This post is about Comic-Con. As such, it will likely be exceptionally nerdy. You have been warned.
Before I get too deep into my personal experience this year, I'd like to address some complaints I've been hearing about the convention this year. If you've read about this year's Comic-Con at all (and there's a decent chance you have, since it's been covered by a broad selection of major news outlets), you've heard about how it's the hot new place for Hollywood to promote upcoming movies and TV shows. This claim is certainly true. Major movie studios dominate the programming in Hall H, the largest venue for panels in the San Diego Convention Center (I believe it seats around 4000 people), and the next largest room, Ballroom 20, is home to many TV show panels. These studios also put together some impressive booths on the exhibit hall floor and make sure to give out plenty of free swag with their logo plastered all over it (Warner Bros is the reigning champ two years running with some freaking gigantic bags). Some people say that this has ruined the convention, but I have to vehemently disagree, and I'll address a few of the complaints I hear most frequently.
Number one: Crowds and wait times are horrific. I've been going to the cone for almost a decade now, and when I started, I went for Saturday only and registered on-site. If you wanted to register on-site for Saturday, you had to be in line at 6 am, or else you would find the line stretched all the way around to the back of the convention center. These days, all registration is done online, and picking up your badge is as simple as scanning a bar code. When I arrived to pick up my badge this year, there were several hundred people waiting in front of me. It only took 45 minutes. In the old days, getting in to the exhibit hall first thing in the morning meant joining a throng pressed up against the doors waiting for the stampede to begin. Now it's an orderly line. The exhibit hall itself has gotten worse, but it's no more difficult than threading your way through Times Square, and in many places it's much easier. The larger booths where crowds tend to gather are also the ones that are more organized (it took my friend two minutes to get into the NBC Universal booth, buy a poster, and leave, and that was on Saturday). In fact, two of the largest causes of traffic on the exhibit hall floor are two of the oldest: elaborate costumes and booth babes. A guy in an Iron Man suit or a girl in next to nothing both slow things down far more than the line to get a bag at the Warner Bros booth.
Number two: Hollywood has brought in people that don't give a fuck about comics. This may be true, but it's a stupid complaint. When I started going to the con, I went because I was obsessed with Decipher's Star Wars CCG, and Decipher was always at the convention. I wasn't really into comics at all. I'd go see Joss Whedon or Ray Bradbury, but comics? Screw that, I was there for the cards! And then a friend led me to the Red Star booth and introduced me to one of the greatest independent comics around (seriously, check it out, it's totally awesome). Looking back on things, that was the spark that eventually led me to become the weekly regular at my local comic shop that I am today (other notable influences: The Sandman, the work of Brian K. Vaughan, and The Ultimates). My point here is that some of the people that come to Comic-Con without any interest in comics are going to become comic book readers. I can't tell you how many times I heard retailers on the floor say "We're all sold out of Watchmen", and how happy that phrase made me. This surge in comic book movies is good for comics.
This post is actually taking a lot longer than I expected, and I'm back to work tomorrow, so I'm going to end this here. Part 2 will show up in what I hope will be the near future. So, loyal readers (all two of you), what do you want to know about Comic-Con?
Before I get too deep into my personal experience this year, I'd like to address some complaints I've been hearing about the convention this year. If you've read about this year's Comic-Con at all (and there's a decent chance you have, since it's been covered by a broad selection of major news outlets), you've heard about how it's the hot new place for Hollywood to promote upcoming movies and TV shows. This claim is certainly true. Major movie studios dominate the programming in Hall H, the largest venue for panels in the San Diego Convention Center (I believe it seats around 4000 people), and the next largest room, Ballroom 20, is home to many TV show panels. These studios also put together some impressive booths on the exhibit hall floor and make sure to give out plenty of free swag with their logo plastered all over it (Warner Bros is the reigning champ two years running with some freaking gigantic bags). Some people say that this has ruined the convention, but I have to vehemently disagree, and I'll address a few of the complaints I hear most frequently.
Number one: Crowds and wait times are horrific. I've been going to the cone for almost a decade now, and when I started, I went for Saturday only and registered on-site. If you wanted to register on-site for Saturday, you had to be in line at 6 am, or else you would find the line stretched all the way around to the back of the convention center. These days, all registration is done online, and picking up your badge is as simple as scanning a bar code. When I arrived to pick up my badge this year, there were several hundred people waiting in front of me. It only took 45 minutes. In the old days, getting in to the exhibit hall first thing in the morning meant joining a throng pressed up against the doors waiting for the stampede to begin. Now it's an orderly line. The exhibit hall itself has gotten worse, but it's no more difficult than threading your way through Times Square, and in many places it's much easier. The larger booths where crowds tend to gather are also the ones that are more organized (it took my friend two minutes to get into the NBC Universal booth, buy a poster, and leave, and that was on Saturday). In fact, two of the largest causes of traffic on the exhibit hall floor are two of the oldest: elaborate costumes and booth babes. A guy in an Iron Man suit or a girl in next to nothing both slow things down far more than the line to get a bag at the Warner Bros booth.
Number two: Hollywood has brought in people that don't give a fuck about comics. This may be true, but it's a stupid complaint. When I started going to the con, I went because I was obsessed with Decipher's Star Wars CCG, and Decipher was always at the convention. I wasn't really into comics at all. I'd go see Joss Whedon or Ray Bradbury, but comics? Screw that, I was there for the cards! And then a friend led me to the Red Star booth and introduced me to one of the greatest independent comics around (seriously, check it out, it's totally awesome). Looking back on things, that was the spark that eventually led me to become the weekly regular at my local comic shop that I am today (other notable influences: The Sandman, the work of Brian K. Vaughan, and The Ultimates). My point here is that some of the people that come to Comic-Con without any interest in comics are going to become comic book readers. I can't tell you how many times I heard retailers on the floor say "We're all sold out of Watchmen", and how happy that phrase made me. This surge in comic book movies is good for comics.
This post is actually taking a lot longer than I expected, and I'm back to work tomorrow, so I'm going to end this here. Part 2 will show up in what I hope will be the near future. So, loyal readers (all two of you), what do you want to know about Comic-Con?
I'm going to be around less for the next few days, since I'll be busy nerding it up at Comic-Con.
My fridge died. It will probably be fixed by the time I get home tomorrow, but the lost food is more than a little aggravating.
It's been a good week for me as far as the visual arts go, I think.
Exhibit A: WALL-E. If you haven't seen this film yet, stop reading this and go see it. You really owe it to yourself. Let's start with the obvious reasons: it's technically flawless, and entertaining as hell. It really has to be technically flawless, because so much of it is told visually. But perfect technique doesn't make for a great film on its own. WALL-E follows in the steps of all the best sci-fi by not making the film about the sci-fi setting, but making it about people. The setting is just a backdrop for human drama, and WALL-E delivers in spades.
Exhibit B: In Plain Sight. This is USA's new original series about the US Witness Protection Program, and it caught me off guard. I watched the pilot because everything else had either gone off the air or was about to go off the air for summer. The pilot had me laughing the whole time, but the next couple of episodes had a far less funny bent. Last week's episode struck a nice balance between serious and funny. In short, In Plain Sight is a really smart show with a great cast and a really broad range. It's almost guaranteed to surprise, and I expect the cast and crew to continue putting out really solid TV all summer long.
Exhibit C: This week's comics, Astonishing X-Men and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi take over the reins on Astonishing X-Men after the heart wrenching end to Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's brilliant 25-issue run on the series. Whedon and Cassaday's run suffered from some time dilation relative to the rest of the Marvel Universe, but Ellis brings us up to the present in a pretty nice fashion. It's a solid handoff one of Marvel's best titles. Meanwhile, Joss Whedon, fresh off his runs on Astonishing X-Men and Runaways, returns to writing Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a big way, bringing back Melaka Fray. Melaka was the star of Joss's miniseries about a 26th century Slayer, the first to be called in centuries, and it'll be very interesting to see what happens when Slayers six centuries apart collide.
Edited to add:
Exhibit D: The final volume of Y: The Last Man, collected in trade paperback as Whys and Wherefores, reached my hands on Thursday. Brian K. Vaughan made me cry.
Exhibit A: WALL-E. If you haven't seen this film yet, stop reading this and go see it. You really owe it to yourself. Let's start with the obvious reasons: it's technically flawless, and entertaining as hell. It really has to be technically flawless, because so much of it is told visually. But perfect technique doesn't make for a great film on its own. WALL-E follows in the steps of all the best sci-fi by not making the film about the sci-fi setting, but making it about people. The setting is just a backdrop for human drama, and WALL-E delivers in spades.
Exhibit B: In Plain Sight. This is USA's new original series about the US Witness Protection Program, and it caught me off guard. I watched the pilot because everything else had either gone off the air or was about to go off the air for summer. The pilot had me laughing the whole time, but the next couple of episodes had a far less funny bent. Last week's episode struck a nice balance between serious and funny. In short, In Plain Sight is a really smart show with a great cast and a really broad range. It's almost guaranteed to surprise, and I expect the cast and crew to continue putting out really solid TV all summer long.
Exhibit C: This week's comics, Astonishing X-Men and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi take over the reins on Astonishing X-Men after the heart wrenching end to Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's brilliant 25-issue run on the series. Whedon and Cassaday's run suffered from some time dilation relative to the rest of the Marvel Universe, but Ellis brings us up to the present in a pretty nice fashion. It's a solid handoff one of Marvel's best titles. Meanwhile, Joss Whedon, fresh off his runs on Astonishing X-Men and Runaways, returns to writing Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a big way, bringing back Melaka Fray. Melaka was the star of Joss's miniseries about a 26th century Slayer, the first to be called in centuries, and it'll be very interesting to see what happens when Slayers six centuries apart collide.
Edited to add:
Exhibit D: The final volume of Y: The Last Man, collected in trade paperback as Whys and Wherefores, reached my hands on Thursday. Brian K. Vaughan made me cry.
Dear stupid people on the internet,
Don't link to some stupid piece about how global warming doesn't exist and tell me to have an "open mind" when I read it. This isn't therapy, fuckers, this is science. We practice critical thinking and we bring our A games. We cite properly peer-reviewed research and we put error bars on our graphs. We know the difference between the mean, the median, and the mode, and we understand what it means to be statistically significant. So if you can't keep up, go home and leave the heavy mental lifting to the experts.
No love,
Me
This post brought to you by:
Don't link to some stupid piece about how global warming doesn't exist and tell me to have an "open mind" when I read it. This isn't therapy, fuckers, this is science. We practice critical thinking and we bring our A games. We cite properly peer-reviewed research and we put error bars on our graphs. We know the difference between the mean, the median, and the mode, and we understand what it means to be statistically significant. So if you can't keep up, go home and leave the heavy mental lifting to the experts.
No love,
Me
This post brought to you by:
Don't go to AMC Theaters. I sent this to AMC's CEO at 1:53 AM:
Mr. Brown,
My father and I are both big Indiana Jones fans, so we made plans to see a midnight showing of the new film at AMC Fashion Valley 18 in San Diego. We bought our tickets in advance and arrived at the theater an hour and a half before the show. As you might guess from the time stamp on this email, we never got to see the movie. After the previews finished, the screen went dark. It took several minutes for the staff to get an image back, but it had no sound. About ten minutes later, the manager, Carmen, came in to tell us that they'd have sound restored momentarily, but they would be unable to start the film from the beginning.
Since my father and I had no interest in seeing only part of the film, we left. Carmen issued us a refund, two complimentary tickets, and two coupons for a free small soda and small popcorn. Were this any other showing, I would consider this an extremely generous gesture. But I don't go to the first showing of a movie just to see the movie; I go to see it with a theater full of people as excited as I am, a group of people I know won't talk through the movie, won't bring crying babies, and won't have their cell phones ringing. If you've ever been to the first showing of a major release, you know that it's an experience that can't be duplicated.
There are several more movies coming out this summer, and I am allocating a significant portion of my disposable income to go see them. I will be attending a couple more first showings and a number of evening shows on top of that. But since I clearly cannot trust AMC not to waste my time, I will not see them at one of your theaters, and I will advise my friends and family to do the same.
Sincerely,
Richard
I met Bill Nye! He signed my commencement program! And shook my hand! Bill Nye shook my hand!
