Boy was I dreading this one. Not the trip to San Diego, although this summer has been quite strange for the usually roasting Southern California coastal city, but the convention itself.

Heard way too many horror stories from various podcasters, bloggers and forum posts about how chaotic the scene was, the bad smells, crowds, and just about how this was the Super Bowl of geekdom. And while never having been in a Super Bowl site city at the same time as the Super Bowl, I do have a sense of how chaotic that scene can be.

But, the city and the convention did surprise me in terms of its organization, as I will point out in this long overdue blog post.

Wednesday

I actually got in on Tuesday night with my father; we were staying at his brother’s house in La Jolla, a suburb about a half hour up the coast from San Diego. My cousin would be joining us as well, though he wasn’t coming in until Wednesday night. This was also the night of the 2010 Bat-Meet at Dick’s Last Resort in the Gas Lamp district, a few blocks down from the Convention Center. So after the Bat-Meet I had to go meet my cousin at a bar uptown at a meet up HE was having for a wedding that he was in town for. I joked with Dustin and Apple at the Bat-Meet that I guess I’m so popular that I had two parties to be at in the same night.

I did get to spend the day in La Jolla, and later in San Diego, which was enjoyable. I could have done without the cloud cover, but what can you do. It was very misty each morning in that area, so misty I kept sending Josh (huge Beatle fan, operates Bertone Beatle Bonanza site and podcast) texts referring to a Paul McCartney & Wings song (“Mull Of Kintyre”) that celebrated a beautiful scenic piece of land in Scotland that McCartney owned at the time. The joke being that somehow San Diego, also known for scenic cliffs and landscapes, had traded weather patterns with Western Europe! This wasn’t the only Beatle related thing I did all day interestingly enough. Actually not the only thing I did via a character limited social messaging device now that I think about it; when I got down to the town of San Diego proper just to see what the crowd was at the Convention Center for Preview Night, and to get a copy of the schedule of events, I saw that Dustin had tweeted about being online waiting for the Center to open. I replied with the first lines to the Wings song “Venus & Mars” which goes “Sitting in the stands of the sports arena/Waiting for the show to begin…” I’d imagine that anticipation sense was going through everyone’s mind in that crowd.

The other Beatle thing that I did was when I grabbed dinner in a bar near where the Bat-Meet was. Nothing against Dick’s Last Restort’s menu, but I figured it would be busy as hell and since the Meet was happening around 9pm, I kind of just wanted a causal sit-down meal. So I did, unknowingly right next to a music act that was about to perform! I engaged them a little before they went on and the lead guy asked if I had any requests. I replied “Johnny Cash” and they did some Cash tunes before asking me if I had any other. For no other reason other than he had been on my mind earlier in the day, and I figure his material can be a letdown, musically, after Cash’s style, so I said “Paul McCartney.” And they actually pulled off a couple of tunes rather well.

I spent about an hour before the Bat-Meet checking out the bar at Dick’s. It seems like a Hooter’s-esque place in terms of décor and the like, and they were quite busy that Wednesday night. I’d guess the crowd was mostly from the con. Meeting both Dustin and Apple at the meet-up was a good highlight. The Dynamic Duo of this site are very good guys, and I’m sorry that my stay at the meet wasn’t longer, though from Dustin’s comments in the podcast, I’m not sure if I missed anything worthwhile.

Thursday

Thursday morning my cousin and I head down to San Diego from La Jolla, and start the long day’s journey into night by getting into the first line to go to another line to be on another line. The line went surprisingly smooth for 8am on the first official and full day of the convention. Well, surprising considering what I’ve heard, (and what I experienced this past October during Wizard’s Big Apple Con where I had to get back on the incoming for first time that day line to get back into a convention I already had a credential for). Since we picked up the badges in the area where the autographs were, I noticed there was a “Mattel” line and so I went on it, hoping to get exclusive toys for my nephews. Unfortunately the line was disbursed with a simple “we aren’t giving out the toys up here” and I heard something about the toys being available only to people at their booth downstairs in the Convention Hall the night before. After hearing this I decided it wasn’t worth going on a wild goose chase all weekend long for, and resigned to picking up the toys on eBay once I returned to the Home Office.

Interestingly enough, the Mattel booth was my next destination to take photos of merchandise there for the website. Camera in hand I proceeded to take photos of any new Batman related piece of merchandise on display from Mattel, and DC Direct. I even stopped by Graffiti Designs to take shots of cool Batman related shirts on display, as well as a Mezco and a novelty company’s booth. Plenty of Batman related merchandise, and I didn’t go strolling through the vendors over at the “flea market” end of the Hall.

By the time I had snapped my last photo, it was time to cover the first panel I was instructed to cover for the site. The Widening Gyre, which was scheduled only to feature artist Walt Flanagan, tracer (joke from Chasing Amy…or I think a colorist would be considered a tracer, right?)…err, colorist Art Thibert and Batman group editor Michael Marts. My cousin, who once interned for a few years in Kevin Smith’s production company when it was still based in New Jersey, was thinking of going, but instead opted for another panel instead spotlighting some television programs.

Well, it turns out the writer of the series, Kevin Smith, did show up unexpectedly, and armed with copies of the final issue (that was due out the following Wednesday) in order for the Q&A to be about the series as a whole and prep for discussions of the next volume of the story due out in January 2011.

The panel went well. Smith must have had Batman 1989 or something on his brain as he referred to Silver St. Cloud as Vicki Vale a number of times. Not sure why it took Josh’s question to get anyone, especially Marts, to call him on his mistake. Also, as I stated, Smith handed out copies of the title for people to read quickly before the panel started, the guy sitting next to me asked a question that was completely contradicted by the reveal at the end of the book. A fact Smith responded to him with and it seemed the guy did not have a copy, so I shoved the copy I had into the guy’s hand so he could see why his question was off the mark.

There were some good questions asked, mostly concerning influences and how the next part of the story will go, Smith promised that there would be more action oriented story telling in the second volume and that Bruce would be “more Bat than Man.” Also I inquired about a possible dream meet-up between Batman and the dope smoking comic book character alter-ego of Silent Bob from the movie Chasing Amy, Bluntman. I think the general consensus was that it would be something to be done in the Vertigo imprint.

Now, my cousin was wearing a shirt that featured a line from Clerks, “I’m not even supposed to BE HERE today!” which is the sad sack mantra of Dante Hicks in the film. When I heard after the panel that Smith would be signing down at the DC booth, I headed down there with the intention of getting him to sign the book for my cousin (not a collector…or even a reader, but since I had nothing else on hand) and since he almost went to the panel and since Smith was there unannounced, I thought it would be fun if Smith personalized the autograph with that iconic phrase. He did oblige and was nice about it, even remembered my cousin when I brought him up. Then interestingly enough, my cousin made his way down to where DC booth was. I showed him the comic book, and he went to try and carry a conversation with Kevin as he was signing. It took a while, but it actually happened, which I guess was nice. I then proceed to fail miserably at telling Walt Flanagan, who was signing next to Kevin, a joke at Art Thibert’s, who was next to Flanagan, expense. It wasn’t all that funny and it was a reference to the “tracer” scene from Chasing Amy, so maybe its for the best that the attempt failed. I also kind of felt bad for Thibert as just about everyone on the line was there for Kevin Smith, and a good percentage of them knew who Walt Flanagan is from various different things (he also is the manager of the comic shop Smith owns in Red Bank, New Jersey and is the co-star of a podcast called Tell ‘em Steve-Dave) but I’d say it was a safe bet that no one knew who Thibert is, other than he colored Flanagan’s drawings in the issues. But, such is life I guess.

After my cousin finished the conversation, he headed to other panels while I walked around some more. Afterward I was kind of kicking myself for not getting one of the two to record a promo for the podcast, there is more to that tale on Saturday though.

The rest of Thursday was pretty basic, soaking everything in and enjoying the atmosphere. I did stop by the podcasting panel, and tried to get TheBatmanUniverse.net a few shout outs, I’m not sure that it helped matters though.

Leaving the convention center was interesting. On the way out with several hundred people, the sea of humanity was stopped as this long freight train slowly made its way across the tracks parallel to the center. It was quite amusing, and annoying.

Friday

To set this up, a month or so before the convention, I broached the subject with the head of the research department of a research firm that I work for about the convention being something worth mining raw data on consumer product trends; what people are buying, what people are looking at, what will be hot in the coming months or so. He thought it could be worth something and gave me the green light Friday morning to get tidbits from people involved and at the least get contact info for future products. So now I could consider the convention a “business trip” on two different fronts!

So not only was I covering the Mattel-DC panel Friday morning, but I’d be combing the floor looking for stuff that could be used by the firm on consumer product trends. This turned out to be a double edged sword actually, approaching various people I became aware that it would be hard to even get “sound bites” from them about shop talk while working an immensely crowded convention hall. It is easier to do “hey record this few second clip for my podcast” than “hey can we chat for a few moments about what’s going on here” in a way that goes beyond general small talk conversation. Yet on the other side I’ve only gotten a couple of hits from the multiple emails I sent out from the business cards I obtained. So next time I’d have to try a different approach to this.

Back to Batman, the next Bat-related thing was I decided to take in the State Of The Bat-Books panel (actually Return of Bruce Wayne was the official title) where I met up with Apple again as well as Josh. This was an entertaining panel as pretty much all of the major players in the Bat-Office right now were there, and pretty informative about where the titles and characters are headed in the coming months. No doubt the next Comic Cast will be filled with tidbits from this panel. I did get off a question about the two out of continuity satellite books, Batman Confidential and Superman/Batman, but other than the continued usage of mystical monsters in Confidential, Mike Marts had nothing really to say other than “yeah we have some good storylines for those books going.” Kind of disappointing to hear when you are reviewing one of those two books.

Saturday

This would be the last day of the convention that I would attend, as I had plans with my cousin to head up to Los Angeles for some Hollywood sight-seeing and a Dodger baseball game, so I had to pack in just about everything I didn’t get to on Thursday and Friday. Which pretty much was scope the vendor side of the convention hall? I wasn’t shopping really; it was just that I hadn’t been there all weekend and its pretty amazing that you literally could spend an entire day, or at least most of it in only one part of the convention if you wanted to, and get a lot out of just that one section.

I mean, there were people that all they were doing was hanging out on line in the theater line for various movie panels and previews that were being shown, I’m sure there were people just there for artist alley, the autographs room, and the exhibition portion of the hall. The set up of the convention center itself was just so massive that you could literally not even realize that stuff was happening on the other side of the center. I will say though that this would cause confusion though, especially since there is no PA system wired for the building. If you didn’t know something had changed or whatnot or if you could say pick up your pass for future days you literally had to be at the place where it was happening to know what was going on. It isn’t a huge deal, but a central information thing, maybe a board or something, giving out updates, delays. Saturday evening’s events were thrown into flux because of a fight between patrons, except for an announcement to the people online outside the convention for Saturday evening events in the big viewing hall I don’t think anyone would actually have known about it until they saw the news about it.

I did run into Apple on the floor of the vendor’s area, which was a nice random moment; we talked briefly about the DC Universe Online panel that was coming up later that day. I also did a lot of walking around getting business cards for the research firm project; most of the companies I approached were nice about it, except for Marvel, who actually had a rent-a-cop tell me not to bother the people working the booth for some reason. Yeah, but that’s what people working the booths are doing, talking with people about whatever they want to talk about. I mean I know I’m talking with essentially interns and whatnot, but why have people there if they can’t interact with people at the convention?

And now the story of my rather epic fail attempt to get Kevin Smith to record a podcast promo…

I’m made aware of a panel Kevin is going to be at for the anniversary of Film Threat, an movie preview and commentary magazine and website that has been around for a few decades, basically the forerunner for sites like Ain’t It Cool News and such. Afterward was scheduled to be his usual Saturday night panel down in the theater hall. So I decide to hang out where the panel was, and wound up listening to an interesting war comics panel, of course later I see that Smith had tweeted that his friend Jason Mewes (Jay in most of Smith’s early films), was signing autographs at a booth, so afterward I realize that maybe that’s where I should have been in the first place.

Well, in part because of the commotion of the day from the stabbing incident, Smith was late in getting to the panel, so they started without him. He wasn’t too late for it, only a moment or so, but enough that obviously the only shot I had was after the panel had ended. It was a good panel, and worth going to; And I so I waited for my moment to approach Kevin afterward, but he was quickly whisked away by a police security detail for I assume preparations for his own panel that night. Denied! Oh well, I did notice during the week that Josh had taken a photo of Kevin Smith for another website Josh was working the convention for so maybe Josh was able to get the recording that I couldn’t.

So there it is; My 2010 San Diego International Comic Convention experience. I’d recommend anyone going to it as a “bucket list” sort of thing if you are into pop culture. It really has become more Hollywood and mass pop-culture friendly in recent years, so I’d say don’t go there expecting to get the same experience that you’d get at the next comic book or baseball card show in your area. I’d say the autograph room, artist alley and the vendor area were the only things that had that flavor of your standard show, but the whole package of San Diego is a different thing entirely.

The next convention on my list is October’s New York Comic Con,(8th through the 10th) which from all accounts should be a stark contrast to Wizard’s Big Apple Con which I attended last year (this year is from October 1st to the 3rd) and did not impress me in the least. I’m kind of expecting a something like San Diego on a lesser scale, and less of a mass-pop culture (TV shows and movies) presence. Well, it should be fun at the very least, being on my home turf and all.

Posted by SteveJRogers