For those of you who've never been able to attend a Comic-Con International in San Diego, someone made this 33-minute walking tour of the main hall at this year's gathering. Actually, this might even be of interest to those of you who've been there because I've been to all of them and I'm seeing stuff in this video that I never saw in person…
This video underscores the point that the convention is many things to different people and the convention you experience there will be the one you seek out…or at least try to seek out. In all my years of attendance, I've never gone near most of these corners of the con. My convention occurs mostly upstairs in the panel rooms and this year, I only set foot in the main hall on one of the days I was there…and only to sign books for an hour at a publisher's booth.
I'm not saying this is good or bad or anything; just that everyone who goes can experience a very different convention. It depends on your areas of interest. It depends on whether you're searching for certain items you want to purchase. It may even depend a lot on how much walking you're willing or able to do.
Some years, some folks seem to think I'm the Complaint Department for the convention and one of those years, a guy I barely knew sought me out to bitch about something that was ruining the con for him. It was how much certain dealers were charging for certain old comics he wanted to purchase. He seemed to think that I — or the folks who run the convention — could do something about that. And some of you may remember this story I've told here before about another complainer who cornered me at the 2002 Comic-Con…
[He] was upset that so much of the Comic-Con wasn't about comics and he felt, I guess, that I'd concur and would rush off to do something about it…maybe throw Robert Downey Jr out of the hall or something. Instead, I told him about that great panel we did on the Golden Age of Batman with Jerry Robinson, Sheldon Moldoff and Lew Schwartz. If you're interested in the history of comics, it doesn't get any more historical than that. I then said to this fellow who was complaining about the con not being about that kind of thing, "I didn't see you there."
And so help me, he replied, "I couldn't be there. I had to get in line to see the 24 panel with Kiefer Sutherland."
I now tell people that if they didn't have a good time at Comic-Con, they were either expecting something that just plain wasn't going to be there or they didn't plan well enough how to locate what they did want that was there.