San Diego Comic Con!
Ah, San Diego Comic-Con! I attended my first Comic-Con this past week, hence the simpler, faster to draw (yet seemingly more popular) Lil’ Botched Spot comics last Wednesday and Friday. It was a pretty awesome experience, although completely overwhelming. The main reason my wife and I went was so she could promote her upcoming graphic novel, “A Friendly Game”, at the SLG Publishing booth, but we had plenty to do besides that. I’ve been to comic conventions before, but none nearly as massive as Comic-Con… and that’s a good thing and a bad thing.
Super Packed!
The convention center was packed. Beyond packed. Like something that fire marshals have nightmares about. It was cool to see so many people excited about comics and dressed in all their different costumes, but damn, that was a lot of people! It was bad enough shuffling along the con floor in long lines trying not to step on Darth Vader’s cape (which I accidently did once), but upstairs where the panels were held was even worse. Up there wannabe bouncers half-assedly ordered people where to walk, where they couldn’t walk, where they couldn’t sit, where they couldn’t stand, without ever seeming to know any actual information about the convention. I’m honestly surprised only one person was stabbed during the whole thing!
Panels!
But going upstairs was worth it for some of the panels. I went to quite a few, some of which were engaging (Webcomics.com’s lightning round) and others less so (Vampire fiction writing). The best one of all though, was the panel entitled “Mattel and WWE: The Ultimate Tag Team” that featured the wrestlers The Miz and Eve, creative writers Brian Gewirtz and Ed Koskey, and some guys from Mattel. I know videos of it have already surfaced online, so I won’t try and do a full recap of all the questions, but I will say that it was very cool, especially considering that the writers behind RAW were there and taking questions. Both Brian and Ed seemed to be pretty honest and humble, or at least more so than I expected them to be, and didn’t seem to hold back too much on any questions. The Miz was extremely funny and self admittedly long winded, and kept the whole experience very entertaining. As a fan of the Miz’s, it was awesome to hear him talk about his whole history and upbringing, including all of his Smackdown/ Diva Search hosting nonsense.
I did feel pretty bad for Eve and the Mattel guys who were barely asked any questions. I think too much was crammed into the hour-long panel, and it’s no surprise Miz and the writers overshadowed them.
Wrestlers?
And speaking of wrestlers, I searched long and hard on both the Comic Con website AND wwe.com for the times and locations of wrestler autograph sessions and found… nothing! And yet on my last day at the con I had to hear one of the volunteers tell me all about the various wrestler signings that happened. How did she know? I have no idea. And of course now on wwe.com they have all kinds of information on all of their different wrestlers who showed up for the convention! I did see Gregory Helms down at the DC booth and Mick Foley at the 12 Gauge Comics booth, but they were engaged with others so I didn’t have any time for high fiving them.
I tried seeing if the Spike TV booth had any TNA related promotional stuff, but didn’t see anything. I could have missed it though.
San Diego!
Overall it was an awesome experience though, and worth missing Smackdown on Friday night for. …Oh, and TNA on Thursday. Downtown San Diego was awesome to hang out at and it was also fun catching up with my old SCAD buddies. Lindsay and I also managed to get away without spending TOO much money there, which is always a good thing. My most prized purchase was “Super Pro K.O.” by Jarrett Williams, a pro wrestling graphic novel done in an old school manga style. Jarrett was one of my few fellow wrestling fan friends at SCAD, and so it was exciting to see the fruits of all his labor. I hope to do a longer review of it in a future blog post.
So, that’s a brief overview of my San Diego Comic-Con experience! It was definitely worth it, but it was extremely draining and I think I’ve had my fill of comic conventions for a while.