Nerd Prom 2010: We Are All Locals Now

I’ve only been coming to Comic-Con for five years, and while the fucker was big even when we first started attending, it has become damn near unwieldy. Since this is The American Jerk, and we are nothing if not professionals in the trade of Dick Jokes As Metaphor: if Comic-Con in 2006 was Ron Jeremy, Comic-Con in 2010 is Big Johnny Holmes. They’ll both make it tough for you to walk when you’re done, but only The Wad can make you dread the next day’s go-round. And maybe kill you and your entire fucking family.

One of my great memories of Comic-Con was my girl’s and my first Preview Night a couple of years ago. And I talk a lot about Preview Night without ever describing it: originally, Preview Night was a courtesy set up for the exhibitioners, the comic pros and the absolute hardcore collector who had come to Comic-Con looking for that ONE thing that they felt they HAD to have. no matter how stringintly you argued that that ONE thing should be a shower.

As such, it was meant to be low-key and not too crowded; a chance for serious people to get some last-minute trading done before the heady throng of maybe 50,000 people hit (Comparision: last night the San Diego Fox affiliate estimated today’s crowd to be 140,000), and for drunken gigglers to have a chance to run wild on the floor, checking out the spectacle and, posing for pictures spooning with Jabba The Hutt… and sometimes pushing off the fumbling advances of Jabba’s pimply sister outside the men’s room.

That was then. Now, Preview Night is just day one of Comic-Con. It used to be considered foreplay, and still kinda is… provided your definition of foreplay includes wandering around in a drug-style haze with a sticky patch on the back of your jeans.

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say there were at least 60,000 people on the floor last night. There is a reason that the only video I have from yesterday is of the crowds; when you go to the zoo, you don’t photograph the cages.

Where once Preview Night was the realm of the serious collector and the shitfaced spectacle hunter, it is now the killing floor for the hustler, professional and amateur alike. Every permanent vertical surface had people lined up like lemmings from some Goddamned Comic-Con “exclusive”, most of it not worth the caloric burn many of these people could easily spare to chuck it in the wastebasket.

Didja know that the Alien quadrilogy is coming out on Blu-Ray? I do… because Fox video was giving away pasteboard facehuggers… on a fucking stick. Who conceives of this? Who believes that anyone wants this? These are legitimate questions… except everywhere I looked there was some joker waving his around with a big fucking smile. There were enough facehuggers flailing around the Comic-Con floor to give Sigorney Weaver a stutter and bladder control issues for the rest of her life.

People LINED UP for this shit. I spoke to people who were proud to get it because it was free. SO WHAT? So is herpes, and you don’t generally have to stand in line for an hour to get it… then again, if you find yourself in a situation where you do, fuck it; herpes is a small price to pay.

And those were only the amateur hustlers. The pros are also there in force, make no mistake. Every Comic-Con I try to come home with an original piece of art. Not some print, even signed; I want pencil and ink on paper. And this year, I was hoping for something with Frankie and The Goon by Eric Powell. I’ve been looking forward to it all year. So once the doors opened, I IMMEDIATELY made my way to booth 2209 adn approached the portfolios of original art…

Upon which I met The Russian. Who was flipping pages and yanking out every one that had the characters that anyone would generally want, muttering, “Da. Da. Yes. Da,” with all the emotion of Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV after the injections that destroyed him as a human being, or whatever euphamism you prefer for fucking Brigitte Nielsen.

This prick was no fan. He was clearly a speculator grabbing art straight from the source to flip on eBay (Gee, Uncle Rob; How can you tell? Easy, Billy; when the artist offers to personalize the art to you and you say no? It’s only because you don’t have the integrity to simply say you’re an opportunist. Now fetch Uncle Rob more tequila. No, Uncle Rob doesn’t want you to sign it).

Long story short, this commie motherfucker took every bit of art I might have wanted in one five-minute burn. And let me make it clear that I in NO way blame Powell for this. The poor fucker’s a freelancer who struck lucky with a character people like, and he’s just looking to recoup his costs for coming to the con and hopefully make a little profit. If I were in his shoes, I’d be wearing quick-release pants in case someone offered an extra ten percent if they could pay in nickels by firing them up my cornchute with a staple gun.

That said, it means that as a fan who buys art at Comic-Con to frame, hang, proudly show off to friends and maybe masturbate a little bit to, my convention got a little worse. And as a guy who’s been coming here for a few years and even in that short time seen it grow bigger and more commercial – and if you can somehow get more commercial than the year Sam Jackson showed up to hype Snakes on a Plane, you are grabbing cash however you can get it, probably even by staple gun – I now understand the guys with “San Diego, CA” on their badges who sneered a little sadly at me and my girl the first years we showed up, wandering around goggle eyed.

PLEASE don’t get me wrong. I still fucking LOVE Comic-Con. I already have tickets for next year. But to ape a cry I heard but didn’t understand five years ago: it ain’t what it used to be.

Welcome to Comic-Con. We are all locals now.

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POSTSCRIPT

After walking dejectedly away from Powell’s booth, drunkenly muttering things like “first strike opportunity” and “mutually assured destruction” about The Russian to my girl, we wandered toward the actual comic book publishers’ booths. Ironically, the areas of Comic-Con actually related to comic books tend to be quieter and less crowded. Go figure.

Something caught my eye as we passed the Slave Labor Graphics booth. “Check THAT out,” I said to my girl.

They had, out on display, copies of My Monkey’s Name is Jennifer – a comic that my girl and I read together when we first got together back in 2001, 2002. It was a funny, savage little black and white book about a chimpanzee who hated people, and the five-year-old girl who dressed him up and made him play make believe.

I came across the issues a year or two ago while I was reorganizing my collection and was impressed all over again. I Googled the guy who wrote and drew it – Ken Knudtsen – and at the time didn’t see anything new from the dude, so I assumed, as all comic fans assume about creators who’ve fallen off the radar, that he had developed a coke habit and died penniless with his organs harvested to keep Todd MacFarlane’s unholy existence gurgling along.

“You know the book?” the guy at the counter called out.

“Dude, I LOVE the book. We read it back when they first came out.”

“You interested in picking up any issues?”

I smiled. “I’ve already got them all at the original cover price. Now, if you had some NEW stuff – ”

The guy smiled back. “How about this new Jennifer graphic novel? Just came out today.”

My eyes widened. “Fucking awesome! I didn’t know the guy was still writing new stuff! Yeah; hook me up!”

He pulled out a copy and said, “You want me to sign it?” I looked at him blankly. “I’m Ken.”

So he and I talked for a little bit; he’s going to publish one new book a year, and he has a Web site to follow what he’s working on, as well as a Facebook page, and amazingly, I managed to sober up enough to not call him a moron for being on Facebook.

And I’ll tell you: I got a real charge out of accidentally meeting a creator I respected who I didn’t expect to see, and I like to believe that he got a charge out of finding, in a throng of around 60,000 people hustling for deals, a genuine fan of his book, which probably sold maybe 5,000 copies WORLDWIDE when it was new.

Yeah, Comic-Con ain’t what it use to be… except when it is. And that’s why I already have next year’s tickets.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, time to hit the Floor.

Well, first the bar. Then the Floor. Then the floor.

[tags]San Diego Comic-Con 2010, Nerd Prom, dark humor, satire[/tags]