San Diego: The Return

Well, I took the redeye flight home from San Diego Sunday night, arriving back in good ol' CT about 9:30 Monday morning, bleary eyed and sick but glad to be back home.
After a couple of days to recuperate, be a dad, and get caught up on life, not to mention see The Police in concert (Sting sounds better than ever), I figure it's time to detail my convention exploits. The truth is, there aren't many exploits to exploit here for the sake of my blog and it's 14 faithful readers, give or take about 800 hundred.

The thing with Comic Con is that it's gotten so damn big, somewhere along the way, a lot of the fun of the show got lost in the crowd. In terms of my career, I don't know if I accomplished anything that I couldn't have just as easily done through email or phone calls. Sure, it's helpful to get some facetime with different editors or meet people from different companies but when that facetime is interrupted 30 times in five minutes by vast throngs of people saying hi, it's not doing much good.

Still, I enjoyed catching up with rarely seen friends like the great gentleman that is Pat Gleason or the legendary Brazillian Kid, Sergio Cariello. I bumped into an old Kubert School classmate, Mr. Dan Curto (www.rebelscum.com), and spent a half an hour catching up and reminiscing. I got to reconnect with former DC and current Wildstorm editor Scott Peterson for a few minutes, who I'm now developing a pitch with. I paid too much for Mrs. Field's cookies and diet Coke, saw Jessica Alba from thirty feet and behind just as many security guards, did a triple take at the sight of the one-legged model dressed as the one-legged character from Grindhouse (she's got the market cornered for that job), and spent some time with a young actor named Bret Harrison (starring in the upcoming series The Reaper), who is a friend of my friend and talented writer, David Baldy (Keep an eye out for their upcoming JSA Classified story, it's gonna be great!).

And of course, there's the Taco Trio, who I didn't see that much of, all told. We all seemed to be going in different directions: Tom was, unfortunately, hospitalized for a chunk of the show and Andy had a busy agenda himself. There was the almost-brawl after dinner one night, a great meal at the Brazillian BBQ joint I always try to get to, and of course...the softball game, where Marvel defeated DC 15-9 (and because it was a charity game, I won't dwell on some...dubious...umpiring that cost DC the game in the 5th.)

And there's more, but this is already getting plenty long and more boring than I intended.

I do think it's funny how, when you're walking around a convention center with 140,000 other people, it's odd how I tend to bump into the same five or six every day. I do enjoy the fact that I've cultivated a nice group of friends and acquaintances through the convention circuit over the years that I can now count on as smiling faces far from home. And overall, I think anyone with a true love for Pop Culture should go to San Diego at least once, to take in the madness and tell their tales from the belly of the beast.

As for me, I think that unless DC for some reason (at this point there's not much of one), some day wants to bring me out to promote something at the show, I would definitely go again. But I've been there and done it at this point, many times over. I think next year, I might try Wizard World Chicago, the SECOND biggest show, just as a change of pace. It's more about comics and less about pop culture, and as amazing as it is to experience, San Diego is really less and less about comic books each passing year. It's morphed into something else entirely.

Thanks for reading.