Comic-Con 2010: Clowns To The Left Of Me, Jokers To The Right

Posted on July 24, 2010 by Rob Reuter

An inquisitive reader (Who knows I know his home address and the name of his employer and should know better than to demand I do ANYTHING beyond drinkfree whiskey that he’s providing) writes:

Where’s the pix? I know there are a ton of hot chicks running around dressed like who knows what… you should be able to point in any direction and find a chick dressed as Hit Girl this year…

Thanks for writing, you filthy, scumsucking swine! I’ve known you for a long time, so I can only assume that your call for “pix” of women dressed as the pre-pubescent anti-heroine of an obscure comic book movie is based on some kind of weird, pop-anthropological interest, and CERTAINLY not the uncontrollable urge to look at pictures of idealized women in a way in which they can never question your manhood, and then jack off like an amphetamined ape in an empty cage.

Or perhaps in the equipment closet of the girl’s locker room back in high school with six soiled sports bras draped over your face, huh? Yeah, you just keep on muttering about “sealed records” and “expunged juvenile record”; some of us know the TRUTH. And trust me: you are going to HELL for leering at women in skintight superhero costumes! You will BURN FOREVER for your filthy IDOLOTRY and LUST!

I know this because these douchebags yelled it at me Thursday.

Yeah, the Westboro Baptist Church swine managed to find some time in their busy schedule of protesting soldiers’ funerals and high school productions of Tennessee Williams to come and protest… comic book geeks. Apparently they take issue with people reading stories about a man with incredible power, sent to Earth by his father, who selflessly toils to save us all… come to think of it, that IS a stupid fucking story. Only a rube would believe it, and certainly NO ONE would base their lives around it. But I digress.

These whimperers showed up peddling their bullshit across the street from the convention center, and immediately a gang of Comic-Con attendees started throwing together a gang to… shit, I don’t know. After all, these are NERDS were talking about here, myself included. I can say from personal experience that, when confronted with bullys, the nerd reaction is less to whip together a posse and more to clamp your nostrils closed so toilet water can’t flood your brain.

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Nerd Prom 2010: We Are All Locals Now

Posted on July 22, 2010 by Rob Reuter

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.

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Nerd Prom 2010: Back In The Saddled

Posted on July 21, 2010 by Rob Reuter

At five this morning, my cell phone shrieked me out of a beautiful dream where I was smoking a Marlboro Red the size of John Holmes job qualifications (Although if that’s the best description I can come up with, it’s probably best it woke me when it did). It was my credit card company’s fraud department, calling to advise me that some depraved spastic had used my card to buy a dozen beers, a bottle and a half of wine, and then hole up in a mid-ranged motel overlooking the Pacific… presumably to make his last stand.

I advised the nice lady in return that the deranged spastic in question was me.

Welcome back to San Diego Comic-Con.

——————

Christ, look at the fucking dust and cobwebs around this fucking Web site, huh?

Sorry about that. Let’s suffice it to say that things have gone weird on me in 2010; even weirder than usual. When you quit one day job after it “allegedly” defrauded you out of $10,000 in 2009 and was on its way to gleefully upping the ante to $23,000 in 2010, and then have to spend an inordinate mount of time at a new day job convincing them that your kind of behavior is NORMAL, well, you try stamping out dick jokes and coming up with clever ways to call politicians whores.

But if there’s one thing that I’ve forced myself to embrace in the past half decade, it’s to report back from Comic-Con. Oh sure: unlike when I started spitting sporadic and incomprehensible dispatches from this place five years ago, now you can just dial up G4 and watch eight hours of Olivia Munn and That Other Guy making hip-hopish hand gestures and tit-jiggling from the main convention floor. Of course, that assumes you can trust that kind of reporting. After seeing Olivia on The Daily Show, I wouldn’t believe her if she reported she had jugs without some hands-on fact-checking.

However, I still think there’s a place for “reporting” (Quoted because what I do is only journalism in the loosest definition… and only then if your definition includes Blue Law violations) from a man with his boots on the ground, a song in his heart, and most of a distillery’s pride in his brain. A man reporting from the actual Cheez-Nip cholesterol-pumping heart of Comic-Con, using all the tools available to a man on the budget of a modest family vacation minus the coin required for enough beer to prevent him from wanting to lay hands on every Naruto with a children’s stroller.

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It’s In The Hole

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Rob Reuter

I need to make this quick, because it’s April Fool’s Day, which means I’ve got shit to do. I need to take care of my elderly neighbor with the yippy shit machine rat dog that craps on my front step every third walkies. I’ve got it all planned out: I’m gonna fill a paper bag with dogshit. Then I’m gonna put it on her front step, set it on fire and ring the doorbell. And when she comes out? I’m gonna blast her with about 30 paintballs. And with any luck, then the bag’ll burn her fucking house down.

However, The Master’s golf tournament’s coming up fast, and what with a busy schedule filled with pleading Not Guity to First Degree Arson and tinkering with the alcohol detector on an ankle bracelet, I wanted to get my thoughts on Tiger Woods’s big golf comeback down while I have a chance. So here we go:

Who gives a shit?

Seriously, Tiger: almost no one cares about your golf game; everyone knows you’re probably the best golfer in the world. No, all anyone wants to see is whether or not you whimper and go fetal the first time someone cocks a nine-iron near your face. The Atlantic City Over/Under on you cracking under the pressure, losing bladder control and sprinting for the nearest SUV is currently the tenth hole of round two, and trust me: the smart money is on the under.

So fuck golfing, all people want to see how you handle the situation… because up until now, you have handled it all wrong. You can trust me, Tiger; after all, I am a man who knows a thing or two about creating a public spectacle.

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The Last Temptation of Netflix, Part 2

Posted on March 31, 2010 by Rob Reuter

EDITOR’S NOTE: Part 1 of this ugly diatribe against Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ can be found here.

So anyway, by this point the Sam Adams was flowing pretty freely and I was checking in and out for cigarette breaks, so my coverage gets a little spotty. Scorcese has Jesus go back out into the desert or something, and come back growling that now he’s “the Son of the God of the Axe,” which would have sounded intimidating if it wasn’t custom-made to be prefixed with “Godzilla Versus”.

So then Jesus hits the temple with his mob of angry goons to kick some ass, but unlike in the Bible, in Scorsese’s movie it’s not filled with money-lenders, but money-exchangers. And just before Jesus Hulks Out we’re introduced to a helpful one-off character I believe was named Rabbi Exposition, who explained that it was against Jewish law to use Roman coinage in the temple, because Roman coins had pictures of Roman gods, and it was illegal to allow graven images of false gods into the temple. In short: in Scorsese’s Jesus story, Jews couldn’t worship unless they had a pile of the right money… thus simultaneously setting back the cause of Judaism at least forty years and plastering a Joker-style grin across the face of Mel Gibson, who then began writing his own little Jesus movie. Probably with one hand.

So then Jesus whips up his crew to grab some weapons and take on the occupying Roman garrison (He may or may not have shouted “Wolverines!”; I was going for a beer around this time). And they get the drop on the Romans and they’re ready to attack… but they pause and tell Jesus that they can’t riot until he gives the order… because we all know that angry mobs respect nothing more than the iron-clad authority implicit in a top-down hierarchy.

Jesus wimps out and the Romans start rounding people up, somehow missing the guy who was right in front of them. Jesus and his disciples escape, and again, unlike in all four gospels of the New Testament, in Scorsese’s flick, Jesus asks Judas to go to the Romans and bring them back to pick him up and crucify him, thus turning a tragic tale of betrayal and sacrifice into the tale of Suicide By Cop so complicated it makes Se7en look like a third-grader’s Johnny Fuckerfaster joke.

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