big Bang Theory" panel and a later "True Blood" panel taking place in Ballroom 20 instead of Hall H, which has double the capacity and was comparatively empty for most of Friday. Many of the lines were horrendous, but I was assured that it was much worse in the past, when there were no tents set up to provide any cover from the elements, and the lines were unmonitored and ended up disrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic in the rest of the convention hall. Compared to the other media conventions I've been to, logistical problems were minimal.

I was not present for the stabbing in Hall H prior to the Marvel panel, though I was receiving texts about it from the friend who was in line. The fact that the panel wasn't canceled, Hall H wasn't shut down, and the delay was only forty-five minutes is, frankly, astounding. I've been at other media events that were canceled over far more minor problems. Still, I had some issues with the convention staff. I figured out very quickly that many of the security personnel gave completely erroneous or contradictory directions. I was ordered back and forth around the back of the upper level pavilion area about three times on Friday morning before I finally broke rank, found the escalators, and escaped. So there's definitely room for improvement there.

But easily the best part of the whole experience was the fans. The fun of spotting people dressed up as characters from obscure shows you thought only you knew about. The ability to hold conversations about the geekiest topics with complete strangers. I think my favorite moment of the entire convention was at the end of the Ray Bradbury panel, when the entire room spontaneously sang the legendary writer "Happy Birthday" to celebrate his upcoming 90th. Maybe Comic-Con is getting too big for San Diego, but I don't think it's too big at all. You can never have enough geeks, and the convergence of the geeky population is a strange and wonderful thing.

I'm exhausted, dehydrated, and definitely need some time to some digest everything that happened over the past few days, but I'm definitely going back to Comic-Con. I'm hooked and I'm already looking forward to my next trip.

Panel recaps starting tomorrow. Promise.