It’s over now, and I am back in The American Jerk home office. I know this because I just went outside for a cigarette and, instead of San Diego Bay and the USS Midway, I saw a pile of my own cigarette butts in the street and the Salvation Army. Real life blows.
In looking back over the stuff I’ve written about Comic Con over the past three years, I notice that I’ve skipped some of the reality over the spectacle, which is understandable. When you’ve spent five days surrounded by weird people in weirder costumes, three story high displays of comic and movie art (For example, here’s Castle Grayskull. It was about two blocks away from the Owlship, and around the corner from the Batcycle, near where Bruce Campbell was signing autographs), and meeting the people who’ve created the stories that have delighted me for the past thirty-two years, it’s easy to skip over the little irritants. Like people.
Comic Con daily attendance is limited to 125,000 people per day by the San Diego Fire Marshall, who comes to that figure using a complicated formula factoring in how many uppity nerds he remembers from high school who failed remember their place and just stay fucking swirlied. He then adds his meager salary divided by that of, say, Zack Snyder, and multiplies by his wife whose let herself go minus the tit queens in Batgirl outfits he can never touch, and comes up with a number of us that is high enough for him to jack off to if we were to, in fact, die in a fire. And that number looks like this:
Over the past few days I’ve used the old saw, “You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting…” a lot, but that was hyperbole. The fact of the matter at Comic Con these days is: you just can’t swing a dead cat. There’s no fucking room. And even if you could, no one would notice because the perfume of 125,000 people packed into a space would make the stench of decaying cat smell like Chanel No. 5.
When I get through eight hours on a plane I sometimes think I’ve got it in me to quit smoking. Then I look at this picture and realize that giving up cigarettes would renew my sense of smell, and I light one up quick.
On the positive side, many of the people at Comic Con are locals, meaning Southern Californian, meaning polite and positive. Which makes most the the experience bearable, because they will give you a sunny “sorry, dude!” after elbowing you in the floating rib and stepping on your toe to trip you and snake your place in line.
On the negative side, we’re talking about an eight of a million nerds, which means that a variable percentage of them on any given day have no social skills whatsoever… and a variable percentage of those have full-on Asperger’s Syndrome, and therefore tweak whenever anything deviates from the path of events that they expect. This can make panels a living hell.
The panels are a lot of what make Comic Con a blast; you get to hear your favorite comic or film or TV creators talk about their projects, and maybe show you some spoiler footage, and then they answer your questions. But after a couple of conventions, you will find your asshole start to suddenly clench when they open the floor to questions, because experience tells you that the borderline Asperger’s patients are out there, and they do not have questions. They have an agenda, and your enjoyment of the panel is not part of it.
“Hi, Mr Flurm. I know they said that there’s only five minutes until the panel ends, and that there’s nine people behind me waiting to ask questions about your new Plaid Lantern book and that there’s a three minute video presentation about your new secret comic that fandom has been waiting for with bated breath, but I just wanted to tell you how awesome you are, and how issue 27 of the Teen Bedwetters changed my life, because I was going through a difficult time when I read it because my mother kicked me out of the basement and a girl who was the love of my life even though I had only seen her through her bedroom window with a powerful telescope had devastated me because I gave her everything and she gave me a restraining order, plus at the time my foot had swelled up to three times its normal size due to nail biting, and when The Boy Wanker told Sunfire that his heart belonged to Ratgirl – the new Ratgirl, not the old Ratgirl, who was much better in my opinion, and GIVE ME BACK THE MICROPHONE I HAVEN’T ASKED MR. FLURM WHAT KIND OF LUBRICANT HE – ”
That kind of thing happens at every panel. At DC Comics panels, Editor in Chief Dan Didio likes to reward enthusiastic audience members by inviting them up to sit with the panelists. At the DC Guide to Your Universe panel (I think), he brought one fan up… who decided that as a panelist she should start answering questions. She tossed in her two cents (In modern, adjusted and deflated American dollars) on every fucking question until they took her mike away… and then she took Grant Morrison’s mike to answer another one until they finally got her under control. Watching people try to question that panel was like watching someone petition God and instead get answers from Jack Thompson.
Of course, it’s easy to bitch about the rude people at Comic Con, but more difficult to come to terms with the fact that, because I was there, I was one of them. Once you understand that you are just another gawker, wandering around with your camera at the ready to snap weirdos in costume, you become a little more forgiving of everyone else. Particularly once you get into the mindset that it’s okay to stop anyone walking around in a set of tights and cleavage and ask them to take their picture. And even more particularly when you stop someone for a photo and ask them who they’re dressed as, and it turns out, they’re not in costume; they’re just a slut with shitty fashion sense, and their boyfriend is not amused.
The quicker you realize that you have met the enemy, and he is you, the quicker you relax and just enjoy the show.
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To be continued. In the meantime, I will be periodically uploading photos to the Photo Dump throughout the day.
[tags]San Diego Comic Con 2008, Nerd Prom[/tags]
