As explained in the mouseover text, the title refers to the idea that because animals have different senses, each animal effectively inhabits a different reality. This can philosophically be extended to human perceptions.

Keeping that in mind, make sure you read it in a few different web browsers (both desktop and mobile!) for the full effect (JavaScript required). And try resizing the window.

As an art project, it’s the best use of browser-sniffing I’ve ever seen.

I go into more detail — including thoughts on some of the implications for the 10-year and 30-year troughs in the cycle — at Speed Force in Return of the 1990s.

»Skip to the photos if you’re so inclined.

There was a very strong comic book focus to the con, maybe not so much as at Long Beach, but all the major comics publishers were there, plus many of the minor ones. I was surprised to find webcomics wrapped around the large-press area and not hidden off in a corner. The small press and Artist’s Alley areas were huge (especially when compared to Wizard’s Comic Con in the same hall two years ago). And there were comic book dealers all over the place.

The only real complaint I had about the layout was that it seemed a bit haphazard. Marvel, IDW, and DC were front and center, but Studio Foglio and the Winner Twins were stuck in between IDW and DC. Zenescape was off in a corner rather than being clustered with fellow indies Archaia, Aspen and Avatar. And when I say the comic dealers were all over the place, I mean scattered all over the place.

The rest of the convention center was being used by a girls’ volleyball tournament and a cheerleading competition. I was encouraged by the fact that the players were just as interested as the fans in taking photos of and with the people in costumes, from Captain America and Bucky through Optimus Prime.

*They’d like to return to San Francisco after Moscone Center’s renovations are done, but that’s still up in the air.

Around the Con

Friday I went solo. It was lightly attended but still busy, and if anything, I’d call it relaxing. I spent a lot of time in panels, exploring the floor, and looking for bargains and cool stuff. This was probably the most traditionally “comic con” day for me. I parked in the convention center lot before noon and stayed until 9 at night (for Superman vs. the Elite), and still felt energized when I got home. It reminded me of the last time I did a Friday at WonderCon (2009) in San Francisco, or like a day at SDCC back in the 1990s.

Katie and I both went to the con on Saturday, when it was a lot more crowded. We parked in the lot across the street, got drenched on the walk to the convention center, and got hailed on that evening. I went to a couple of more literary panels, but didn’t spend much time on comic events…though I did spend a lot of time hunting down autographs. After Friday’s dismal plastic food (worst. pizza. ever.) in the convention center, we made a point of taking a break for lunch and eating at one of the hotel restaurants. That was definitely worth it.

Sunday was very different, because we brought our son along. Having a toddler with you really changes what you can do, how quickly you can get around, etc. (We also got in later, which meant parking waaay out at Angel Stadium and taking a shuttle in. Fortunately the shuttles were fast and frequent.) Crowd weaving with a stroller is a lot more difficult even than crowd weaving with a giant backpack. We were only there for about four hours, and mostly spent the time exploring. I don’t think he really understood what was going on, but he had a good time people-watching, and playing with demo toys, and I made sure to find him a place out of the way that he could run around.

Signings, Swag and Encounters

After a couple of years on hold, I’ve picked up the Comic Book Tattoo autograph project again. Only Ted McKeever was there out of the artists and writers I still needed, but since I wan’t carrying a computer around, I figured I’d bring it on the first day. Then I picked up a volume of Absolute Sandman for 50% off. (How do half-price trade/hardcover booths make a profit? Is it a loss leader? Clearance?) I was very happy that I’d managed to park in the convention center lot that day.

I talked for a while with Randy Milholland of Something*Positive, and while I wasn’t planning on buying any original art, I figured I’d take a look, and stumbled upon a piece that inspired a running gag here. Then he told me the real story of the childhood event that inspired the storyline. Somewhere in here, the real T-Bob showed up, and he and Randy caught up while I continued looking through the art.

At one point, while walking down the hall, I heard someone saying “I think so, Brain…” in a perfect Pinky voice. I looked over and it was Rob Paulsen. (‘Kay bye.)

I got Naomi Novik to sign the latest Temeraire novel, Crucible of Gold and Ernest Cline to sign the audiobook of Ready Player One. (I’d read the book on the Kindle, and discovered that morning that Wil Wheaton reads the audio version. Apparently they’d been trading recommendations for quite some time, informally, and Wil was quite pleased to get to do the audio version. He didn’t pre-read the book, so he didn’t know he was in it until about the page before, and still managed to read it “like a boss.”) Humberto Ramos signed my copy of Impulse #1 (previously signed by Mark Waid), and I caught up with Fiona Staples for Saga, and Joe Benitez for Lady Mechanika. I talked briefly with Flash co-writer/artist Brian Buccellato, and intended to head back to his Artist’s Alley table later, but somehow never quite made it.

Events

Programming is one of Comic-Con/WonderCon’s strong points, and they always have a wide variety of events. As much as people complain about the Hollywood presence in San Diego, most years you can put together a personal schedule of entirely comic-book events that barely leaves you any time on the floor (or for lunch).

I caught the Superman vs. the Elite screening on Friday. Since it was Friday, I had no trouble getting in, and getting a really nice view of the second row of screens. It moves the premise from Action Comics #775 to a more political stage, and while there are problematic elements, and the animation style takes getting used to, my favorite part of the movie was the interplay between Lois and Clark.

In general, I’ve found that if I have to choose between an announcement and a discussion, I’ll go for the discussion. (The announcements will be online by the end of the hour anyway.) I did check out the Hobbit panel, which turned out to be less preview and more “What we know so far…” from The One Ring.net, and the Friday DC Comics & Vertigo panels. I got some good quotes, but not much information out of the DC panel, while Vertigo has me seriously considering checking out American Vampire.

A couple of audience surveys at the DC panel: Only about 1/5 of the audience raised its hands when asked whether they read comics online. And it was sad that only a handful recognized China Miéville’s name.

Anthony Bourdain’s upcoming graphic novel Get Jiro sounds like one of those amazingly bizarre books that will either be awesome or awful: In a dystopian future Los Angeles, the divide between haves and have-nots has become extremely sharp. All forms of entertainment have died out except for food, and the action-adventure focuses on Jiro, a sushi chef caught between literally-warring gangs of foodies.

More fun were the Saturday panels on Rewriting History and the Science Behind Science-Fiction.

Rewriting History featured Naomi Novik (Temeraire), Ernest Cline (Ready Player One), Rob Reid (co-founder of Rhapsody, with a sci-fi novel coming out called Year Zero) and — when he finally made it through the parking mess — Todd McCaffrey (the more recent Dragonriders of Pern novels).

The Science Behind Science Fiction was a presentation and Q&A by the authors of How To Defeat Your Own Clone, showing examples of common sci-fi tropes and comparing them to real science. For example: We can’t build an Iron Man suit (yet), but we can build an exoskeleton. We can’t engineer a super-human, but there are genes that control muscle growth. We’ve only cloned animals so far, but we can look at identical twins. They used clips from movies to illustrate the tropes, including Avatar, Captain America…and two from Doom. (Now I have to know: is Doom so bad it’s good, or so bad it’s bad?)

One of them told us about the time he was almost bitten by a radioactive spider, and how just for a moment, he actually considered letting it bite him.

Quotes

“Are you clamoring for a Canterbury Cricket series?” “I am.” “Oh, you’re the one…” – DC All Access on Friday

“Is intertwinededness an actual word?” “It is now, I’ve got the podium.” – DC All Access again

“Is that Thorin, or Gowron?” – The One Ring/The Hobbit on Friday

“A hipster will wear a Captain Picard shirt and say, ‘Look how dumb this shirt is.’ If I wear one, it’s because I want some mofo to make it so!” — The Nerdist, Friday

“Why doesn’t Batman talk about his feelings more?” — CAC #7, Female Superheroes and Trauma, Saturday

“Who would do this to their dying friend?” — Ernest Cline, re: taking someone to see Star Wars: Episode I, Saturday

“If you don’t know who Boba Fett is, your opinion is invalid.” — Ernest Cline, Saturday

But Wait! There’s More!

»All my WonderCon 2012 Photos
»WonderCon as a Test Case for Comic-Con in Anaheim

The Anaheim Convention Center definitely has the floor space. WonderCon used about 1/4 of the main floor this weekend (all of Hall D, unlike Wizard in 2010, which only used about half to two-thirds of it), not counting registration downstairs.

Rooms for programming might be a problem. As near as I can tell, WonderCon used all the meeting rooms on level 2, and the large ballroom that takes up most of level 3. The Arena might be a good replacement for San Diego’s Hall H, but for the smaller panels they’d have to spill over into the nearby hotels. Fortunately, those hotels are next to the convention center, not at opposite ends or across a railroad like in San Diego.

Parking was the major breakdown this year, and Comic-Con will need even more. (I’d guess a lot of the people at the volleyball and cheer competitions were staying in hotels from out of town, or bused in from closer schools.) I suspect if they can use the stadium lot all four days and direct people to it clearly (including signs between the freeway and convention center letting people know that the convention lot is full, and accurate directional signs all the way to the stadium lot), it will probably be all right.

Food could be a problem, but it’s easily solved by bringing in food trucks or encouraging people to walk a few minutes. You know…like we do in San Diego. (Though hotel restaurants and a half-empty mall have nothing on the Gaslamp District.)

Hotels, to me, are the biggest open question. Most of the pro-Comic-Con-in-Anaheim articles I’ve seen sort of gloss over the fact that Disneyland is right across the street, or use it to bolster the claim that there are lots of hotels.

But you know, Disneyland visitors are going to be using those hotels, too. Especially during the height of summer.

If you’re trying to get a message out, or provide a service, analytics are great. They tell you what’s working and what’s not, so you can focus on what does work. Unfortunately, when it comes to email, a lot of organizations use a third-party click-tracking service, which registers which mailing the user clicked on, then redirects them to the real website.

Why do I say unfortunately?

Because it’s what phishing does: Sets up a link that looks like it goes one place, but sends you somewhere else instead. In the case of a legitimate email with a click tracker, you end up at the real site eventually. In the case of a phishing message, you end up at a fake login page that wants to capture your username & password, or a site with drive-by malware downloads. Using this technique in legit mail trains people to ignore warning signs, making them more vulnerable to the bad guys. And it makes it harder for security software to detect phishing automatically.

Now add another reason: You don’t control that click-tracking service, so it had better be reliable.

That’s what happened with Comic-Con registration today.

Getting tickets to San Diego Comic-Con used to be a breeze, but last year the system broke down repeatedly. It took them three tries, with multiple handlers, to open a registration system that didn’t melt in the first few minutes.

A few days ago, Comic-Con International sent out a message with the date and time registration would open, and a link to where the page would be when it went live. They went to a lot of trouble to make sure their servers could handle the load, as did the company handling registration. They built a “waiting room” to make sure that people trying to buy tickets would get feedback, and get into a queue, when they arrived, but could still be filtered into the registration system slowly enough not to overwhelm it.

The weak link: The click tracker.

That click tracking service was swamped, and thousands of people clicked on that link and got a blank browser window with the “loading” icon.

To make matters worse, Comic-Con had not only insisted that you should use the link from the email, but they had make a big point about how you shouldn’t refresh your browser, or try reloading the page in another browser or tab, or you’d get sent to the back of the line. After last year’s fiasco, and the last few years of “Hoteloween” with the same sort of problems dogging hotel reservations, people were used to pages loading slowly, and CCI had trained them to let that blank page sit there, loading.

After 15-20 minutes, SDCC realized that the tracker was broken and sent out bulletins on Facebook and Twitter suggesting that people copy and paste the URL, or type it in manually. But by then, the damage had been done, and a lot of users who would have gotten in line at 8:00 got in line at 8:15 or 8:20 instead, and ended up so far back in line that the convention sold out before they made it to the front.

This all could have been avoided if the bulletin had linked directly to the target website instead of to that redirector.

So, email campaigners: remember this cautionary tale and do your own click-tracking.

(For the record: I was able to get through and got the days I wanted. But only because I copied and pasted that URL instead of clicking on it, and started at position #3948 about 30 seconds after registration opened. To be honest, I probably benefited from the fact that so many people who would have been in competition with me those first 30 seconds ended up getting in line after me, but it was still a bad move on SDCC’s part.)

What we found was a surprisingly big show, with a wide variety of exhibitors, though I’d hesitate to call it a “Comic-Con.” More of a general geek pop culture show. There were certainly comic book artists and dealers (a few of whom I recognized from last week), but it reminded me a bit of the last Wizard con I went to (Anaheim 2010). There were actors & celebrities, artists, indie publishers, authors, dealers, T-shirt and nerdy craft sellers, costumers, fan groups for everything from G.I. Joe to Firefly, tattoo artists (that’s a new one), a giant card game area, a giant tabletop game area, and a video game demo trailer. All in all, it was somewhere between Wizard and San Diego without the big names.

The facility itself left a bit to be desired: Kentia Hall, below the South Hall, is technically convention space, but it doubles as a parking garage. Everything was concrete, you could see faded lines marking out parking spaces on the floor, and there were enough support pillars to rival Dwarrowdelf (many of them right in the middle of aisles). The high ceilings, dim lighting, exposed air ducts and just the fact that everything was gray gave the place a really dismal feel, and the noise echoed horribly. To make matters worse, all the panels were held in the main hall in curtained-off “rooms” around the edge. Even with microphones, it was hard to hear the panelists over the noise.

I much prefer the other large halls in the Los Angeles Convention Center that I’ve been in (South and West): they both provide for more…cheery venues.

On the plus side, the line to get in moved. When I got there, they even had staff walking up the line with wristbands looking for people who had all their paperwork and just needed to hand it over.

As it is, I didn’t make it to many panels. I kept getting to a room, checking the schedule and finding that the panel I was interested in had started 40 minutes earlier. (It didn’t help that they didn’t provide program booklets, but I’m sure that’s one of the ways they kept the cost down.) I caught a few minutes of a Star Trek cast panel (by which they meant Garret Wang (Harry Kim) and two guest stars from the original series, though a lot more of the actors had appeared for signings earlier in the day), and about 20 minutes of a panel on the “Evolution of the Modern Zombie,” led by the author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. I missed the DC New 52 Q&A panel entirely due to a mixup and the fact that I didn’t check my text messages frequently enough.

Some highlights: amazing Jack-o-Lanterns carved by The Pumpkin Geek using a Dremel tool. Optimystical Studios’ Zomb-Alert pendants, so that your loved ones will be able to honor your wishes in the event that you’re bitten by a zombie. The Starbucks buzz. The worst ice cream I’ve ever tasted. (OK, that’s a lowlight.) Walking up to a crowd of people taking pictures of someone I couldn’t see, asking what was going on, and learning that everyone was taking pictures of Stan Lee playing a video game.

And of course all the costumes: The woman who had painted Trill spots on herself. The three Johnny Depp characters who ran into each other. An actual Donna Troy/Wonder Girl. Several Ramona Flowers, one of whom was walking around with Scott Pilgrim. Lots of steampunk outfits.

There was a lot of stuff there, but unfortunately I was only interested in a fraction of it. Long Beach was, I think, a smaller con, but it really felt like a full day of entertainment. I think my Comikaze experience would have been better if if I’d managed to catch a couple of panels on time, or if I hadn’t just been to another con with a lot of the same artists, or if I’d actually found the two artists I was specifically looking for, but as it was, I felt done about two hours before the floor closed for the day.

I might go again next year, but if it’s right next to Long Beach again, or if I have to choose one over the other, it’ll be Long Beach.

» Photos on Flickr.

Of course, Halloween and horror did make their presence known, starting with the signs for zombie parking, and continuing with programming, guests and costumes. (Jump straight to the photos.)

Getting In

I’ve never had a problem getting into Long Beach before, but this year the line to get in stretched all the way to the end of the lobby. Or rather, the line for people who had pre-registered stretched that far. When I arrived, there were only a handful of people in line to buy tickets at the door, and I was kicking myself for the last-minute decision to buy my tickets ahead of time this year. It took 45 minutes to get through the line, but only 20 seconds to hand over my paperwork and pick up my wristband. They were efficient, just understaffed.

Still, it’s nothing compared to the time I went to San Diego without pre-registering — back when you could still do that — and I waited in line from 8:00am until noon.

Around the Con

The floor never got too crowded, but the only place it ever felt empty was way in the back by the fan groups and the wrestling ring. And there was nothing going on in the ring at the time. (The first time I saw wrestling at a comic con I thought it was weird – until I realized it was a bunch of guys in garish costumes fighting each other, often with code names and dual identities.) I think the longest line I saw was for John Carpenter.

Most of the well-known small publishers were there: Aspen has been really involved in the con from the beginning, and I saw BOOM!, IDW and Top Cow. There does seem to have been some drop-off. I can’t remember seeing Dark Horse or Zenescope, for instance, and either would be a shoo-in with the added horror theme. DC’s never had a booth here, but they held panels at the first two Long Beach Comic Cons, and they didn’t seem to have any official presence at all this time around. (They have a panel at Comikaze Expo this weekend instead.)

At the back of the main floor, the con had set up several event areas: a Laser Tag arena, a wrestling ring, and a stage. I wandered by the stage while Captured Aural Phantasy was performing a staged reading of an 1940s crime comic book: melodramatic, tongue-in-cheek, over the top, and thoroughly fun. I didn’t catch the title of that story, but they followed it up with “Revenge Can Be Fatal (The Mad Hate of Dr. Zart)” – a sordid (if sparse) tale of vicious betrayal and revenge gone wrong.

I didn’t make it to any of the panels this year, though I was glad to see they’d managed to get rooms close to the main hall this time. (Last year the programming was all the way around the other side of the convention center.) I kind of regret skipping out on the masquerade, though.

Artist/Writer Encounters

The first booth I went to was the Aspen Comics booth, and Joe Benitez was there. He signed my copies of Lady Mechanika #1 & #2, and while I didn’t talk with him very long, he said that issue #3 should be out within a few weeks.

I caught Marv Wolfman at the Hero Initiative booth (he was actually behind me in line for lunch, but I didn’t want to bother him while he was trying to eat), told him that his and George Perez’ classic run on The New Teen Titans is what got me into comics in general and DC in particular, and asked him to sign The New Teen Titans: Games, the long-delayed graphic novel that finally hit the shelves last month after nearly 20 years.

He asked me if I’d had a chance to read it.

And I had to admit that no, I hadn’t.

He suggested that I try to read it all at once, which is just as well, since that’s exactly why I haven’t gotten to it yet. He also said that this was the first work of his in a long time where he hasn’t found things he wanted to change after it was published.

I spent at least half an hour talking with Brian Buccellato, co-writer and colorist on the new Flash series. We’d talked on Twitter before, and met at a signing he did at The Comic Bug the week that Flash #1 was released. He was kind enough to give me a sneak peek at Flash #3 — which looks awesome! — and drew me a sketch of Impulse.

Swag

I didn’t buy much this year (lightest backpack ever, even with the stuff I brought for autographs), though I was seriously tempted by Absolute Sandman for 40% off. One of these days, I’ll buy it.

I did discover a new webcomic, Rock Paper Cynic, and picked up the first collection. The strip that convinced me was a reference to Chekhov’s Gun. What can I say? You can take the theater major out of the theater, but you can’t take the theater out of the theater major.

Try saying that three times fast.

I also picked up a two-issue indie book called Prodigal, which looks like an Indiana Jones-type adventure, and the Coffee: It’s What’s For Dinner collection from Sheldon. (This one pushed me over the “must buy” threshold.)

And when I went back to the Hero Initiative booth to link up my Ralphs card for their community charity program, I discovered that they were offering incentives to do so — one of which was the Transmetropolitan art book. I guess it makes sense: they get a lot more in the long run from an ongoing percentage of grocery purchases than they would from a one-time sale. But it still felt like a steal.

Outside the Con

I always try to get outside at least for a walk and a look around. The convention center’s right by the ocean, and while I didn’t explore as much as I did the first year, I did wander out on the deck/bridge past the Hyatt hotel next door. It turned out there was an event going on there as well, though much more sparsely attended: Over the Edge had city council members and other people rappelling down the side of the hotel to raise money for the Special Olympics. There were a few lunch trucks up on the bridge by the info booth, but in the end I decided to just go back to the convention center and grab a panini.

I went out again later on after I grabbed some coffee, and ran into a group of four or five guys who were out celebrating Halloween with what sounded like a costumed pub crawl. One of them wondered what was going on at the convention center, and someone said it was Comic-Con, and he said, “No it’s not! Comic Con is in September!” I told him that it was Long Beach Comic Con — “No way! There’s a Long Beach Comic Con now?” — yes, in its third year. I told him how much it cost, and let him know about Comikaze Expo next week. They moved on, and when I headed back toward the convention center a few minutes later, I saw Jabba the Hutt stopped at a food truck. People were stepping over his tail to get past. Later on I saw the same group in the lobby. I guess they’d decided to check it out.

I wonder if they ended up coming back for Sunday.

»More convention reports
»Take me to the photos!

Some guy asked me, “What’re you dressed up as?” And I said, “…a Muggle?”

(Full photo set on Flickr.)

Planning a trip to Comic-Con is always about trade-offs. It’s so big that you can’t see everything, and there are so many events going on that you can’t attend them all. With four days, there’s some wiggle room. With just one, it seemed like I was constantly thinking about those choices.

One of the first choices I made: No news panels. I could get that the next day online (and did). I wanted to focus only on what was unique to the con: exhibits, meeting people, the art show, etc. Basically, I wanted to experience as much of San Diego Comic Con as I could in one day.

Katie decided to pick two things and build her day around them: visiting The Field, an Irish pub our friend Sean introduced us to a few years ago, and seeing the new Thundercats screening.

The Main Floor

With just one day, I ended up doing several circuits of the exhibit hall instead of a thorough, aisle-by-aisle search. It seemed less crowded than I remembered, though that may have been because it was Friday.

I hit some of my usual targets: Stop at the Studio Foglio booth & get Phil & Kaja to sign my copy of the latest Girl Genius volume. Check out the displays at the DC Comics booth and Sideshow. Look for signings by artists and writers that I want to meet.

Unfortunately, my haphazard approach meant that I never made it back to Artist’s Alley after my initial pass to make a list of people I wanted to talk to later in the day. (I had the idea of trying to start a new Flash jam sketch and get Francis Manapul, Todd Nauck, and a few others.) And I forgot to come back to the BOOM! Studios booth for Mark Waid after buying a copy of The Unknown TPB for him to sign.

I did, however, finally pick up a copy of Boilerplate (a steampunk robot, photoshopped into historical photos, with stylistically appropriate articles written about the events) after walking by the display for several years running. And I stumbled across the Union of Superlative Heroes in the small press section.

I was also lucky enough to get a wrist band allowing me to buy the limited-edition convention exclusive Flashpoint: Reverse Flash action figure for Devin at Speed Force. It went about like this Gutters strip, except that there were fewer costumes and they hadn’t sold out when I got to the booth. Also, the line went very fast. I went through five times in about as many minutes (they were encouraging people to try again) until I drew a winning ticket.

Meeting People

It still amazes me that in a crowd of ~150,000 people, you can randomly run into people you know. I ran into my parents at the DC booth. I ran into our friend Wayne (whom we’d been planning to meet up with later anyway) in the lobby.

At one point, I was waiting to ask a question at the Mimobot booth when I looked over at an X-wing pilot and recognized a college classmate whom I hadn’t seen in over a decade. We talked for a bit, then I went back to the booth. As I left the booth, I spotted someone dressed as Ramona Flowers and walked up to ask for a photo. She turned out to be another college classmate from a completely different circle!

One of those trade-offs I mentioned earlier: Catching that day’s big DC Comics “New 52″ panel (not for the news, but for the chance to ask questions) or catching a meet-up of people in Flash costumes. I went for the meetup. Unfortunately, only two cosplayers showed up, but I did get to meet the people organizing it. I also got to meet @BitterWallyWest, and we talked about Flash and other comics (but mostly Flash) for a good 20-30 minutes or so.

The two of us, @SpeedsterSite and @TheFlashReborn had been trying to set up a meeting with all of us at once, but that didn’t work out. At the time, they were both in the New 52 panel. I finally caught up with them mid-afternoon, not long after @SpeedsterSite’s talk with Dan Didio.

Thundercats and the Plural of Apocalypse

Thundercats has since premiered on Cartoon Network, so if you catch a repeat of the pilot, Katie highly recommends it. This goes double if you’re among the child-of-the-80s crowd for whom it’s nostalgic. The audience for the panel was mostly this target demographic, and enough were habitual congoers that the preceding two panels were crammed. For the panel immediately preceding, a new thriller-genre ABC show called “The River,” this wasn’t much of a problem. But the one before that was “SpongeBob SquarePants,” and the campers were crowding out some kids. Katie let a family of first-time attendees cut ahead of her in line to get escorted to the last few seats.

The show itself is not just an update of the original cartoon, but also a reimagining. The characters have different backgrounds and relationships to one another, and the premise has been tweaked. They’re still on Third Earth, but rather than having crash-landed there, it’s their original home. Some plotholes have been plugged, and a lot of the cheese has (mercifully) been picked off. We haven’t yet seen all the major players from the previous series, and not all of those we have seen have met each other yet. And the original voice of Lion-O is in the cast…as his father. Worth standing in line for, and will be going on the DVR.

I only made it to one panel: “Writing the Apocalypse,” and while it was full, I mad no problem getting in just a few minutes before it started. Most of the guests were authors of zombie-related apocalypses, and I came away from the panel with two thoughts:

1. Mira Grant loves virology.
2. The premise of Soft Apocalypse sounds scarier than zombies.

Out in San Diego

We ventured outside the convention center twice: Once for lunch, and once for dinner. We’ve developed a tradition of hitting The Field, an Irish pub in the Gaslamp District, at least once each convention. Since I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d be doing, we figured we’d both aim for it, but not worry about getting there at the same time. As it was, we did manage to catch up briefly while Katie finished her lunch and I ordered mine.

The crowds around 5th Street weren’t as bad as I remember from last year. Maybe there were fewer people handing out fliers (though there was no shortage of women in skimpy outfits with stacks of postcards), or maybe the offsite events were just spread out better. Last year, the area between the Hilton and the trolley tracks had a bunch of tables and booths set up for the Scott Pilgrim promotion. This year I think it was just people until you actually walked into the exhibits. That alone may have helped immensely.

For dinner, we met up with Wayne after all our late-afternoon panels and final passes through the floor were complete. One problem: We hadn’t made reservations anywhere, and we had deadlines: Wayne needed to be back at the convention center by 8:00, and Katie and I needed to be on the train by 8:20 (or so we thought — more about that later). We ended up at the Broken Yolk Cafe (which I still want to call the Burnt Toast Diner for some reason), which was decent enough, but I like their breakfasts better. (That said, the next time I’m in Downtown San Diego for breakfast, it’s going to be Cafe 222.)

We wrapped up the day with stops at two more of our San Diego mainstays: Heavenly Cupcake (on 6th), and the Ghirardelli shop (on 5th). We were too stuffed for dessert, but cupcakes and chocolate both travel well.

The Journey Home

Neither of us had expected the longest line to be for the train ride home. We’d been advised to arrive early, and got to the station around 8:00 for our 8:20 train, but the train was delayed coming into San Diego. We didn’t even board until at least 9:00. (That this was the worst line either of us experienced has a lot to do with the choices we made about what to see at the con.)

Part of it was all the extra cars they’d added to cover not only people leaving San Diego after Comic-Con, but people leaving Solana Beach (the next stop north) after the evening’s races at Del Mar. The passengers who boarded in San Diego, for the most part, were exhausted after a day at the con, and quiet. If they talked, it was quietly, within groups. Those who boarded at Solana Beach had just finished an evening at the races, and they were excited, drunk and loud. It was an interesting contrast.

The train delay meant we got home around midnight. Definitely too late for a daily commute, especially with the hour drive to and from the train station. If we go more than one day next year, we’ll have to stay in town (or at least closer).

It’s sad that next year is an “if,” though. This was my twenty-second trip to Comic-Con, and Katie’s ninth or tenth. It’s never been a problem to get tickets ahead of time before, but they’d capped the line for the day’s 2012 pre-sale before we even arrived, and if online sales are anything like they were this year, it’s going to be a Hoteloween-level madhouse when they go on sale.

» Full photo set on Flickr.
» More convention write-ups and photos.

(No, that’s not us.)

I’ve posted my 2011 San Diego Comic-Con photos at Flickr. Actually, they’ve been up for a week, but I was so focused on coverage at Speed Force (when I had time for blogging, anyway) that I forgot to post a notice here.

I’m still working on a con write-up. It’s going to be a lot shorter than last year’s extensive coverage, probably a single post, mainly because we were only there for one day this year.

Enjoy the photos, and check back for the write-up. I’m hoping to have it done by the end of the weekend. We’ll see how that goes. Update: It’s done! The write-up is online!.