comic-con 2002
adam, jonathan, sumir, and vince on 08/09/2002 12:19:48 -0700
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Comic-Con was a wonderful experience. It was
an overloaded visual experience. The San Diego Convention Center is
very nice and everything was arranged well. Registration lines are
VERY long; I suggest that if you are going to buy a ticket at the door,
you should go the day before, a few hours before they close, so you don't
encounter ridiculous waits. We were fortunate enough not to put up
with that.
Another thing to remember at Comic-Cons is food. The food is expensive, but you can bring your own. You should definitely bring your own water; you are guaranteed to get dehydrated there. The food service is, unfortunately, somewhat flaky. We were in line for the pizza, and all they had was sausage so we had to wait around 15 minutes before we could get what we wanted. No one in the line wanted sausage (except for 2 or 3 guys) so we had about 30 people just waiting there. Also, the pizza stand closed at 5 (definitely a "WTF?" moment) and at around 4, they said they would not make any more cheese pizza for the day. The good news: for vegetarians like me, the vegetarian pizza was still available. The bad news: me and the people behind me took all the slices of the last vegetarian pizza they were going to make. With the pepperoni coming through really slowly, the vegetarian options exhausted, and an abundance of sausage (insert joke here), it was pretty lame.
You should not plan on parking in the convention center - it's really
not an option. Instead, downtown San Diego has various parking lots
scattered around. These parking lots are pretty convenient and we
had no troubles finding parking inside the lots. This however, does
not reflect a very simple fact: downtown San Diego has the most retarded,
godawfully ridiculous street scheme in the world. You'll find your
one-way streets, your strange street splitting, and streets that curve
around perpendicular to themselves. I will admit that Los Angeles is
not a great place to drive. Our streets are jam-packed and our
drivers want to murder you in cold blood and eat your babies. But at
least our city isn't a cartographic nightmare straight out of
Wolfenstein.
The schedule is appropriate to cons. You start at 10 and end around 6ish (the Masquerade went to 12 on Saturday). It's tiring and sometimes hectic if you want to go see back-to-back panels. But it's not unreasonable - if you want to go to a con, you should expect to come back home dead tired. That's just a fact.
Comic-Con's website sucks. It was down pretty much the entire time in the duration of the con. Don't count on it to provide you with information during the event... try checking Google's cache or just printing out the information ahead of time.
Overall, the con is VERY well planned-out. Lines can be long, things can be intense, but it's SO MUCH fun. A warning to those with children: not all of the content there is very safe for minors; nothing pornographic is displayed - if it IS of that nature, it will be covered (usually with Post-Its or something) - but the suggestive image is still there. I think Comic-Con can be a lot of fun for kids - just be careful where you are if you are concerned about bare skin.
Meeting the Penny Arcade people was a real treat. It's too bad we
were a little too dorky to actually DO anything except say "Hi" and laugh
feebly in an attempt to look cool. I guess we're bold here on our
site behind our computers. Gabe saw my Mediocre Minds t-shirt and
asked, "So you guys are digital anarchists?" and I laughed like an idiot
and blurted out, "Wannabes, maybe." Of course, Vince has his own
interpretation of how things happened. He was even kind of enough to
grace us with a pictorial representation of what REALLY happened.
Click to enlarge.
I had a BLAST at Comic-Con, and so did my friends. Next year, we're crashing the place with press passes. :-D
- Sumir
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