Letters From The Loft
Stuff From The Desk Of Chuck Thornton
DAY TWO - PAGE 3
After discovering the length of the line, we considered writing the Walking Dead panel off, but we've experienced worse lines at Comic-Con and still managed to find a seat, so we decided to stick around for a while. While standing there, I noticed some strange foamy objects floating up from somewhere below us:
I thought this was pretty interesting, but the rest of the folks in line didn't seem very impressed. Sam suggested that I have a tourist mentality that celebrates novelty without exercising any discernment regarding aesthetic value... well, he didn't use those words exactly. I think what he actually said was, "You're such a rube." He could be right. On the first day of our trip, I had snapped this picture of a truck that was parked near us at Shakey's:
It wasn't relevant to our trip, but I thought skewering antenna figures was an artistic vision worth recording, even though I find it as spooky as the Walking Dead exhibit. I sure didn't wait around to say "hi" to the driver. But the mere fact that this kind of thing attracts my interest is strong evidence that Sam is right about how low I set the bar when it comes to "points of interest."
While we were waiting, some folks asked us where we had picked up our cool Smallville bags. We directed them to the Warner Brothers booth, which, at the moment, seemed many miles away.
The line started moving... barely... at about 11:25 (5 minutes before when the Walking Dead panel was supposed to start). After about 20 more minutes, it seemed pretty obvious that we weren't going to get into the panel, but by that time I had been seized by an irrational stubbornness to see this thing through to its conclusion. I made noises about staying in line in order to get into the room for the following scheduled program, which was a panel on Marvel Comics animation projects, but I wasn't fooling anybody, including myself... I just wanted to see if any CCI personnel was going to muster up the courage to let the line know that all hope should be abandoned, and thanks for making the Marvel animation people think that this was going to be a banner year.
About 45 minutes after the official start of the Walking Dead panel, our spot in line had just made it back inside the building from the balcony when a burly CCI handler announced, "Sorry, folks, the Walking Dead panel is full. If you're staying in line, it's for the next program, which starts in about 15 minutes." I tried to imagine a scenario where it took 45 minutes to either get all the chairs filled, or to come to the realization that folks were bumping into walls instead of sitting down, but nothing seemed credible. I figured it was much more likely that it took the staff 45 minutes to find a guy with the appropriate qualifications to break the news to the crowd; namely, a guy with biceps that could twist your head off like it was a chicken's.
Once the official announcement was made, we dropped all pretense and decided to proceed to the next order of business: picking up my t-shirt swag that I had scored from the day before at the USA Network panels.