Four Days, Three Crazy Nights

I drove down to San Diego with one small piece of luggage and the preconceived notion that Comic Con was really just another trade show/convention, only bigger.   From the start, all my expectations were shattered.   Including the radical notion that the trip from L.A. to S.D. would take a maximum of three hours.   Thanks to two freaky accidents on alternate routes, it was an eight-hour trip.

The organizers hand out “professional” registrations to almost anyone who can make a persuasive case that he/she works in the biz.   And you can bring a friend. Which means that all you really have to worry about is paying for your hotel and feeding yourself while you’re there.   Veteran Con-goers book their hotels in January to get a jump on the inflated convention prices and also to make sure they don’t have to drive in from East Jesus every morning and then pay the $15 daily parking rate.   (This rate barely fazes the Angelenos but people who don’t live in the land of the $5/gallon gas were walking around shell-shocked.)

You’ve heard that Comic Con is a big costume party/Halloween rave?   It’s true, but the most prevalent costume was the red shirts the “Elite” security guys and gals were sporting.   They’d clearly been brought in to supplement the convention center’s regular folk and they did not have a clue where anything was.   But there were a lot of them.   In red shirts.

There were several incarnations of Batman, from the pop art 60s incarnation to the recent Dark Knight.   But there were a lot more Jokers, nearly all of them of them in the diseased, cracked-makeup mold if the Heath Ledger version.   Lots of Indiana Jones, some in gangs with other people made up to look like other characters from the films.   Bonus points for them.   There were people dressed as random hero characters in home-made costumes heavy on the red, white and blue.   With lots of stars.

There were a fair number of women (young and old) wearing Victorian dress in honor of the Victorian romance manga EMMA.   There were even more hot women in random skimpy outfits.   A lot of them were wearing wigs of blue and pink hair.

The Best costume hands down was the guy dressed as Jesus with the neon halo who was walking around Sunday blessing people.   (The rest of the week there were people offering strangers random hugs, which is so not California that it was   fun.)   The one costume that was conspicuously absent was THE GREEN HORNET.

This is a problem because there’s a GREEN HORNET movie in the works and nobody besides the guy at the PINEAPPLE EXPRESS panel seems to care.   Seth Rogan (more about him later), who will write the movie and play the title role, even noted that he saw guys dressed like “the guy from FINAL FANTASY 15 but nobody dressed as Green Lantern.

For those who didn’t want to commit to a whole costume, there were several choices–cat ears and Naruto headbands.   The cat ears actually outnumbered the headbands four to one (I was with someone who counted) but the headbands were geekier, so they got more points.   At one booth, if you bought a t-shirt, they’d make you up to look like a zombie.

But who buys t-shirts?   If you stood in line to get a voucher, you could get a TROPIC THUNDER t-shirt for free and also an invite to the screening.   (It’s hilarious, but I can say no more until its release date.)   There were guys in white Haz-Mat shirts handing out cool QUARENTINE t-shirts (green lettering on black).   HBO was pushing their new vampire series TRUE BLOOD really hard by handing out comic books and nifty little backpacks with t-shirts that said:   FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS DRINK FRIENDS.

The t-shirt everyone really wanted was at the booth where a STARGATE game was being previewed.   Not for sale, unfortunately, although they were giving away cool dog-tags.   The freebies flowed.   The most sought-after being the gauzy fairy wings being handed out at the Disney exhibit and the inflatable He-Man swords from Mattel.   (You couldn’t just go up and grab those, you had to fill out a survey.)

Hugh Jackman showed up with some footage from WOLVERINE but with all due respect to Hugh, the hot ticket of the convention was the MYTH BUSTERS panel.   The convention organizers were caught totally flat-footed by the demand to see Jamie and Adam and the gang.   The event was held in room 6B, one of the smallest rooms in the whole convention center.   And meanwhile, the panel for LAND OF THE LOST was going on in a ballroom.

More on PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (and Seth) and UNDERWORLD THREE and LAND OF THE LOST in my next post.–Kat Parrish