Comic-con International 2010 – ****ing lines, how do they work?
Okay, I made it through Comic-Con 2010. Technically, Comic-Con ended Sunday. It took me this long to recover from all the walking, waiting, and flying.1

For those of you that don’t know, Comic-Con International is one of the largest comic/sci-fi conventions in the world. It’s a magical place where you pay money to stand in lines for hours and wait to see famous people talk and answer questions for fifteen minutes.
On the first day I decided to try and get into Hall H, the biggest conference room in the San Diego Convention Center. Here is a picture from the very back of the line at about eight in the morning.

The line goes to the end of the grass field, turns a corner, goes down the other side, then across a street into another winding line before finally getting to the building. If I had to guess, I’d say there were several thousand people lined up.

After about two hours, I made it to the part of the line that had tents. It was roughly another two hours before I finally made it into Hall H, where I camped for the rest of the afternoon. I totally missed the Tron Legacy panel by about two hours, for which I had lined up in the first place.
It wasn’t all waiting in lines. Don’t get me wrong, it was a LOT of waiting in lines, but I sat in on some really interesting panels. The two best panels I attended were the ones on Penn & Teller and Blood Factory. Penn and Teller were hilarious. The Blood Factory is a project to produce short (5~10 min) horror films by Danny DeVito, amongst others. The films are extremely graphic, bloody, and funny. Plus, as was stated during the panel, they do have messages. Although, those messages may be obscured through blood and vagina monsters (don’t ask, you have to see it when it comes out). Let’s face it, if you’ve been watching anime for any period of time you’ve seen some type of vagina monster. It shouldn’t be anything new.
I also saw the first episode of the Iron Man anime. It wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t that good either. Judging by the trailer for the show, it should get a bit better later, on the action front. Who knows about the story?
San Diego was fun. I’ll have to visit again someday. There was talk about moving Comic-Con to another city because San Diego’s convention center doesn’t have the capacity for the current crowds at Comic-Con. I can attest to this. It was packed all day every day of the event. The longest waits were for the big name panels like Burn Notice, Tron Legacy, or just to get into one of the big convention rooms like Hall H or Room 20 where they had the best lineups. The smaller panels usually didn’t have huge lines, and in most instances were more entertaining with more unique subjects.
Also, I got a sunburn.
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