San Diego Comic Con 2010

I'm a six year veteran of the San Diego Comic Con. We originally went on kind of a whim to see some weird new media things and wow, who would have ever expected that it would have turned out to basically be the new red carpet?

So this year the Good Ensign and I trekked off to San Diego, checked into the 500 West and lived out five days of "do whatever the hell we want" while being surrounded by every new scrap of movies, tv, art, comics, fandom, media and insanity that dares to show it's face in 2011. As per tradition, we went directly to Fred's (A chain tex-mex place) for celebratory beer and Chicken Chingaderas. That night, we were into preview night, roaming the seemingly endless yet familiar exhibitor hall in search of new goodies. Put it this way, the street signs outside of the convention center were written in Klingon. Really:


Despite going every year, it's hard to accurately describe how massive and crazy Comic Con is. Think 150 thousand people and all of them are trying to get your attention. Then think it's somehow even crazier than that. This is not a place for those with Agoraphobia or Enochlophobia.

So Thursday we hit the exhibit hall again with fleeting plans to attend any panels that day. That's how it usually goes down. We plan to do a bunch of stuff but it never happens because we're doing something else. That evening we attended the art toy company Munkey King's party at Bar Basic which is always a fun event featuring pop artists doing live paintings and beer. Can't forget the beer. Here's a lame picture of Joe Ledbetter doing the live painting.


The amount of stars on the floor this year blew away previous years. Sure you may bump into Glenn Danzig or Seth Green but this year there were tons of people signing in the exhibitor hall. Here are just a few I could get pictures of:

Danny DiVito


Chevy Chase


Seth Green


Bill and Sookie from True Blood


Michael MacDowell


Warehouse 13


We also caught Penn & Teller's panel on performing together for 35 years. Pretty awesome. The level of general fandom is off the charts. People camped out just to get into panels and I don't mean just super big panels like Big Bang Theory and True Blood, I mean like for everything. Here's people at 1AM camped out for the Supernatural panel and Smallville Panel. As for us, we waited 3 hours for the always amazing Mythbusters panel. Great stuff as usual. Funny, exciting and brilliant!


Of course there were the fun crazy people in costume. If you can think of a costume, it was probably there. Here's a VERY small sampling of what was there:
Captain America (With a goat for some reason) was protesting the idea that Comic Con might move to Anaheim. I didn;t have the heart to tell him that I think I heard that San Diego already signed an extension to keep the con there...


Kitana (Mortal Cobat)


Cobra Comander (Now with 200% more henchmen!)


So we're already looking forward to Comic Con 2011 (Hopefully no one will get stabbed in the eye next year.) Until then, thank you San Diego!

Next Up:
I'll be at Gencon selling Thomas Riley at the Frenzy Universe Booth and as an added bonus I'll have the first copies of the Steampunk Anthology "Dreams of Steam" in which I have a steampunk story called Engine 316. See you in Indianapolis!