Con Games
The worst thing about coming back from vacation is getting back to work. The best thing about coming back from vacation is telling people who didn’t go anywhere about what a great time you had. I figure if I combine the two and write a column about my vacation, I’ll come out somewhere in the middle and for once seem like a normal, well-adjusted fellow. At least till I get to the part about the four hour line for a sketch, but that’ll come in its own good time.
Now, Pattie and I have never taken a real extended vacation; the closest we’ve come is a weekend at a bed and breakfast. So this year we decided, to heck with it, we’re gonna fly somewhere on a jet plane, stay in a hotel, the whole nine yards. We both decided it would be cool — and pay attention here, because one reason I married this woman is that she would actually think this is cool — to fly out to San Diego for Comic-Con International, the biggest comic book convention in the world. Four days of comic buying, autograph getting, and watching people dress up like Jedi and stormtroopers. I had to promise her something about seeing the rest of San Diego while we were there, but I figured one day of cruising around California was a small price to pay for a visit to Graphic Art Nirvana.
Of course, first we had to get there, which is where the jet plane came in. Now, I am over six feet tall, and we were flying in coach. Despite this, and the fact that I booked the plane tickets, I forsake any hope of an aisle seat so that Pattie could sit by a window that may have been twice the size of my thumb and look at the clouds. As a result, I was slightly cramped during the six hour flight. Fortunately, I had my revenge, as the cramping resulted in my ankles cracking loudly for the rest of the day and night. Foley artists have recorded my ankles in order to better replicate the sound of a fierce thunderstorm, which can make trying to sleep in the same room with me an . . . interesting experience, to say the least. Cramping aside, the flight was fairly pleasant, the in-flight meal was actually pretty tasty, and everything was going along smoothly.
Until we started our descent, of course, and I experienced the most agonizing pain I can remember as my ears tried to deal with the change in air pressure. Ten sticks of Wrigley’s Spearmint did absolutely nothing to help me, and to make matters worse, I couldn’t hear a darn thing. Pattie would try and say something to me, and all I could do was shrug my shoulders. Now, a medical excuse to not hear any of your wife’s requests may seem like a good thing at first, but since we were on vacation there was no chance she was asking me to clean the dishes or take out the garbage, and besides, she’s a pretty good conversationalist most of the time. To say nothing of the fact that without any sense of hearing on my part, regulating the volume of my own voice was suddenly a challenge. Next time we fly, they’re gonna have to pull some kind of BA Baracus stunt on me, because I do NOT want to go through that again.
Anyway, we get to San Diego, and let me tell you, I’ve heard all sorts of claptrap about how the weather’s always perfect in San Diego, and it’s so beautiful, and the sun’s always shining, and I’m here to tell you it’s just not true. Just as an example, on Friday, I saw a cloud. It was one of those perfect, fluffy cumulus clouds, but still — it was a cloud. And I think the high temperature may have deviated by a degree or two during our five day stay. And once, for a moment, I think it may have been slightly humid before a breeze came in off the bay and took care of that. So really, we Northeasterners with our humid 100 degree summers and our slushy below freezing winters don’t have a thing to be jealous of, and I think those Southern Californians should just stop fooling themselves.
I’m running out of room here — why do I never have this problem when I’m trying to write a philosophy article? — so let me get to the con itself. When I say it is enormously huge, I’m understating it. Walking the floor of the San Diego Convention Center was probably more exercise than I get in a month. And it was full of retailers, artists, companies, filmmakers, you name it. I got to meet people whose work I’ve been reading for years and tell them how much I enjoyed it. Or at least, I could attempt to. Once or twice I got a wee bit tongue tied. The worst was when I hoped to commission a sketch from Jeff Moy, one of my favorite artists who drew the Legion of Super-Heroes for several years. I was standing by his table, patiently waiting for him to finish what he was doing so I could talk to him and trying to figure out what exactly the protocol was for commissioning a sketch, since I’d never done it before, when he stopped, looked up at me and asked something along the lines of “What can I do for you?”
Now, I’m in graduate school. I’ve given lectures and presentations pretty much on the fly. I consider myself a fairly intelligent articulate guy. Of course, since I all of a sudden was put on the spot, what came out was, “Um, yeah . . .sketch . . .can I get one? Or two? With characters? If I paid for them? Or something?” Let’s just say I’m sure I’ve made better impressions. To top it off, he didn’t have any more openings to do sketches that day. (I did manage to go back and get one the next day, so at least that story has a happy ending.)
One of the things Pattie and I had done in the weeks before the con was to go over the programming list to select all the entertaining and informative panels that we would attend. Unfortunately, these well laid plans were shot to pieces pretty quickly, especially for me on Sunday. George Perez, one of my favorite artists (whose work appears in the corner of the first Not News cover image, by the way), was at the con and doing free sketches for his fans. Unfortunately for me, George Perez has had a spectacular 25+ year career in comics, and he’s a LOT of people’s favorite artist. So much so, that somehow the lines for his sketches managed to be full practically before the convention opened for business each day. (I am still trying to figure out how that worked, by the way. The ability to distort time and space in that fashion would pay off my student loans in a hurry.) In true comic fashion, I got my sketch in the nick of time, with about 15 minutes before the whole con closed, and after a four hour wait that absorbed most of the day. Now you can say that’s crazy, but hey — someday, I might find myself stuck in a six hour line at DisneyNation and look back fondly on the old days.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.