Vertigo Comics

Comic Con Day 0: San Diego Comic Con is an impressive, wonderful, albeit slightly overwhelming experience with 125,000 of your closest friends. It’s 4, well 5 with preview night, days of non stop activities: from wandering the exhibit hall, to watching panels about your favorite shows, movies, comics, etc., from getting autographs to simply enjoying what downtown San Diego has to offer. Words can hardly do it justice; it’s something that everyone should try and experience at some point in their lives. Here’s my recap of the 2009 festivities.

And one quick note, as I failed to register in time for a 4-day pass, I decided to buy 1-day passes for some days and volunteer others, as that made it cheaper and enabled me to get into preview night.  However, this meant I got to spend much of my mornings in line for a badge, which I’ll mention more later.

Wednesday, July 22^nd

Preview night is always a fun time. As a special deal for 4-day attendees and preregistered volunteers, the exhibit hall is open for 3 hours for a sneak peek at the all the cool stuff for sale, as well as your first chance of obtaining the numerous freebies that the major vendors hand out. I started by getting in line at the DC Comics booth. I had no idea what it was for, but there’s always something cool there, and that was the first of many, many lines throughout the trip. I was correct in that assessment, because at the front of the line was a preview issue of about a dozen different Vertigo comics. 1^st score of the con, and I’m only 20 minutes in. I also found the DC comics dog tag necklace that I could wear with all my comfy shirts.

Wander over to the WB booth, and I see the predictable crush of people trying to get free stuff from them. I decide I don’t want to and wander in other directions. Just like last year (This was my 4^th Comic Con), I found Max Brooks, author of Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, completely by accident. He was signing things again, and they now have Zombie Survival Guide T-Shirts for sale. So, of course, I bought one and had Max autograph it. Score again!

I met up with some friends after that.  I discovered they had visited Cafe Diem, the restaurant from Eureka.  Sci-Fi, er Syfy took over the cafe at the Hard Rock Hotel and turned it into Cafe Diem from Eureka, which was pretty awesome.  They had a bunch of stuff for me, including a Syfy bag, a set of pins for their shows, a disposable camera, and possibly more, but I can’t remember.  I stopped by the Capcom booth to try and get the Resident Evil shirt, but the line was too long, so I figured I’d try later.  After some more wandering and obtaining of random free things, the convention center was closing for the night.  All in all, it was a good day.

I rate this day a 4 out of 5

-Zack the Comic-con guru