Comicon Part !!

So there we were, Peter and I, two first-time Comiconners, stranded in downtown San Diego at 2:30 in the morning, strangers in the town with no place to stay and no way to leave. What had started as a post-college romp through the hallowed halls of popular culture had come with the dire, unexpected consequence of spending a night on the street, like weak-stomached, geeky bums!
Now admittedly, if there are few places more pleasant to be homeless than San Diego, which is clean, well-lit, and even in the wee hours of the morning, surprisingly pleasant and warm. We couldn’t find a beach to sleep on, and the idea of wandering around a 24 hour supermarket seemed unbearably horrible for all parties involved, including the supermarket, which would probably be victim to any antics we might come up with while fighting off exhaustion, and I’ve broken one to many glass salsa jars while trying to juggle in a Ralph’s already. We didn’t have much of a clue, but there was a nice hotel across the street from the convention, and I was tired of carrying my backpack and bags full of comics and free stuff around all day, so I suggested we see if we could bum around their lobby or find a corner somewhere to hideout for a while.
The place was basically deserted, except for a few other refugees from the Comicon who were hanging around chatting at tables outside. I tried to think of a way to ask them if we could stay in their hotel room without sounding creepy or desperate, but failed.
Instead we rode the elevators for a while, stopping on a couple of floors and checking out all the unlocked doors we could find that didn’t lead to guest rooms. We couldn’t very well sleep in a service area, and the ice rooms were a bit small. There were no couches or chairs in the hallways either. It looked dire.
Fortunately, I don’t think I ever went to an Honors Conference in college where I didn’t spent a few hours exploring the convention hotel. Through the years, I’ve discovered a few trends, which may have saved our lives that night:
1. The conference rooms, ballrooms, and other assorted, meeting rooms are usually on the lowest floor before the guest rooms start.
2. These rooms are always deserted at night, except for occasional hypothetical janitors.
3. There’s usually a way to get into them.
These principles held up in the San Diego hotel, and soon we found ourselves in one of about a dozen large ballrooms, although because it was more secure than I’m used to, we had to sneak through an empty service hallway/kitchen in order to do so. There were plenty of chairs and long tables with floor length skirts in the ballroom, and while the chairs just got in the way, the tables were perfect to sleep under.
Something like this had been my plan all along.
It was crazy enough that it just might work. But DID IT??????

Part Three in this now rather ridiculously drawn-out adventure coming tomorrow since I have to go to bed!!!!!

Comicon Part One

"Comicon," roughly extrapolated means "The San Diego International Comic Book Convention," which seems to be testing the limits of how much can be packed into a two-syllable word which isn't technically even an abbreviation. That seems appropriate, however, because even though the convention center it's held in is massive, it's still hard to fathom just how much Comicon contains.
I've wanted to go to this event ever since I learned it existed, so I was excited this year when everything seemed to fall into place to allow me to go. As it turns out, that didn't really happen (more on that later), but I went anyway, not suspecting the perils that would befall us.
The plan was to hit up two days of the four-and-a-half day convention – Friday and Saturday with my old pal Peter and his roommate Glasses, who for some reason preferred to be called Jeremy. They drove down from LA and picked me up an hour before the convention started. The drive from Orange took well over two hours of us moaning “I wish I was at Comicon,” but eventually we made it to San Diego, the city I’ve never heard anyone utter a word against. Parking, of course, was abysmal, as not only was the city infused with comic book geeks, it was also crawling with sports fans since the Padres were playing that weekend. We managed to find a spot in a seven-level shopping center garage.
It didn’t take long to get into the con, actually, nor was it quite as crowded as I had suspected. We were able to keep a safe distance from the fans dressed up as storm troopers and Final Fantasy characters, and within minutes of entering the massive convention hall I’d already spotted James Kochalka,, indie comics star and author of Quit Your Job, Monkey vs. Robot and The Sketchbook Diaries, and other writers and artists whose work I wasn’t as familiar with, but still recognized as being relatively famous in the alt.comix world. It’s a tribute to my ridiculous accumulation of comic-knowledge that I knew who these people were without having hardly read their work. Everyone seemed pretty cool and low-key though.
At the other end of the spectrum were the huge displays from the BIG companies. A giant Pikachu balloon hovered over the Nintendo booth in the middle of the exhibitor hall, which served as a good point of reference to try and figure out where you were at in the grand scheme of things, even though the place was actually big enough that you couldn’t see the huge balloon from the far sides of the room. The Sci-Fi channel had a big space-ship area to walk through, and some of the kid oriented companies had lounges where kids of all ages were sitting on beanbags watching cartoons. The Star Wars booth-system was so huge it was actually impossible to understand. All around, DC, Darkhorse, the manga publishers, Sony, Scholastic, there were actually so many companies there I can’t come up with names for hardly any of them, there were sculptures and displays, free posters, free comics, contests, costumes, lots of lightsabers, flyers, DVDs, movies, plenty for sale, plenty being sold. There was just A LOT. At the time I was able to parse it all well enough to make my way around and grab all the free stuff I could find, but now, looking back, it’s just a blur of color and comics and lights. And as the weekend went on, everything got more and more crowded.
You could only take in so much on the exhibitor floor at a time. Fortunately, and impossibly, it was only part of the show, maybe half. There were big table-top game tournaments, day-long anime screenings, autograph signings, art galleries, portfolio reviews, and various conferences, presentations and seminars.
Peter and I hopped around the conferences, first hitting up panels on self-publishing, computer coloring, Jack Kirby, He-Man and Hellboy during the afternoon. Peter stayed through the whole coloring panel, but we left all the others early. Most of them required more than the passing knowledge that we had of the topics in order to follow along. When people we didn’t know were introduced as “needing no introduction,” we knew we were out of our league. I was slightly enthralled by the Hellboy panel since I was familiar with the property and have a love for the character, but Peter and Glasses were bored after ten minutes.
Glasses actually had to get back home to L.A. so Peter and I walked with him back to the parking garage to get the rest of our stuff out of his car. It was a good thing we went, because parking ended up costing over 30 dollars, two dollars for every 20 minutes or something like that, since we didn’t get our parking validated at the mall. Yikes.
Even after helping Glasses with the parking fee, we still went shopping when we got back to the convention.
I got a lot of books I was looking for: the collected Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Street Angel (which I got signed with a sketch!), a long out-of-print Usagi Yojimbo collection, American Elf (which James Kochalka drew a three-color sketch in for me!), and the second volume of Bill and Ted’s Most Excellent Adventures (Peter got the first one). I was planning on getting a smaller collection from Kochalka, but he convinced me that the larger one was a better deal. As a result, I was short a few dollars when I went to buy Bill and Ted, but Peter loaned me his last dollar and the guy selling the book finally relented and let me have it “discounted.”
The last big event we went to was an Adult Swim panel, where we braved our first real lines of the convention to watch clips from the new stupid-funny stoner shows on Cartoon Network. I thought most of them were more stupid than funny, and the only one that really aimed higher than lowbrow was an animated version of The Boondocks, which was difficult to understand and got a laugh only for using the word “nigger,” which will probably not make it to TV. Maybe I’m too old for that stuff now. I am twenty-two.
But we got free Aqua Teen Hunger Force socks when the panel was over, which are really rad and probably the best free thing at the convention, so all’s not lost.
Afterwards we went to Ralph’s to get “dinner” – peanuts, donut and apple juice, which we ate in the park, and then returned to the convention for the night-time programming. We were waiting to hear from some of Peter’s friends who were on their way down to go to the convention on Saturday, and we planned to spend the night with them. In the meantime, we watched bits of 2004’s finest super hero films: Hellboy, Blade Trinity and all of The Punisher.
When The Punisher blew up a bunch of cars in the shape of the skull on his shirt and the final credits rolled it was about 2 AM. And we still hadn’t heard from Peter’s friends. The convention was kicking us out. And we had nowhere to go . . . …..

To be continued!