parakkum

Well, not really. But "Preview Night" certainly isn't nearly as peaceful as it was just two years ago.

Of course, when I started attending the con it was a relatively teeny little thing in Golden Hall, so these things to grow.

The initial wave of "horror" during Preview Night came with just how many people were there. On reflection, though, this makes sense, and isn't as bad as it seems.

1) Four-day passes sold out ahead of time this year, for the first time. Anyone with a presold four-day pass can attend Preview Night. Thus, lots of people (they also appeared to have sold Preview Night-only badges this year).

2) There's nowhere else to be on Preview Night other than the Exhibit Floor. No panels, no gigantic events happening in Hall H, nothing. So everyone bundles into the Exhibit Floor and spends time shouldering around each other.

I chiefly trailed after littlestar today as she did the heavy shopping. It's best to get those hard-to-find, imported hardcovers from Stuart Ng books on Preview Night, both to make sure they don't sell out and so you don't have to lug a bag full of hardcovers around for a full convention day. She picked up some books there, but didn't find anything exciting at Kinokuniya.

My one goal was to sign up for the 2007 Magic Amateur Championships which is taking place this Saturday at the con. It's limited to 140 players, and I didn't want to have to bother signing up on a full con day. There were already a few folks ahead of me in that line, as the Wizards staff did their best to get things up and running. They have a very full (and well-described in the schedule) docket of events this year, covering all their major brands.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow. Will a full day of panels bleed off some pressure from the Exhibit Floor? I hope so.

I'm glad that my Saturday plan looks like it'll solidly ignore the Floor, though...

Faced by the trauma of an overloaded Exhibit Floor yesterday, I hypothesized that the first real day of the con would calm things down a bit by dint of having actual panels and events for people to attend outside the Floor.

I was wrong. The Floor was just as excessively busy today as it was yesterday. Even so, we managed to do a lot of solid talking to folks and shopping. I trailed littlestar all day today, because she wasn't going to be able to actually carry anything she bought by dint of her current "recovering" condition (injured back + weight is a bad choice).

Things we did today, very roughly in order, included:

Hanging out for a while at the Wizards of the Coast booth and demoing some games. We watched a session of D&D Minis (free Gnolls!), watched another session of the Transformers constructible strategy game (free Jetfires!), and tried to watch the Uncivilized demo, although that was more of a series of pictures than anything else. littlestar did admirably in the "roll for stuff" portion of the Wizards experience, picking up a copy of Axis & Allies: D-Day, an interesting game that was too expensive to pick up just for a the heck of it.

We also checked out Bud Plant, and then wandered around a lot.

The really big fun on the Floor today was checking in with the nice folks of Flight. We picked up a copy of Flight 4, as well as Clio Chang's new sketchbook (with the awesome title "no baby, not my pradas!!"). We hung out at the Flight booth for quite a while as littlestar's new copy of Flight 4 was passed around to garner sketches (as was littlestar's sketchbook). The Flight folks are a pleasure to talk to each time, comfortable, conversational, and friendly.

We only did two panels today. One was the Groo 25th anniversary panel, featuring everyone currently or previously involved in the creation of Groo. Some great bits:

• Sergio's reaction to the suggestion that Will Farrell could play Groo. "No. Will Farrell is the unfunniest man on the planet."
• Stan's favorite issue of Groo: the pantomime issue with no lettering (actually, it was his favorite because it was the only issue he ever read as a pure fan, having not seen the story before the final version)
• Sergio tells us that when he thinks of Groo, Groo speaks in Spanish
• Tom Luth on the buckle on Groo's chest: "If I'd known it was a buckle, I wouldn't have colored it blue!"

I enjoyed the discussion of the difficulties in negotiating a Groo movie, and found the audience's questions entirely good ones, which is a nice thing when it happens.

Our other panel on the day was Bill Plympton. He showed off some shorts, then spoke, then showed some more, then spoke, then showed some bits from his film that's currently in production. Again, the audience questions were good ones, and Bill Plympton was quite approachable and gave straightforward, helpful answers. I appreciate that he isn't coy about the costs involved in making a movie, and was interested to hear that he's a strong seller all over the world, including in places I wouldn't necessarily have guessed (e.g. Korea). Once again, it seems as if an American artist finds it easier to sell his work outside the country (although Plympton is, of course, still really well known within the U.S.).

My companions went product- and swag-hunting today, but I continued to eschew both. That's good, since I ended up trucking around that copy of Axis & Allies as well as a whole passel of books for littlestar.

Some cute Studio Ghibli things littlestar picked up:

Overall, this was a fun day. I haven't had a chance to really hit the indie and small press areas as much as I'd like to, nor have I made the artist alley rounds, but I may be able to do so tomorrow or Sunday. More and more, I'm glad that my game plan for Saturday involves not being on the Exhibit Floor.

Still having fun, though. :)

Following yesterday's disappointing breakfast at Hennessey's, we hit a new place this morning. Instead, we tried The Cheese Shop. They were harried, seeming a bit understaffed, but the food came fast anyway, and was quite good. I shared with littlestar -- she ordered biscuits and gravy (which came with a stunningly large side of two eggs, hash browns, and sausage) while I had bagels with cream cheese, salmon, and capers. Nice.

Well-fueled, we instantly crashed into the chaos that reigned outside the hall. Ugh, and all that. With that sorted out in a few minutes, we started our day in earnest.

Panel highlights on the day included the tail-end of the panel covering the new Spectacular Spider-Man television program, a set of Pixar shorts, and Neil Gaiman.

I ended up wishing I'd hit the Spider-Man panel earlier (we sat down mainly to get seats for the Neil Gaiman presentation).

The Pixar panel was all about an upcoming Pixar DVD featuring and focused on their shorts. It includes a documentary, which they showed us in full. We rather wished they hadn't, since showing us the documentary, plus three short films, left little time for questions and answers with the three Pixar folks they brought in. As much as I enjoyed the documentary (and I really did), we're going to buy the DVD and have access to it later. I would rather have heard more from the three Pixar people about their experiences, especially comparing short films and features.

The ten minutes of Spider-Man panel was fun. One interaction:

Q: "Will you ever have villain team ups?"

A (from various): "Villain team ups? You mean like, three villains against Spider-Man?"

"Or four villains? Or even five? Six? What about seven? Six?"

"Six? That would be impressive."

"One might even call it sinister."

Cue applause there, with the Sinister Six reference.

Neil Gaiman came on in a very impromptu fashion, introduced quickly and well by Pam Noles. Neil Gaimain is probably more brilliants sans prompting than he is with someone officially asking questions. He told us about the status of various movie projects (Death has once again wiggled closer to reality) and then moved on to ask audience questions. A number of questions boil down to "How do you work, and how can I work like you?"

I hope videos of Neil's session will show up online, as I didn't bother to record anything he said in detail.

The "Star Wars at 30" panel was fairly lame. I'd already seen the previews for the new Clone Wars cartoon, and everything else tended toward lame. Especially poor was the decision to preview non-Star Wars games coming out from Lucasarts. It felt overly opportunistic to throw random ads at us because we're too polite to leave in the middle.

Outside of panels, I followed littlestar around as we visited booths, checking in again with the folks from Flight, as well as Pascal Campion, Stan Sakai, and other people. I occasionally floated out when she talked with people for a longer time, checking on the rest of the floor.

Last year, we were able to call Taka when they opened and get a table. Today, a call half and hour after opening netted us nothing until 9pm. The rest of the Gaslamp was similarly swamped, so we yet again bagged it and headed home early, eating in Ocean Beach instead.

My Saturday plan was quite flexible, as my one big activity was the 2007 Magic Amateur Championship. Were I to do well, I'd expect it to eat the rest of the day. Were I to do poorly, I could drop out early and go do something else. Given how terrible we were all expecting the day to be on the Exhibit Floor, spending many hours in the gaming rooms didn't seem like a bad idea.

We began our Saturday the usual way, with breakfast at The Field. I went for the Ulster fry, which is an exciting combination of meat, meat, and more meat, with ancillary non-animal product items (the full listing - sausage, rasher, black pudding, white pudding, eggs, potatoes, fried slice of tomato, bit of toast, beans). Thus fortified, we headed toward the convention center, and were already surprised by the relative calm of our side of the street (most of the attendees being, inexplicably, on the other approach to the convention center).

I headed straight off for the quick draw event, which was fun as always. I have quite a few pictures even though I only stayed for an hour. I'll cover it in a different post.

From Quick Draw, I moved on to the Amateur Championship. Although the event had a cap of 140 participants, the final tally was less than 90, meaning it would a short event with a rigorous cutoff for the final 16. Basically, the thought was one loss and you're out.

Not really a very crowded field.

She was meant to win me games...

Naturally, I lost my first match. That was largely a luck loss, which happens. In the second match, I had my first game win off of a rule violation. I played a Head Games which let me look through my opponent's deck, and immediately noticed a card that I was pretty sure wasn't in Standard anymore. I was right, and he took a game loss and had to swap in some basic lands to replace the incorrect cards.

...but this ended up doing the job.

I won that match, then lost match three fair and square (no luck issues there, nor bad play, just a bad matchup that I probably could have been better prepared for deckwise). With two match losses, I ducked out of the tournament and headed for the Exhibit Floor.

Shockingly (let's bold that) shockingly the Exhibit Floor was relatively calm -- calmer than Friday, certainly. Based on what kwc, m, and bleusky saw, the real business was in the big halls, especially Hall 20. Despite Saturday's biggest-day-of-the-con, sold-out-first status, Hall 20 siphoned off enough folks to make it easier going on the floor than either of the two days preceding it. It used this time to check in with the small press area, including picking up the latest work from Elephant Eater Comics, home of the not-at-all depressing slice-of-life comic (no sarcasm here -- his comics are slice-of-life without the usual emo content of the genre).

Visions of the small press:

I wandered all over the place today. I picked up some card signatures from Terese Nielsen, Cyril Van Der Hagen, and Rebecca Guay. I had a nice conversation with Ms. Guay about illustration, fine art, and a potential resurgence in representational fine art. If you're interested in that exact thing, there are a number of Guay pieces that are just lovely, if well out of my price range. I think this conversation might actually end up being the highlight of my day.

Other wandering included a bit more swag-acquisition work at the Wizards of the Coast booth, where I wandered into four more Magic boosters.

At the end of the day, we met up for the Masquerade, which I will also cover in a separate entry.

All in all, Saturday ended up being fun and oddly relaxing. Weird, but nice.

Yeah, that's someone in a full-size MOSPEADA. Awesome.

(From the 2007 San Diego Comic Con Masquerade. More on the full event later.)

Going into the last day of the con, I still felt pretty good, but didn't have a lot of events I wanted to hit. I took a speculative took at Magic events on the day, then decided against burning my time on any of those (especially since I plan on doing that in late August). Following another Ulster Fry (hurrah for meat, another meat, a third meat, a fourth meat, eggs, beans, toast, and a slice of fried tomato) I immediately went for the Exhibit Floor. This was my "buying a handful of cheap trades" day, including almost the entire current line of trades from Virgin Comics. I've been curious about Virgin Comics' line, but as always, am not a fan of picking up individual issues.

I also picked up some other books I've been wanting to read. I expect I'll have reviews in the next few weeks as I read my way through new stuff.

Other than a whole lot of hiking around, only one panel enticed me into the meeting rooms. That was Cover Story: Art of the Cover, led by Mark Evanier. Much more on that panel, with notes and pictures, in the extended.