Weekend Report

Well, where to begin on my Comic-Con travelogue?

The trip to California was straightforward enough. For the first time in I don’t know how many trips, nobody in my party was wrestled to the ground and strip-searched, or even asked to just stand aside while being wanted and shoe-scanned.

We got into California without many problems, once we convinced the stewardess to sit us together (picky, picky, picky). The flight was nice, though Katherine stayed vehemently wide-awake until 15 minutes before we landed (and stayed awake the whole trip to the K’s, even though it was around Midnight. Too much excitement!).

Jim and Ginger were already hosting a houseful of relatives (more below), so they insisted on our sleeping in their bed, while they slept on an air mattress down in the office. Eep! After several unsuccessful attempts to convince them, we bowed to the inevitable and crashed.

Up-‘n’-at-’em at 6:30a, quick greetings and farewells, and off we headed for San Diego. The day before we’d gotten an e-mail from Mary about a major accident on the Interstate heading down there, which had much of the freeway closed for over twelve hours. By the time we reached the site of the accident (which involved, we learned later, big rigs, tanks full of tar, and lots of fire), it was all cleared up, save for the hazmat crews still on duty, the burnt and melted guard rail to the right, and the tarry path across the freeway to the center divider. Yeesh.

Down in San Diego, we dropped off our bags at Mary’s place, and headed for the Con!

Sort of. The (new! expanded!) lot under the San Diego Convention Center (home of the 2000 GOP Convention) was full by the time we got there — and was full Saturday and Sunday, too. We cruised, slowly, around the Gaslamp District, trying to find parking somewhere, to no avail. Eventually we parked over by the train station, and made use of the very handy Con shuttle busses to get over there.

If you’ve never been to the SDCC, it’s almost impossible to describe. The length and breadth of a tremendous conference center is staggering — 350,000 sq. ft. It’s full of publisher exhibits, vendor booths, artist tables, the art show and art auction, comics, movie stuff, TV stuff, jewelry, overpriced food, and, of course, umpteen zillion attendees, enough of whom are in costume to provide a Mos Eisley air to the proceedings.

(I’d say that SW-related costumes were most in evidence, primarily various types of Stormtroopers and Jedi, though there were also the requisite number of Klingons.)

We spent a lot of time cruising up and down the hall, going ooh and aah and I can’t believe anyone would buy that sort of crap and When I win the lottery … Over the course of most of Friday, Saturday, and a bit of Sunday morning, we actually did pretty well with not maxing out the credit cards (or weight alotment on the plane back). We did pick up some graphic novels, some t-shirts … and, ironically, the biggest bill (even including a very nice amber necklace Margie snagged) came from a gaming shop (okay, that it had the John Kovalic “Dork Storm” tie-in probably influenced that, but there were also some games I picked up, and the Bucket o’ Dice for Margie).

On the panel side of things — and, yes, there are dozens of panels here, usually four or five going in simultaneously during all the open hours of the show, some in rooms significantly larger than shows altogether) — we had pretty good luck.

• Joe Straczynski and John Romita, Jr. had a joint talk on Spider-Man, plus other projects each are working on. JMS was, as always, vastly entertaining. Romita was a surprising live-wire, very enthused about the work he’s doing, very open, very chatty. It’s a great panel (and Amazing Spider-Man is a great book (and, now, an Eisner-winner), if you’re not reading it).
• A large Improv Art (a la “Whose Line is It Anyway?”) was held, with Romita, Scott Shaw!, Eric Larson (Savage Dragon), and, of course, Sergio Aragones (of Groo and Mad fame). Mark Evanier (“EH-vuh-NEER,” oddly enough) did the MC job, quite nicely. They had a couple of projection tables that the artists could draw on, and though they all did a fine and funny job, Aragones stole the show (without alienating any of this co-artists, I’ll add) with his detail, his sense of humor, and the fact that he just seemed to have to keep drawing, no matter what.

• We went to the Peter David panel on Saturday, where he talked about his current work (including a play on divorce, now in production here in SoCal), his wife’s pregnancy, and life dealing with Marvel and DC. He also read at length from scripts of two upcoming issues of Captain Marvel and Supergirl, and did a pretty nice job of it.

• Later Saturday, we went to the SDCC Trivia Competition, this year starring (as the doomed opponents of the Purple Pros) a team fielded by the Beat the Geeks TV show. The current Comic Book Geek was captaining, with a couple of his friends on the panel, though the eventually invited up the Music Geek (the Movie Geek was also in attendance), who was surprisingly good.

  It made little difference, since the Purple Pros, consisting of Len Wein, Kurt Busiek, and the encyclopediac Mark Waid, seriously took them down, as they’ve taken down every other team over the many years of the con. Waid, himself, is an astonishing collection of comics trivia (mostly Silver Age, to be sure, which most of the questions were aligned around), and could probably compete single-handedly.

  Afterwards, I got a great opportunity to make an idiot of myself by going to the microphone first when they announced an audience participation segment (after the contest was over). I had thought we audience members were going to be asked questions by the panel, but instead we were expected to have questions for the panel. Embarrassment ensued, and I managed to stammer out something like was the real name of Power Girl (Karen Page, though that’s only one of them), and I got a Beat the Geeks t-shirt nonetheless.

I tried to avoid too many t-shirts this year, since I’m wearing fewer of them these days. Still ended up with a bundle, including the BtG, a Blood Drive one, a charming Gashlycrumb Tinies one, a “Livin’ La Vida Dorka” one, and a couple of other promotional throw-aways.

In the promotional throw-away category, the hot item this year was bookmarks. Everyone had them. I almost have a bookmark for every book I own now, just to give you an idea.

I also had a chance to finally hook up with Chris Kindred, with whom I’ve PBEMed for years but never actually met (despite a near miss at the SDCC in ’98). Fun, and a great guy.

While in San Diego, we stayed with Mary, which was nice since we hadn’t had a chance to stay there since … well, the last Con we attended, in ’98. She’s done nice things both to the interior of her condo and to her back yard, and Friday we (including Michelle, who also came down for the weekend) had a nice dinner and played “Fluxx” and “Munchkin.”

I got to learn how Mac IE has hitherto-unknown-to-me rendering problems with CSS. Apologies for the style clumsiness to the Mac users out there.

When we were done Sunday, we headed back up north. Another accident on I-5 sent us jinking cross-country to I-15, and then across back to Orange County and Margie’s folks. No rest for the wicked, as this was the evening of the Lots of Kleerup Family Dinner (though my folks and the Dellis were there — “shirt-tail relatives,” as Helen put it, laughing).

Early bed time. We were bushed.