Letters From The Loft
Stuff From The Desk Of Chuck Thornton
DAY ZERO - PAGE 4
Giveaways are in the nature of free promotional posters (we got ones for the upcoming movies The Expendables and Red) and buttons... we got one for the TV show The Human Target that was the show's logo on a clip-on plastic disk...
with red LED lights that blinked incessantly. It was a great item to have if you didn't think your skin-tight Spider-Man costume was attracting enough attention, or if, like us, you blindly accepted whatever a stranger in the aisles was handing to you. Attendees who have been successfully dodging process servers all year meet their downfall at the Con.
Ironically, most of the giveaways were more bags. The Warner Brothers people, not content with the millions of square feet of advertising generated by the giant bags handed out at registration, were also giving away smaller, more tasteful, bags promoting the Smallville television series. Sam and I bagged a couple of those (so to speak) and also picked up a pretty good-sized bag for The Green Hornet, coming next year to a theater near you (the movie, not the bag).
Every year, the Charles M. Schulz booth sells a couple of Peanuts t-shirts that are exclusive to CCI, and I'll pick them up for Sue. So I swung by that booth, figuring I'd pick them up early, but the small booth was uncharacteristically swamped with people, so I decided to come back one of the other days. There's normally a respectable Peanuts contingent at CCI, but nothing massive along the lines of, say, the Pok-E-Mon or Harry Potter crowd... comic strips in general are the neglected stepchild of comic book fans, and I believe the genius of Peanuts (celebrating its 60th anniversary this year) is generally taken for granted because of its longevity and ubiquitousness. So I was surprised to see the crowd at the Peanuts booth. But later I learned that they were selling the t-shirts for $2.00 less on preview night. So although the size of the crowd was indicative of groundswell support, the support wasn't so much for Peanuts as much as it was for cheaper t-shirts.
We strolled around for a bit longer, getting a general idea of the exhibition room layout. It wasn't much different than last year. All the big exhibitors representing the major players in comic books, movies, TV, video games and toys) were set up in the center. On either side, roughly grouped together in little neighborhoods (not to say "ghettos"), were toy vendors, comic book retailers and book publishers, manga and anime merchandisers, gaming merchants, and Artists Alley (a set of tables where artists feature their work and do commissioned sketches). These narrower side aisles sort of resemble Hollywood's idea of a middle eastern bazaar, with merchandise hanging down and vendors doing everything short of self-immolation to get your attention. It seemed to us that the number of comic book and book sellers had dwindled a bit, both in size and number, but like I said, when you're a comic-book fan discussing the amount of space CCI devotes to comics, your default setting is "curmudgeon."
After our preview night survey, we decided it was time to grab some dinner and head back to the hotel. If given a choice, Sam prefers to eat in the hotel room the first night so as not to delay the vital "discovery" phase of utilizing the hotel's cable TV channel line-up. So we stopped at Carls Jr. and picked up so much food that we felt we had to justify the order by telling the counterperson that we had two other guys waiting out in the car. (We didn't want to risk being busted for violating any local anti-obesity ordinance.) Once dinner was completed, I passed out and Sam tucked me in, which is the traditional closing ceremony of Day Zero.