It’s a little after noon, and I’ve been driving down the road for the last five hours. I’m still north of San Diego, and traffic is stop and go. Suddenly, icy fingers grip the back of my brain as it hits me: I may not make it in time.
The “it” I’m steadily heading toward is the 20 minutes of James Cameron’s Avatar footage screening at the annual Comic-Con International event in San Diego.
I had been driving my wife and friends nuts for months about just how wicked cool Avatar is going to be, and this is my only chance to get a glimpse of it before December.
There’s nothing to do but roll down my window and shriek grief and angst to the world:
“COOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNN!”
Geek chic
Comic-Con: It’s the great pilgrimage of the world’s geeks to San Diego, except geek really is chic nowadays.
The event is San Diego’s ugly little stepchild—ask any of the city’s older residents (like my wife’s grandmother, whose place I was lucky enough to stay at and avoid the $300- to $400-a-night hotel rooms). They just can’t understand what the big deal about “comics” is.
But big deal it is. More than 120,000 people from all over the world came to San Diego, and by no means are we talking about pimply faced nerds here.
Sure, there were Supermen and Batmen and Wolverines strolling the exhibition floor, but they were rubbing elbows with financial planners, teachers, nurses, and at least one guy who worked with hedge funds—though not one of the zillionaire manager types. He still probably operated out of his mom’s basement.
To be fair, there were still some great super-geek types at the convention. I think one of my favorite (and surreal) moments was being on the escalator and overhearing part of a conversation from the girls in front of me: “So I have this OCD thing with taking off all my clothes, and here comes Constable Odo yelling, ‘You can’t do that on the Promenade!’”
They came from everywhere: There were locals, pseudo-locals (L.A. area), California-locals, then the folks with the long commute: Oregon, Colorado, Texas, and—winning the longest commute award of attendees I found—England.
Behold Hall H, in all its terrible splendor!
After racing down the interstate, driving around downtown San Diego in a near-panic looking for parking, finally breaking down and hiring a very nice Russian kid named Sergei to take me to the convention center in his pedal cab, I arrived at Hall H.
Rather, I arrived at the line for Hall H, which—to my horror—stretched out of the building, across the lawn, doubled back on itself about a half million times like some intestinal tract from hell, and ended somewhere across the street at the Hilton.
And there we waited, in the sultry San Diego summer sun, for two hours. And by waited, I mean oozed.
One girl (dressed as Kahlan from Legend of the Seeker) had given blood earlier in the day and admitted she came pretty close to passing out. Another guy was out cold when the line finally started to move. We had a mini-debate on whether or not to leave him, but geek solidarity won out in the end.
I had no idea James Cameron was only 2 inches tall
As we filed in out of the sun, my eyes adjusted to the dim light, and there he was … on a giant screen floating above the crowd. Apparently, the real James Cameron is only 2 inches tall, and the screens are there for the audience’s benefit. Or that was just how frakking huge Hall H is? Six-thousand, five-hundred seats is a, well, a lot.
I settled into mine just in time for James Cameron to say a few words, and then aieeeeee!!!
Mommy, why are my eardrums bleeding?
Some of you may mistake that screech for fanboy enthusiasm, which it was, at least for the first few seconds of the Avatar footage. Then they actually started talking on screen, and it felt like our eardrums were being collectively beaten to death.
Apart from that little tidbit, the actual footage was spectacular. The 3D was impressive, but was oddly a little straining on the eyes at first. I don’t know if it’s because I’m blind in one eye or what, but I had a sensation that was almost, but not entirely unlike, a headache. The pain-ish-ness went away after the first 10 minutes or so—whether because I got used to it or was rendered senseless by the volume is anyone’s guess.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
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Joss Whedon’s musical web-based project during the writings’ strike
has amassed a huge cult following, and the only reason I got into the screening was because of the friends I made earlier in the day in line for Avatar.
They held a seat for me (they
were determined not to miss Dr. Horrible, and had sat through the previous two panels), and I got
there for the second half of the Robotech panel.
I felt really bad for the two dozen or so Robotech fans in a roomful of 500 Whedonites waiting for Dr. Horrible to start. These guys had questions about Veritechs and protoculture (not that I’d know anything about that) while the rest of the room shifted in their seats.
But then it was time for Dr. Horrible, presented a la the Rocky Horror Picture Show, complete with callbacks. See Dr. Horrible’s freeze-ray on screen? Make “Pewpewpew” noises. Any time the leader of the Evil League of Evil, Bad Horse, has his messages sung on screen? Everyone bounce in your seat.
Five-hundred people. Bouncing in their seats. On the second story. The floor was literally flexing underneath us, and I had visions of the 11 o’clock news reporting tragedy from Comic-Con. We’d have died happy, though.
These lines aren’t nearly as fun as Disneyland’s
After the promising start of the first day, my second didn’t go quite as smoothly. The culprit? Lines. With more than 120,000 people in attendance, the lines to get into any of the panels were—to steal a bit of geek parlance—frakking insane.
Getting turned away was something of a theme at Comic-Con. Almost every person I talked to had a story of waiting in line for hours, only to get within sight of the doors and be told, “Well, you’re going to miss out on Star Wars, but you’ll probably get in for the arts and crafts panel after it.”
Twice I spent close to two hours in line only to get turned away yards from the door. But, as my wife told me when I called her for a sympathetic ear: “Suck it up, at least you’re at Comic-Con!”
Thing is, she was right.
Contact Staff Writer Nicholas Walter at nwalter @santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 6, 2009.