Nerd Prom Pregame: Killer of Saints, Part 1

For most of the year, the San Diego Comic-Con feels like a vaguely abstract concept. You know it’s coming sometime in the next few months, and you should be getting ready for it, but you’re always busy not getting ready. It’s inevitable yet somehow unreal, kinda like Christmas, or my annual family intervention.

It feels like this to me mostly because the guts of initial preparations for the trip need to start to Goddamned early. Last year the show sold about completely about a week before opening, and this year it’s been sold out for a month already. Comic-Con has transcended the concept of a “comic book convention” and turned into a full-blown media EVENT. And at a daily capacity of 125,000 people, that means that on any given day you want to attend Comic-Con, you’re competing with journalists, bloggers, wanna-be artists, movie producers, Nicholas Cage, and 90,000 other people with unfocused eyes and agendas no more than three degrees of separation away from “I needs to touch Bruce Campbell’s sweat so’s I can get my yiff on.”

Prep starts with requesting the week off from work the day I get back from that year’s Comic-Con. Because when you work for a tech start-up, you already know that there will be some emergency that will make them ask you to cancel your vacation, and it’s easier to look yourself in the mirror when you can say, “If I’m so important you can’t plan around me with fifty-one weeks notice, I should be paid more,” than it is if you have to whimper, “Fuck you, I’ll quit” like the whipped animal eighteen months of recession has really made you. Besides, the company policy of First Approved – Last Denied gives me the perverse little passive-aggressive thrill of being able to say, “Sorry you can’t visit your sick Babushka in Kiev, Aleksi, but I have to go look at comic books,“… which is vastly better than the aggressive-aggressive thrill he’d get by putting me in a Spetnaz combination choke / groin hold if the employee handbook wasn’t on my side.

Stage two is January, when I realize that most airlines start booking flights six months in advance, and that there’s exactly one daily non-stop flight from Boston to San Diego. And I must be on that flight; the airline system and I don’t coexist well in the same space. They prohibit smoking and also frown upon frustrated acts of violence, which is similar to prohibiting oxygen while tsk-tsking suffocation. So they want me in and out as quickly as humanly possible, just like every girl I ever dated.

Then while I’m at it, I usually book a backup hotel room. Comic-Con offers rooms at discounted rates in February or March through a travel agency using state-of-the-art technology, provided it’s 1913 and a Bic lighter would vastly improve your quality of life… mostly by making it easier to light a torch to chase down the person who gave it to you as a witch. Most years, booking a room through them is no better or more certain than obtaining one though the use of fervent prayer. So you want a backup in place to hedge against the even odds that the front desk clerk at your convention-booked hotel will tell you that billing your credit card doesn’t equal proof that you actually exist.

After that, the whole concept of Comic-Con kinda slips from my mind… up until my RSS reader dings and I see that they’ve started posting the programming schedule. That whacks me across the eyeballs and makes the whole thing feel real and immediate again; here are the things that I’m going to see, the events that will entertain me, the lines that will enrage me and the bodily funk that will drive me to Nicky Rotten’s for the cleansing scents of seared flesh and Arrogant Bastard Ale on draft.

Even the programming schedule has become an unholy frenzy of competetive activity. Four years ago, programming started on Thursday and went from about 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Now it goes usually until midnight, with everyone in publishing and Hollywood who has anything that could remotely be considered “genre” jockeying for a spot in one of the panel rooms. I can almost picture Zack and Miri screaming into a phone, “But… Star Whores! It’s a perfect fit! Hello?”

It’s gotten so bad that even some of the heavyweights can’t get space in the convention center proper. Heroes, which debuted at Comic-Con in 2006, and which had people camping out in line for Hall H last year, has to have their panel at some hotel nearby. And while I treasure the mental picture of Milo Ventamiglia clawing at the service door and yelping, “Lemme in! I’m Milo Venta – okay… I’m Sage Stallone! PLEASE!”, it means that Comic-Con has hit an apogee of desperation for nerd eyeballs and dollars.

Which sounds bad, but I’ll give the convention organizers credit for this: regardless of how badly the big money Hollywood types moan for space, there is always something interesting and unexpected scheduled. Sometimes it’s something really cool and niche, like last year’s Greatest American Hero cast reunion, which put a big, eight-year-old’s smile on my face. And sometimes, well…

Sometimes you get smacked by something like this. A prime-time Saturday afternoon panel spot… in one of the bigger rooms… for Boondock Saints… 2.

Boondock Saints… written and directed by Troy Duffy…

Troy. Fucking. Duffy.

Ahh. My old nemesis. We meet again.

TO BE CONTINUED.

[tags]San Diego Comic-Con, Nerd Prom, Boondock Saints, Troy Duffy, dark humor, satire[/tags]