Comic-Con 2010 — Preview Night

Okay, so this will be posted in the correct chronological order, but let’s face it — Comic-Con is FAR too busy and excited to be able to blog in any reasonable way from there. So I will now, almost two weeks later, with the help of images and my ever-faltering memory reconstruct and post my thoughts on Comic-Con 2010 based on my personal experiences.

Comic-Con! Awwwwwwww Yeah!

The best thing for me about Comic-Con 2010 was that I got to experience it with fresh eyes.  Two very important people in my life, my friend, Landall Goolsby and my partner, Kevin Fabian, were attending Comic-Con for the first time ever.  Both huge comic geeks, it was a little shocking that this was their first year to make the trek down to San Diego for the annual event, but sometimes you just have to wait for the fates to get you in the right place with the right people at the right time.

The first thing I noticed about Comic-Con this year was that San Diego is CLEARLY trying to hold on to this convention with as much will as it can muster.  From setting up shuttles to and from the very-distant hotels in Mission Valley (which made being stuck staying that far from the convention a little more bearable) to converting all of the Trolley signs into Klingon, the city came out for the Geeks with a hearty “PLEASE KEEP SPENDING YOUR MONEY HERE.”   A recent survey reported that Comic-Con generates over $163 million for the San Diego economy, so of course the city is going to go out of its way to keep the convention for as long as it can.

Preview night with newbies is a blast.  No matter how long and hard I tried to initiate them into and warn them about the madness that is Comic-Con, they still disregard me and shrug me off . . . until they actually get here.  And they were lucky: with the limitation on tickets for preview night this year, the exhibition floor was not nearly as packed or insane as it has been in other years.

In Brightest Day, In Blackest Night . . .

We stayed mostly on the “comics” side of the floor, eschewing the southern end of the hall where the TV, movie and game booths tend to be set up.  It always amazes me how much quieter it is at the north end, where the focus is primarily print media and collectibles.  Kevin and I did head for the Mattel booth because we wanted to snag the convention exclusive (and brilliantly funny) Wonder Woman Hot Wheels Invisible Jet. Arriving at the booth, I WAS able to recite the Green Lantern oath at a power battery, but I was using my Legion Flight Ring, so I didn’t get much of a charge.  Also, the Mattel shop line was characteristically and excruciatingly long, so we were told to come back tomorrow morning (and given special passes to do so at 11:00 a.m.)  Our plans to stand in line for Hall H to see Tron might be in jeopardy . . .

Giving up on Mattel, Landall wanted to (and I could not disagree with him) to hang out at the DC Comics booth, which we tend to regard as some sort of holy land.  Landall and I are staunch DCs, whereas Kevin is much more bi, preferring the company of Marvel as well as DC.  I forgive him for those transgressions.  We moved on from the DC booth to explore the lay of the land, as is appropriate for preview night.  Many sales were going on in a lot of booths; I’m not sure if the vendors thought that they wouldn’t make may sales this year or not because of the economy, but with fanboys saving up all year for this event, the money didn’t seem to be too much of an issue.  Landall picked up some items, I bought a few action figures (mostly to get a rare Wonder Woman for Kev, but I also picked up a female Dr. Light and a Psycho Pirate.  Awesome.) and Kevin bought himself a very sweet Green Lantern jacket to replace the brown and tan one seen in these pictures.

9:00 p.m. cam quickly and it was back to the car to drive out to Hotel Circle to get to bed.  Thursday is Tron day and therefore is a day requiring lots of rest.