COMIC-CON 2009 JOURNAL - THE WHOLE THING

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It seems like only a year ago that my sons and I made our annual trip to the San Diego Comic-Con, but it’s that time again. For those of you unfamiliar with my history with the Con, you can click here for some background. Those of you who have read that and are coming back for more probably suffer from the same short-term memory loss that prompts me to keep booking the trip every year.

This year, my sons Ben and Sam (click here for an introduction) were able to accompany me for the whole Wednesday-through-Sunday trip. (Last year, they couldn’t join me till Friday and Saturday). I was surprised. The prospect of spending four days with me, much of it in a hotel room, must be daunting. They probably think of the trip as a character-builder, like climbing Mt. Everest or caring for the criminally insane.

A couple of differences from the previous journal:

- I've used the correct spelling of "Comic-Con" this year, even though the constant stretch of my pinkie to the hyphen key is excruciating.

- Last year I included quite a few pictures. Except for a few diagrams that look like they came from an NFL locker room chalkboard, there are no pictures this year. I'm not fond of shining a spotlight on my legendary absent-mindedness, but I couldn't come up with a credible excuse, so I'll just fess up: I took pictures the whole time we were there, but when I got home on Sunday, the camera was nowhere to be found. I've since replaced my little Nikon Coolpix with a Canon camera that hangs around my neck and is heavy enough to send me to the bottom of any body of water, but it looks like the Comic-Con 2008 pictures are gone forever. Still, if anybody out there finds a camera with a bunch of pictures that I'm not in, send it my way.

DAY ZERO
WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2009

I drove the whole way down to San Diego. I’ve got no problem with my sons’ driving skills, and they’ve got a lot of problems with mine, so you’d think that I’d take advantage of the situation and be chauffeured for the 3 hour trip. But there are still safety issues involved. Certain family rules have developed over the years (like “don’t let your father interact with the drive-through intercom” and “the remote control is not community property”) and one of those is that whoever is driving gets to pick the music. So if one of my sons drives, there are better than even odds that eventually the music playing in the car will impel me to grab the wheel and force the car into something unyielding enough to disable the sound system. Fortunately, my taste in music doesn’t have the same effect on my sons… it simply induces a temporary catatonia that’s easily dispelled with a few robust slaps to the face.

Our first stop was at the hotel I had booked. Hotel rooms are a valuable commodity in San Diego during the Comic-Con, and the room rates increase substantially during the week of the Con. Cynics would say the price hikes are greedily opportunistic, but I’m inclined to think that the hotels experience a corresponding increase in overhead when they book Con attendees. Fan-types are notoriously frugal when it comes to lodging expenses, and they tend to defray the cost by sub-letting their hotel room to seven or eight fellow enthusiasts, so the rooms are subjected to a bit more wear and tear than average. Add to that the extra cleaning required to remove Cheeto residue and the added security it takes to break up the nightly fistfights between the Kirk vs. Picard crowd, and I imagine the increased room rate is justified, even if you take into account a smaller water bill due to the dip in shower usage.

Last year, I tried to book early, and I used the online hotel-booking service Priceline to find a room at an affordable rate. That strategy was, for the most part, a success… it got me a room at a Holiday Inn that was a reasonable distance from the Convention Center in the historic Bowery District of San Diego. I decided to use the same strategy this year.

As you probably know, with Priceline, you name a price, a minimum hotel rating, and a geographic area, and agree to accept whatever hotel Priceline comes up with at that price. This year, I entered the same parameters as last year, and was initially disappointed; the site quickly informed me that no rooms could be found at my price. But it suggested that I broaden the geographical area, so I included Coronado Island in my parameters and tried again. Surprisingly, I was booked at the four-star Loews Coronado Bay Resort, which, with its beach location, double-ply toilet tissue, and non-paper towels, looked like a marked improvement over the Holiday Inn. And it was still only about 20 minutes from the Convention Center.

When booking the room, Priceline makes it clear that you’re only guaranteed a queen or king-sized bed, and you’re on your own if you want two beds in the room. I called the hotel a couple of weeks before the trip and asked them if it was possible to request two beds instead of one, and, between fits of giggling, they told me that, as a Priceline customer, the rate I was paying didn’t buy me any extra favors, and that maybe, if there were two-bed rooms available at the time of check-in, and if I caught the fancy of the person checking me in, there might be something they could do. So, anticipating a one-bed room, we brought a pad and a cot for Sam and Ben to sleep on.

(This is probably a generational thing, so perhaps an explanation is in order for those of you reading this that are too old to realize that guys in their 20’s will hyperventilate at the thought of sharing a bed with each other or, even worse, with their father. I’m a guy who, when sleeping, moves around about as much as your average corpse… I don’t make snow-angels and I confine myself to a relatively small amount of the real estate offered by a king-size bed. One of my sons could have used the same bed and crossing paths with me would have been as likely as running into Bigfoot. Yet the prospect of one of them sharing the bed with me was treated as inconceivable; after bringing it up a couple of times, I was politely asked to quit making their blood run cold. Thus the pad and cot.)

When we arrived at the Loews Coronado Bay Resort, it was obvious that a four-star rating was about one and a half stars more than the likes of us deserved. It also became quickly apparent that fancy resorts, like fancy restaurants, operate under an “a la carte” approach to amenities that we weren’t used to.

We knew enough to avoid opening or brushing against the mini-bar, but there were other charges we hadn’t anticipated. While checking in, I asked the hotel clerk if I could have a room with two beds. He advised that no rooms with two beds were available, but I could have a roll-away bed brought to my room for an additional charge of $25 per night. I told him my sons would accept a bribe of $10 a night to sleep on the floor, so as long as I was willing to be inconsiderate, I could save $5 a night.

I may have avoided the extra-bedding charge, but there was no way around the $22 daily parking fee. The last I looked, Coronado Island was still within Southern California borders, where everyone’s required to operate a motor vehicle daily, even if it’s just to get you to the bus stop. And the Loews Coronado Bay Resort is miles from anything other than sand and salt water, so it’s safe to say that, unless this charge was only levied on guys too cheap to get a roll-away bed, the $22 charge might as well have been tacked onto the room rate. Instead, I had to carry around both a room key-card and a parking key-card to raise the gate at the parking lot exit. The two cards weren’t interchangeable, which resulted in an additional charge for damage incurred to the exit gate.

And, of course, there was a daily charge for internet access, but the alternative of a day without spam was unthinkable. Bottom line: Priceline would have been a good deal if I just hadn’t shown up at the hotel. Travel tip: check the hotel’s fine print if your room’s toilet has a meter attached.

Once we settled into the room and unfolded all the extra bedding, we made our way to the Convention Center. Although the Con doesn’t officially start until Thursday, there’s a “preview night” that allows you to register and introduce yourself to the 125,000 other folks that you’ll be spending the next four days with.

Because of the sheer number of people and the geography of downtown San Diego, parking for the Con requires some advance tactical thinking. Parking is pretty much limited to lots scattered randomly throughout the downtown area, and serviced by shuttle buses set up specifically for the Con and manned by individuals who have all been decorated (some posthumously) by the California DMV. For the past few years, we frequented a particular parking lot located near where the cruise ships dock. But this year we decided to try something different. We located a parking lot sort of near the Petco Stadium, which is sort of within walking distance of the Convention Center if you’re not a 55-year-old overweight comic book fan, and it was $10 to park there. That might seem steep, but the larger lot right across the street was charging $20. On the other side of that lot was a shuttle bus stop, but by the time we got there, we figured we were halfway to our destination and everyone around us had the same giant underarm stains, so we decided there was no harm in walking the rest of the way.

Registering went without a hitch; we got our nifty lanyard to hold the badge that allows you through the Convention Center doors, all of which are required to have “Contents Under Pressure” signs. There aren’t any programs on Preview Night, but you’re allowed into the massive Exhibition Hall, which can easily hold half of the people that are in it at any given time.

I made my annual stop at the Peanuts Booth (run by the Charles M. Schulz Museum). Every year they offer one or two T-shirts that are exclusive to the Convention, and my wife loves them, because she loves Peanuts. This year, like last year, I picked up two shirts; one with a Snoopy image, one with a Charlie Brown image. The last two Charlie Brown shirts have surprised me. One has an image from the early days of the strip, with a Charlie Brown that looks about 3 or 4, dressed up in a cowboy outfit, with a look that can only be described as utter resignation to his status as a loser. The other one looks more like the Charlie Brown we know from the majority of the strip’s run, sitting hunched over with a pained expression and exclaiming (all together now), “Good Grief!” Both are great images that perfectly capture the poignancy that was a big part of Peanuts, and every time I see Sue wearing one of those shirts, it makes me feel a little sad. That I should feel bad for a fictional character may be an indication of great art, but I’m not sure it’s good for my marriage.

For a while, we rubbed elbows (euphemistically speaking) with other Preview Night attendees, then decided to get out of there, grab some dinner, stock up on some oxygen, and prepare for the first real day of Comic-Con… as real as it gets, anyway.

We decided on a quick meal at Burger King, where we elevated the level of dinner conversation in the dining area by discussing such matters as how cool a Plastic Man movie would be; and why a company would call their signature hamburger The Whopper, then immediately offer a Junior Whopper.

DAY ONE
THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2009

The Con’s doors open at 9:30 every morning (or earlier, depending on the pressure of all the noses pressed up against the windows), so I had to make sure we were up by somewhere between 7 and 7:30 so we could shower, dress, pack up the portable bedding so the maid could navigate the room, get some breakfast, and make our way to the Convention Center.

A little after rising, I got a call from my friend Alan, who manages to be at the Con every year at least one day out of the four. He drove down early from Riverside so he could score parking, and wanted to let me know he was there and that the streets of downtown San Diego were already filled with more people than a battle scene from Lord Of The Rings, and very few of them were computer-generated. I told him we’d call him when we got there and then arrange to meet. Before cell phones, this kind of rendezvous would have involved meticulous scheduling, crackerjack logistics and a total resignation to failure.

My two sons are not what you would call morning people… left to their own devices, they’ll sleep till 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning. It’s no problem getting them up earlier than that, but I can’t expect much in the way of conversation beyond some muttering about the caliber of my parenting. With my son Sam, this is especially ironic because Sam loves breakfast. Sam is a guy who believes that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, probably because it’s the first one of three. I won’t say that we would have skipped breakfast if Sam weren’t with us, but it was his influence that kept us from making a morning meal out of a couple of Paydays washed down with Diet Dr. Pepper.

This morning we chose a fifties-style diner called Beach-N-Diner in downtown Coronado. When we parked at the curb out front, Sam asked me to please not wear the lanyard with my Comic-Con badge into the diner. How else were they going to know we were going to the Con? I asked. He gave me early-morning-stare # 35, which translates into “Don’t be obtuse.” I don’t think Sam’s embarrassed about going to the Con; I think he’s just embarrassed to be associated with a guy who has no problem being perceived as a yokel by the locals.

At any rate, I honored his wishes and left my lanyard in the car, and we had a nice, albeit quiet, breakfast. At least until I overheard a conversation between the manager of the diner and one of the waitresses, discussing whether they were going to see any weirdoes over the course of the Comic-Con. I raised my hand and let them know we were weirdoes, and we had a nice conversation about the Con and the kind of business it generates, and how much fun we have. I think I embarrassed Sam, but I don’t know how… I left my lanyard in the car, for Pete’s sake.

Today we decided to try our traditional parking lot on the other side of town. The price was a bit more expensive than the lot from the day before--- $15--- but there was a Con shuttle bus stop right by the lot, and it’s the first stop on the shuttle’s circular route back to the Convention Center. Keep in mind that the term “shuttle” might give the wrong impression. These are full size charter buses with windshield wipers that sweep pedestrians out of the way. On the San Diego streets, they’re the equivalent of Optimus Prime wading through a sea of Mini-Coopers.

As veterans of this shuttle route, we knew what to expect: we’d line up with other folks at the stop, board the bus and find a seat. The bus would proceed to the next scheduled stop (near a Holiday Inn), where a small army of people were waiting to board. The driver would get out, unholster his sidearm, and explain to the crowd that he only had five vacant seats, and the rest of the folks would have to wait for the next bus (that would also have only five vacant seats). Then the driver would hop back in and pull away quickly before the crowd could organize and overturn the bus… while those of us who had a seat would shake our heads at the injustice of it all.

So we were a bit surprised this year when justice reared its ugly head and the shuttle operators decided to limit the number of people who could board at the first stop. Since Ben and Sam and I were behind 25 other people in line, we didn’t make the first seating, and now we were as pitiful as the folks down the block near the Holiday Inn. We actually considered walking till our sanity overpowered our outrage.

Consequently, we were a little late arriving at the Convention Center, and didn’t connect with Alan in the Exhibition Hall till around 11 am. We got to stroll around with him in the Exhibition Hall for a while, and our paths crossed at one of the panels, but it’s hard to count it as “quality time” with a friend when you’re standing in the equivalent of an 8 acre cocktail party. Thankfully, the Con isn’t the only time I get to see my friend.

The main dilemma of any Comic-Con attendee is scheduling: what to do and when to do it. And there are three main areas that compete for attention:

1. The aforementioned Exhibition Hall, which contains the booths of all the cash-paying exhibitors. These booths range from something you might see at your average flea-market (including the fleas) to incredibly elaborate set-ups run by the major publishers and studios. Fox, Warner Brothers, Mattel, Lego, CapCom, Marvel, DC, Sony… these are just a fraction of the exhibitors represented in a room so large it could be seen from space if it weren’t covered up by people. Journalists generally try to express its size in terms of football fields, a unit of measure that leaves your average comic-book fan scratching his head.

2. The panel rooms on the upper level. At any given time during the day, there are about 13 simultaneous presentations or panels going on up here, featuring creators in all areas of pop culture… but primarily comic books and comic-book-related subjects.

3. Hall H and Ballroom 20, which, respectively, contain seating for about 6500 and 5000 people. Hall H usually features the presentations by the major movie studios in order to generate buzz about upcoming projects, so the programs there will feature A-list celebrities and directors and include first-time sneak-peeks of movies in the works. Ballroom 20 serves much the same purpose for television shows and stars… unless the show gets so popular it warrants a move to Hall H (like Lost did this year).

Usually Hall H and Room 20 are so popular that if there’s something you want to see there, you might as well line up for the first program of the day, and once you’re inside, park yourself in a seat till that event finally rolls around. It’s a good strategy for folks who want to see a lot of celebrities. But keep in mind that it takes hours and a billy club to traverse the Exhibition Hall, which has all sorts of cool stuff and interesting people in it, so time spent in Hall H can seriously cut into the time required to fully appreciate the Exhibition Hall. And the upstairs panels can offer some real interesting one-on-one conversations with creators that you might never see or hear from elsewhere. Deciding what to do becomes Sophie’s choice, if you take out the life-and-death aspect, the emotional crippling, the Academy Award… okay, it’s nothing like Sophie’s Choice, but it’s can be a dilemma, nonetheless.

Our strategy has always been to plan out our days in advance, while figuring in a day where the majority of the time would be spent in Hall H.

This time, however, I decided I would skip Hall H and Room 20 in favor of more upstairs panels. Although the movie and TV presentations are always entertaining, the fact remains that, if I’m interested in the movie or TV show being touted, I’m eventually going to see it when it’s released; and the excitement I get out of seeing a live celebrity is… well, about as much excitement as they get out of seeing me. On the other hand, there were a lot of old-timer comics creators being featured in the upstairs panels this year that were responsible for some of the stuff I grew up with and frankly, who knows if I’ll have another opportunity to hear what they have to say. So I built my schedule around those panels, with the Exhibition Hall and other stuff filling in the gaps.

Sam and Ben had their own scheduling problems. For those of you who only check out the news for the best place to see Halley’s Comet, there’s been a series of novels for young adults called Twilight, about a teenage girl who moves to the Pacific Northwest and falls for a brooding teen-heartthrob vampire. No worries, though; this vampire, and the other vampires in his “family”, don’t bite humans… they lay off the hard stuff and get their blood from other animals, so they’re pretty people-friendly (except for PETA, I suppose). This series of novels is enormously popular, especially among the female demographic, and of course, has resulted in an enormously popular movie that was released last year, with enormously popular sequels planned for future release. In Hall H on this particular Thursday at 1:45, there was a Twilight panel scheduled that would include information and cast members from the next sequel.

A friend of ours who is a card-carrying member of the above-mentioned female demographic heard about this panel, and asked Ben and Sam to attend and get a picture of the various and sundry heartthrobs that would be appearing. So Sam and Ben had to decide when would be the best time to venture near Hall H and gain admittance to this very special estrogen-fest. It soon became apparent, though, that the coffin-lid had long closed on the opportunity to participate in Twilight-mania. The prospect of seeing Twilight stars live (so to speak) had resulted in a flood of young girls and their mothers buying Con tickets just so they could attend this one event, and they had started lining up for Hall H on the previous Wednesday evening. Ben and Sam never stood a chance of getting into Hall H today, and lost both the photo opportunity and possibly a chance to discover how to become heartthrobs themselves.

As we wandered the Exhibition Hall floor, we could overhear various conversations (it’s not really eavesdropping when you’re all sardines in the same can) and noted many of the “average” Comic-Con attendees expressing disdain for these Twilight groupies that had descended on the Con. I suppose it’s understandable, but still a bit mind-boggling. The Con population is huge and frightening when gathered together at San Diego, but it represents a sub-culture of avid enthusiasts that’s still generally perceived as geeks or nerds by the average citizen. Away from the Con, in real life, these folks are used to having their passion treated with a mixture of amusement, curiosity, ridicule, caution, and condescension… but not much respect. One of the reasons they come to the Con is to get that respect… from the fellow attendees who share their passion, and, albeit artificially, from the companies who are courting their patronage. In a nutshell, I think the Con is really a big support group for dodge-ball survivors.

So it’s a bit ironic that many Comic-Con folks who’ve experienced various degrees of social ostracism would decide that the Twilighters were crashing their party. It’s also a bit surprising… here’s an event causing a sudden influx of young women into a venue comprised mostly of either physically or mentally adolescent males, and they’re complaining? Since when did the Convention Center become the Little Rascals clubhouse?

But back to the matter at hand: to celebrate the 40th year of the Con there were panels throughout the four days looking back on the previous four decades. Even I’m not immune to nostalgia (when I can remember it), so I decided to attend the panel today focusing on the 70’s, since I had attended many of those early conventions. Sam decided to tag along, because he had heard my stories of the days when attendees sat on the floor at panels and you were as likely to run into creators in the bar or restrooms as on the Convention floor, and wanted to see some pictures of what it was actually like.

Big disappointment. The panel consisted of folks who had indeed worked with the Con in those earlier years, but they spent the hour mostly reminiscing about the camaraderie they shared as they manually typed membership badges and collated programs. I’m sure it was nice for these folks to see each other again, but the audience felt like the husband who tags along to his wife’s high school reunion.

Sam and I went our separate ways after that. Although I was avoiding the movie/TV rooms this year, there was one exception: a panel for the USA TV series Burn Notice. Sue and Ben and I really enjoy the show, but Sam hasn’t had the opportunity to follow it so he went back down to the Exhibition Hall, and I went to line up about a half hour early to get into Room 20. The line looked daunting--- it accordioned down the entire length of the building in the way I imagine tapeworms take up residence in the intestinal tract--- but, like I said, Room 20 holds a few thousand people, so once the doors were open, I easily found a seat inside.

Attending this panel seems to fly in the face of my earlier statement about the lack of appeal these kind of movie/TV panels have for me, but I couldn’t resist seeing Bruce Campbell, who’s a Burn Notice costar, in action. His biggest claim to fame is probably as the star of a trio of Sam Raimi movies entitled Evil Dead; Evil Dead II; and Army of Darkness, and on the strength of those three titles alone, he could sign autographs at the Con for the rest of his life, just like the guy who played Imperial Storm Trooper # 26. His list of credits, while not prestigious, is extensive, and he’s always involved with something that justifies annual appearances at the Con. But even if his only current project was painting his living room, I’m convinced the Con would find a way to put him on a panel. Because Bruce Campbell knows this audience, and he plays them like a virtuoso. When he walks on the stage, he’s greeted as if he were Elvis (who he played in the movie Bubba Ho-Tep). He works hard to entertain the audience and he makes it seem effortless. Every endeavor, no matter how humble, has its masters, and Bruce Campbell is the Picasso of working a Comic-Con crowd.

There was an added bonus to being at the Burn Notice panel; a little ticket was handed out to every audience member that, we were told by the studio representative, could be redeemed for a free Burn Notice T-shirt down at the Fox booth in the Exhibition Hall.

One of the upsides of enduring the crowds to get into Hall H or Room 20 is that the studios customarily arrange plenty of swag, usually in the form of posters or T-shirts or tote-bags with logos plastered on them. We Con attendees love these give-aways, and are grateful for the opportunity to be walking billboards (I’m sure most of the Twilight contingent took advantage of the free forehead tattoos). By shying away from the two big rooms this year, I missed out on all this kind of stuff, so the Burn Notice T-shirt (which I thought Sue would find pretty cool) took on added value for me.

After the Burn Notice panel, I had to hightail it over to the Golden and Silver Age of Comics panel, which was featuring some of the industry old-timers on which I had decided to focus this year. The panel was hosted by Mark Evanier, a guy who has made a living as a writer for both TV and comic books. At one time Mark was the production assistant for Jack Kirby, who is generally revered as one of the all-time greatest comic book artists, and Jack must have taught him the Comic-Book-Senior-Citizen secret handshake because Mark has always been the go-to guy at the Con for talking with the older-generation creators. He does his best to make sure these folks are remembered and appreciated by a crowd that, for the most part, were in Huggies when these creators were being put out to pasture.

As much respect as Mark has for the participants of these panels, hosting them is still a challenge. None of the participants are wired for sound (unless you count hearing aids). Instead, in front of each chair at the long table where the guests sit, there are table mikes that everyone must speak into. The mikes are essential, Acoustics in these rooms are non-existent; sound waves take a nose-dive about 3 cm from their point of origin. But a guest can be heard clearly if he looks straight ahead, hunches over in his chair, and puts his mouth up against a device that has been in contact with many other mouths from previous panels.

I’m sure it’s tough for anybody to maintain the posture demanded by the Comic-Con PA system, but it seemed to be particularly challenging for the generation represented by this panel, a generation that was around during the McCarthy hearings and probably didn’t want to look like they were testifying in front of a Congressional committee. Much of the time that could have been devoted to reminiscing was instead used by Mark to issue reminders like “Could I ask you to speak into the microphone?”; “A little closer to the mike, please,” “Please, don’t look at me while you’re talking, talk to the audience,” “Please, don’t grip the microphone while you’re speaking,” and ultimately, “Let me repeat what our guest just got done saying.”

Still, they had interesting stories to tell, to the utter delight of all of us in the front row.

I had some time to kill before the next panel, so I decided to try to score my Burn Notice T-shirt down at the Fox booth in the Exhibition Hall. When you’re actually heading for a specific destination in the Exhibition Hall (rather than browsing the aisles), it’s sort of like being a quarterback in a football game where everyone in the stands had decided to join Defense. I had to set my heading to the Fox logo hanging from the ceiling and then steer that general direction through whatever holes in the crowd presented themselves. When I finally got there, I asked a nice young Fox representative if she had my Burn Notice T-shirt; and she explained in a fair and balanced manner that the studio representative had been mistaken when directing the hundreds of lucky T-shirt ticket holders to the Fox booth. She advised that the shirts were being dispensed in Room 29, and politely asked me to please go there to pick one up, and that if I happened to run across the studio representative in question, to let him know what she had discovered about the marital status of his parents.

Fortuitously, I had planned to meet Sam for the next program on my schedule at Room 30, which, even in the Comic-Con universe, was right next door to Room 29. On my way upstairs and toward the other side of the Convention Center, I got a MayDay call from Sam, asking for assistance with his approach to Room 30. At first I thought he was being obtuse, since anybody who’s attended as many Cons as Sam knows the all the rooms numbered 20 or above are on the upper west side of the Convention Center. He explained, though, that he knew where Room 30 was; he just couldn’t find the door. I told him to keep circling the field and I’d talk him in as soon as I got to the tower.

When I arrived, I could understand Sam’s consternation. The door to room 30 was completely obscured by a line of people that originated from Room 29 next door and made its way in a non-organized fashion down the corridor and in front of the entrances to Rooms 30 through 33, blending in with folks who were trying to line up for entrance to these other rooms. As you’ll recall, Room 29 was the room that held my prized Burn Notice T-shirt, so I abandoned my plan to pick up the shirt. Instead, I managed to finagle my way near the entrance door to Room 30 and plaster myself against the wall in such a way that people would know I was either in the line for that room or suffering under the delusion that I was providing crucial structural support for that part of the building. Either way, I hoped I wouldn’t be challenged.

As it turns out, not all the people lining up for Room 29 were clamoring for a Burn Notice T-shirt. Room 29 was the designated room for distribution of all the ticketed premiums handed out by the studios at the Con, so folks were also there to get their Psych 8-balls, Astro-Boy posters, Dexter bone-saws, and Twilight sunscreen. In fact, it’s officially designated as the Fulfillment Room, which may have accounted for the crowd; it’s a label that, frankly, promises more to a convention of comic-book fans than it can deliver.

Sam and I eventually managed to gain entry to Room 30 for The Physics of Hollywood Movies. It was surprisingly well-attended, considering it featured no celebrities and was hosted by a physics instructor. But it was an entertaining look how Hollywood ignores the laws of physics in favor of what looks good (which accounts for the large number of plastic surgeons there). The host used scenes from some big-budget movies to explain some elementary scientific laws, like:

- even if you’re the Green Goblin, you can’t really kick a guy 50 yards without flying back a few feet yourself;

- hitting the ground at 60 mph is going to hurt no matter what kind of high-tech body armor you’re wearing; and

- wearing Spandex is not a good idea if you’re a guy.

About this time, Sam discovered a voicemail message from his doctor, and we had to radically rethink our dining strategy for the trip.

We don’t eat at the Convention Center. The cuisine is mostly dough… Wetzel’s Pretzels, followed by Mrs. Fields Cookies, washed down by soda or Starbucks. There’s a snack bar in the Exhibition Hall that offers a bit more variety, but when an establishment with the square footage of a walk-in closet is trying to serve a lunchtime crowd of 125,000 fans, it can get pretty ugly. They try to control the crowds by charging gold-rush prices and refusing to take comics in trade, but I think the Comic-Con snack bar is still responsible for the annual spike in the GNP every July.

Nor do we try to eat somewhere nearby in downtown San Diego. It’s also crowded; but some of that crowd is bound to contain non-Convention-attending locals who work in the downtown area. These folks tend to be a bit cranky from having to get up at 3 AM in order to beat the Con-generated traffic to get to work on time. Wearing a Comic-Con badge and shuffling through that crowd is risking a shiv in the gut.

So we normally try to grab a good breakfast before we get to the Con, and then have a good dinner on our way back to the hotel at the end of the day. Of course, by “good” we mean fried, or at least fatty, and in supersize quantities. Even at places with actual table service, we try to pretend we’re giving our order to a speaker.

But Sam’s been taking some medication that has the possible side effect of pushing his cholesterol needle into the red, so he has occasional labwork done to monitor his blood’s Crisco factor. And the voicemail from his doctor was advising him that his latest blood work could have come from a crankcase and he should watch his diet for the next few weeks. This was a significant disappointment for Sam, who doesn’t believe that watching what you eat should interfere with eating what you eat, and his doctor had really rained on his Comic-Con parade.

So we nixed our plans for dinner at TGIFried’s, and tried to figure out a place that would offer a variety of dishes that Sam could eat, and still meet our standards of fine dining. The answer was obvious: Hometown Buffet.

This is not a paid endorsement… although we have no objection if the Hometown people want to turn it into one. Our family loves Hometown Buffet. This is not a sentiment shared by most of our family and friends, who have an irrational fear of sneeze guards. But nearly every reason they have for treating Hometown Buffet like a CDC Hot Zone is a reason we like to go there. Honest, we’re not proud of our lack of sophistication… we’re just happy with it. For example:

- At a conventional restaurant, someone takes your order and brings you your food. Ben and Sam and I get enough of that at home. And we’re not that crazy about the waiting period between the time we order and the time the food gets to the table. For fast food aficionados, nothing is faster than Hometown Buffet, where they lay out the food for you before you get there.

- At Hometown Buffet, you put what you want on your plate. I find it ironic that the people who look down their noses at Hometown Buffet are the same people that, when the food arrives at their table at a conventional restaurant, immediately start sampling something from everyone’s plate. I’d rather that my food encounter as few detours as possible before making it to my mouth.

- It’s all you can eat. Folks who don’t like Hometown Buffet have to pretend that this factor doesn’t totally make irrelevant any criticisms involving quality or ambience.

Through the magic of the car’s onboard (via suction cup) GPS navigation system, we were guided to the nearest Hometown Buffet located right next door to a Chuck E. Cheese bistro in National City’s restaurant row. We decided this would be our dining destination for the next couple of nights.

DAY TWO
FRIDAY, JULY 24, 2009

Before we knew it, it was morning, and time for another meal. In our quest for healthier breakfast alternatives, we chose Denny’s, figuring any restaurant chain so big that its signs can be used as freeway mile markers would have a “low cholesterol” section on their menu. Once we got there, we actually couldn’t find such a section, but then again, the menu’s mostly made up of pictures (like a comic book!) so we might have missed it. It didn’t matter; there was a “Build Your Own Grand Slam Breakfast” special, so Sam chose the turkey bacon, chicken sausage patty, oatmeal (I can’t remember what kind of poultry the oatmeal was made from), and English Muffin. Sort of a “Grand Slim” breakfast (note to Denny’s: you have my permission to use this). I took the waitress aside and asked her to slip some antidepressants into the oatmeal, but I don’t think she took it seriously, because Sam, who under the best of circumstances isn’t a morning person, was at DefCon 5 surliness this morning.

He got over it by the time we made it to the parking lot. After the bus-rationing of the day before, we decided to return to the $10 lot we had used on Wednesday near the Petco Stadium area. We were disappointed: As part of San Diego’s effort to educate the community on the basics of economics, the price had increased to $20, but there wasn’t anything cheaper within the same hemisphere, so we took it.

There were more Mark Evanier-hosted panels with elder statesmen comic creators today… three consecutive panels all located in the same room. I got there early to secure a front-row seat so I wouldn’t have to use my ear-horn to hear the conversations. Ben came with me while Sam pursued other interests… I’m sure Sam and Ben had previously worked out a schedule to split custody of me during the Con, and this was Ben’s shift.

The first panel, at 11:00, was the “Spotlight on Gene Colan”, a comic book artist who was around when I first started reading comics five decades ago, and is still doing work today. Mark started talking with him at 11 sharp; unfortunately, it was via cell phone. Mark was there with us at the Convention Center, and Gene was still in his hotel room, apparently under the impression that the “Spotlight on Gene Colan” could be aimed through his room window. Mark explained to the audience that there was a scheduling miscommunication, and he had Marv Wolfman, a writer who had worked extensively with Gene, say good things about Gene while Mark tried to talk him in.

Fortunately, there were a lot of good things to say about Gene, because he still wasn’t there when the hour allotted for the panel was up. The next panel was “That 70’s Panel”, and its participants started arriving while Marv was still vamping. So while bottles of Geritol were being set out for the next guests, Mark explained that the two panels would be merged so that Gene could participate when he arrived.

About a half-hour later, Gene made it, and, though the format was a bit different than anticipated, it was still entertaining. Before Gene arrived, Marv had been telling us about how speedy Gene was, producing 2 or 3 comic books a month. But after he arrived, Gene shared how long it took him to draw, and how he wished he were as fast as other artists. (Marv silently disagreed by shaking his head at the audience while Gene made these remarks). I’m sure most people chalked up this discrepancy to modesty on Gene’s part, or faulty memory, or just a difference in perspective. But I didn’t see it as a necessary contradiction, especially when Gene made it clear (as did most of his generation who made appearances) that in his day, drawing a comic book was primarily a job that put bread on the table, not a career that gained you recognition as an artist. Marv was impressed by Gene’s speed because he produced 2 or 3 books a month. Gene, however, made it clear that he was working 16-hour days to come up with those books. So I guess the lesson is: if your first concern is providing for your family and having a work-ethic that includes honoring your commitment to a deadline, you only get credit for being efficient.

Besides the merging of these two panels into one, it was also notable because Mark Evanier, the host, stayed on his cell phone much of the time. Besides getting Gene down to the spotlight, there were other logistical snafus involving guests that required Mark’s immediate attention, so the panel was essentially self-hosted, with Marv Wolfman doing some of the heavy lifting. We were in the front row near Mark, so along with the panelists’ stories, we were treated to the undercurrent of Mark’s cell phone conversations. After he had guided Gene to a successful re-entry, he had to convince some Con staffers that another guest (Larraine Newman, once part of Saturday Night Live and who does voicework for animated projects) should be allowed entry even if she didn’t have her badge with her. This required a lot of phone calls from Mark, some of them to the Pentagon.

It was still a great panel, and Mark deserves a lot of credit for pulling it off and getting these people together. But it wasn’t over yet.

It’s hard to describe this panel. The participants were Sheldon “Shelly” Moldoff, Jerry Robinson, and Lew Sayre Schwartz, but the topic of conversation was the (now deceased) creator of Batman and his total lack of redeeming qualities. It was sort of like a posthumous celebrity roast with sincerity taking the place of jokes. At one point it was mentioned that, now that Batman’s creator was dead, they were free to tell the truth about him, but to me it felt a little creepy to hear all sorts of bad things about a guy who could only respond via séance. So even though his name can be easily looked up, I hesitate to use it here… instead, let���s call him Bruce.

Here’s everybody’s beef with Bruce: although he came up with the general concept of Batman, it was writer/artist Bill Finger (also now deceased) that ultimately designed the character as we know it, and wrote most of the early stories. But Bruce ran a studio, and Bill was an employee at that studio, so Bruce took all the credit for producing the work. When Bruce ultimately sold the rights to Batman to DC comics, part of the deal was that only his name would appear as a credited creator on the stories, even though he was neither writing nor drawing the stories. And that was the way it was up until 1965, no matter what artists or writers were doing the work. Uncredited ghost writers and artists weren’t really uncommon in the industry, but Bruce was embarrassingly blatant in taking the credit, and shockingly dismissive of Finger, and that’s why he’s generally cast as the bad guy by comic book historians.

To Mark Evanier’s credit, it didn’t seem like his main interest was in making the panel a referendum on Bruce, probably because he figured the injustice was common knowledge and old hat with this crowd. Instead he initially tried to guide the conversation toward establishing a historical timeline on the panelists’ contributions to the Batman character. Shelly Moldoff was eager to respond to Mark… as long as he didn’t have to concern himself with what Mark was asking. Finally, after asking all 3 panelists about the specific years they arrived and left Bruce’s studio, Mark was set straight by Shelly, who had the longest history with Bruce (and, of course, I’m paraphrasing here).

“Mark,” he said, “those dates are probably more important to you than to us. At the time we weren’t keeping notes on when we did what. But I don’t think these people are here today to find out when we worked for Bruce. They want to know what kind of person Bruce was.”

Mark threw in the towel and said, “Okay, Shelly, what else do you want to share about Bruce?”

Shelly turned to the audience and put his mouth right up against the mike. “I knew Bruce probably better than anyone else here. I worked for him, I socialized with him, I went to his house, I had dinner with the family, we exchanged gifts. I think you could say we were friends. Are you familiar with the story of Dorian Gray?”

Most of the audience nodded or murmured “yes.” But Shelly either couldn’t see the audience reaction, or didn’t think that we had really caught that issue of Classics Illustrated.

“Well,” Shelly went on, “Dorian Gray was a story about a guy who had a portrait of himself, and as the years went by, every bad thing he did would make the picture turn uglier, while he stayed the same. It was like the picture was aging instead of him, and the picture was showing the true man inside while he stayed handsome and debonair. Well, I always thought that Bruce had a picture like that somewhere in his attic. He always wore the best clothes, looked real dapper, and was a real ladies’ man. But really, Bruce was the personification of evil.”

A pause. Then a little laughter from the audience at the hyperbole… and Shelly quickly responded:

“No, I’m serious. He was a bad man.”

From there the discussion turned into anecdotes attesting to Bruce’s membership-in-good-standing with The Dark Side. The other two panelists also attested to Bruce’s misdeeds (Jerry Robinson in particular made it clear he could never forgive Bruce for not giving Bill Finger the credit he deserved), but it was Shelly Moldoff that supplied most of the stories of the moral abyss that was Bruce. It made for an interesting and entertaining panel, but after listening to Bruce portrayed as a Lord of Darkness, I half expected to see his remains come shambling in to slap Shelly around. It was kind of creepy.

Which makes a nice segue into the next panel I attended: the Creepy panel. Creepy was a comic anthology magazine of horror stories, similar to the old 50’s EC comic books like The Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt. It was published in the sixties and featured some of the best artists in the business, along with its sister publication Eerie, and its nephews Slimy, Spooky, Ghastly, Grumpy, Dopey, and Doc. Dark Horse Publishing has been reprinting the magazine in nice hardbound collections and was announcing a revival of the title with new stories. Bill Warren was the publisher of the original magazine, and he’s a notably eccentric guy, so there were some interesting Bill Warren stories told, but no one suggested that his life was the basis for The Omen, so it was a nice change-up from the previous panel.

DAY THREE
SATURDAY, JULY 25, 2009

This morning, in our quest for a Sam-friendly breakfast, we opted for another national restaurant chain: The International House of Pancakes, aka IHOP.

As with Denny’s, American citizenship is contingent upon eating at IHOP at least once. Our family’s pretty familiar with the establishment, which first attracted our attention when they said the word “pancakes” out loud. But I never really noticed an “international” aspect to IHOP. The menu doesn’t feature pancakes from around the world… the breakfasts, while good, are the traditional hearty fried eggs-bacon-sausage-biscuits-gravy-flapjacks dishes that have been putting the American farmer in cardiac clinics for decades. So I assumed that the “international’ part of IHOP had to do with the scope of their locations.

But I did some research, consulting the authoritative IHOP history printed on the back of their paper placemats. If you don’t count Canada (and no one does) and Mexico (whose northern border is currently featured on the back of milk cartons), IHOP is strictly an American concern. When it was founded back in 1958 in Toluca Lake, California, it was a small local chain that decided on the “international” appellation because it served a variety of crepe-style pancakes, along with French toast and Belgian waffles. It seems like a questionable approach to establishing a theme… just because it serves English muffins, should a diner call itself “Ye Olde Mom’s Place”?

But the issue became irrelevant a year later when serendipitously (look it up), the local chain was purchased by International Industries, and the name became indicative of the ownership. In 1975, International Industries pretty much bit the dust, and IHOP went through a rough patch of buyouts, but eventually emerged as its own company. Everybody calls the chain IHOP now, so even thought the “international” tag might not be as applicable as it once was, the issue isn’t really discussed except by crackpot writers operating on the far fringes of the internet.

Ben and I were still full from the eight meals we’d had for dinner the night before at Hometown Buffet, so we ordered modestly at IHOP. You don’t have to order pancakes; IHOP conveniently places four little pitchers of different-flavored syrups at every table, so you can have put syrup on anything you want, or try some straight from the pitcher. Sam had a waffle with no butter, so he had to compensate with extra syrup commandeered from nearby tables.

We went back to the same parking area. Reflecting the increased demand for parking, you now gained access by sliding your pink slip through a slot in the fee collection box.