parakkum

We picked up kwc and m at the San Diego airport today, then popped over to the convention center to pick up our badges and attend some of Preview Night (now from 6-9pm this year).

The badge pickup was rapid and efficient -- the actual checkin and reception of my badge took all of four seconds. Then we burned an hour sitting and going through the program guides for the next four days.

I'll leave it to kwc and m to put up pictures of the insanity that was the waiting area in front of the convention center doors. Preview night this year felt like Friday last year, which suggests the entire convention might be truly insane in terms of attendance. I heard from a con employee last year that preregistered attendee numbers have doubled in each of the past two years. As it stood last year, con attendance was 105,000 people, making it the biggest convention in San Diego.

littlestar grabbed two books from Kinokuniya. I spoke with an editor at Dark Horse who informed me that they will not be announcing winners for the 2005 New Recruits program at the Con as they'd previously announced. Instead, they have it "narrowed down to about forty entries" and are now looking at them in depth. He said that they'd probably make an announcement in another six weeks. He was quite nice and asked my name and the name of my project -- Inhabit.

Having eschewed attempts to park or hotels nearby, we took a taxi to downtown this morning. We had our now-traditional non-traditional Thursday-morning Irish breakfast at Hennessey's (no traditional Irish food has ranchero sauce). m and kwc both did the black and black, with Guiness and coffee. Afterward, we hit the convention center proper, where I started my full exhibit hall coverage with littlestar. littlestar and I ended up completing our floor coverage (which apparently involves walking three miles) today, so we've at least walked by every exhibitor in the convention.

One such exhibitor was Daniel Davis, of Caught Creatures fame. We have a copy of his fine book, and littlestar has one of his posters. He's recently updated his webshop -- you can now buy Caught Creatures and other work by Davis at www.magicskull.com.

Other fun today in the extended.

Friday was a pretty solid day. Panels I attended included:

The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation
Paramount Pictures (Stardust)
Pitchin' Impossible? (subtitled: A Useful Panel About Entering Hollywood)

(Gaiman talking about Stardust, which looked pretty good.)

Other than panels, I had a day featuring actual swag, something I avoided yesterday. I did a somewhat disjointed Star Wars Miniatures demo at the Wizards of the Coast booth, then went and rolled the die for the best swag so far -- the Attack on Endor set for Star Wars Minis (retails for $20, includes an AT-ST). Other than that, I picked up copies of The Patron Saint of Plagues by Barth Anderson and World War Z: an oral history of the zombie war by Max Brooks (the latter required signing up for a free podcast of the first chapter, which sounds like fun anyway). Today wasn't very purchase heavy, with a $5 copy of Dave Gibbons' War Machine and one other book that I'll post if I like it when I read it.

Many notes on The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation in the extended.

Due to a late night on Saturday and a ridiculously late one last night (4 am arrival at home after a long, slow drive...) I have neither written by Saturday and Sunday nor put together my quickdraw notes to hand off to kwc.

The drive North out of San Diego was uncharacteristically and painfully slow up until we hit Los Angeles (and, to mollify littlestar, I will clarify that this really, really means LA -- Orange county was slow...). There was one fun part of the trip, though. We were slowly overtaking a car in an adjacent lane when I noticed it had a "Battlestar Galactica 25th Anniversary Meeting" bumper sticker. Thinking I'd see another con attendee, I checked out the driver:

Richard Hatch

I pointed him out to horizonline, who has avidly watched the new BSG but was not a viewer of the old one (too young, really). "Look -- it's Tom Zarek!"

It's a good high point for the drive home for the con, capping a fun extended weekend with just the right star quality.

Okay, finally recovered enough to write about the remaining days of Comic Con.

Saturday was very, very busy. As happened last year, entry into the convention center was shut off sometime in the middle of the day. With attendance increasing in massive bounds each year, the convention is becoming less and less of a local event. Back in the day, you could just show up on Saturday, sign up and walk in -- this is how I ended up in my first San Diego Comic Con back in the 80s when attendance as an order of magnitude lower. These days, it's a three hour wait in line, and at some point, you might not make it in at all. That's unfortunate, but it's a consequence of the con becoming less of a local event and more of a trade show.

Big Saturday events included trawling for swag, the quickdraw, Avatar, Bruce Campbell (Brisco panel), Taka and the Masquerade.

More in the extended.

Sunday was a big walking day, a last chance to traverse the floor and catch everything we might have missed. There were two real highlights from Sunday -- watching Scott Morse do an elaborate cycling sketch for kwc and talking to Ryan Claytor (Elephant Eater Comics) who had his lovely fifth issue of "And Then One Day," featuring a lovely varnished cover and two-color printing.