One week from today — on Saturday, November 10 at 9 AM PST, Open Registration will happen for the 2019 Comic-Con International in San Diego. If you wish to attend and didn't qualify under Returning Registration or Professional Registration, this is your time. But understand these two cold, hard facts of life…
- You need to plan ahead and study up on how the process works. The Comic-Con people explain it here. The informative folks over at the San Diego-Comic Con Unofficial Blog explain it over here. Do not wait until late Friday night to learn this.
- The odds are against you. How bad they are is the subject of much discussion and debate and of course, it depends on two numbers we can't possibly know now — how many people will apply for how many badges. But estimates for recent years have varied from about a 6% chance to maybe 25%. I have never seen anyone suggest anything better than that.
This will be the 50th of these gatherings in San Diego. That may cause more than ever to join the throngs pounding on the gates…or the likelihood of that may scare some off. Who knows? All I know is that I'll be there for the fiftieth time because I always have a good time at the convention. Full Disclosure: I didn't always.
The first dozen or so were wonderful. There were fascinating people to meet. There were important people to hear speak. There were much-desired things to purchase from dealers. There were interesting things to look at but not purchase. Perhaps best of all, I just felt surrounded by friends, old and new.
But around about 1982 or 3, the con began to feel like a chore to me…something I went to not because I wanted to go but because, as someone working in the industry, I felt I had to go. That alone took some of the fun out of it. For much of the con, I also didn't feel like I had a place to physically be.
I don't like to sell things. This is probably a character flaw of some sort on my part but while I love having people shell out $9.99 (or whatever the price is) for my new book, I don't want to be the one asking them to do so or running their credit cards. I'll occasionally sit and sign for a while at some dealer's or publisher's table but that will never be my table, nor will I spend all day at it.
So then where do I spend the con? There's a limit as to how long you can be walking around the exhibit hall of a four-day convention. Even when both my knees were real and neither was crying out for replacement, there was a limit.
So I began skipping Day One of Comic-Con and leaving for home halfway through Day Four. This was before they started Preview Night, which now makes what is still officially a four-day convention run 4.5 days. Some years, I thought maybe I'd just take the train down for one day, see everyone I wanted to see, do my one or two panels and then head home. Back then, they usually asked me to be on one or two and maybe appear on a third.
Then that changed. I couldn't just go down for one day because they had me on one panel on Friday and another on Sunday. I liked doing the panels so I began suggesting some and volunteering to host more of them so their number increased. I think one year I did ten and then next year, twelve…and I can't figure out what the maximum was because sometimes I was drafted at the last minute so looking back at old program books wouldn't tell us. I'm thinking it was fifteen one year.
And you know what? I started really enjoying the convention again. Now I wouldn't miss a day of it. For much of each day, I have a place to be and I get to interview and/or joust with some pretty amazing people. It's one of my favorite parts of my year.
I don't know what it is you might enjoy about the convention. My observation is that everyone who loves it finds something different to love there. If you love it even a tenth as much as I do, I hope you get a badge for 2019. It's gonna be a good one.