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!

Sunday morning we got up early so we could check out of the hotel and move the car. (We left most of our luggage stored at the hotel, but they wanted all the cars out of their valet lot by noon to make room for a new round of guests.) I was amazed that we managed to get a space in a lot literally right across the train tracks from the convention center. Of course, it was around 7:00 AM, and the con didn’t open until 9:30. Neither of us needed to get in immediately today, and standing in line for 2½ hours didn’t seem appealing, so we tried to find something else to do.

We went back to Cafe 222 for breakfast (it seems appropriate that we did it twice), then wandered the Gaslamp district a bit — which is a little creepy at that hour, when very little is open aside from coffee places and restaurants that serve breakfast, and few people are out and about aside from people working at deliveries, taking out trash, etc. and homeless people. Once the William Heath Davis House opened, we went into the museum and took a self-guided tour.

Back to the convention, we both spent the morning combing the floor. I focused on the artists’ area, and ended up getting another sketch, this one of Iris West II by Freddie Williams II. Eventually I made my way to the second DC Nation panel, dashed off a blog post, and discovered that my writeup of the Comic Book Tattoo panel and signing had hit Undented and at least half a dozen other blogs and forums. The 24 hours from 5pm Saturday to 5pm Sunday (midnight to midnight in UTC) had the highest traffic this blog has seen since I installed WP-Stats, something like a year and a half ago.

Katie hit the Cartoon Voice acting panel, during which room staff moved her purse without telling her. She stood up at the end of the panel and it was gone. We spent the next hour and a half talking to event staff (run by a different organization, so they didn’t actually talk to each other), filing a missing property report, reporting her credit card lost, and looking for the purse itself, until I went back into the room and checked with the tech table — and there it was.

We had just enough time to make it to the sing-along screening of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode, “Once More With Feeling.” It was different from last year, since it was a much bigger room and the sound was turned up too high to really hear the audience sing, but still a lot of fun.

Afterward, we wrapped up the weekend with ice cream at the Ghirardelli shop. Then we picked up the car and the luggage, and started the long drive home.

Reportedly the contestants didn’t get it.

Ironically, the event organizers had read about the protest in advance on Craigslist, and quickly got the “zombies” to sign release forms to appear on the show.

(via Cognitive Dissonance)

Last night I saw proof that zombies are at least branching out a little: they’re not just being used for email spam, but they’re also being used for comment spam. Starting around 8:30, someone started posting pairs of comments every 20-30 minutes. The content and links were identical each time, except for some random numbers in the (probably bogus) email and at the end of the body… but the IP address was different each time.

I caught it around 10:00, added “poker” to the list of moderation triggers, figured they’d give up when they saw their comments weren’t posting, and after another 3 pair (that’s not a legal hand, is it?) I just closed comments on the two posts.

Update 6pm: After a long afternoon dealing with server recovery issues, I checked my email and found about 40 “Please approve…” notices, starting around 1:45 and running all afternoon. All from the same blog spammer. A bit more aggressive than yesterday’s, because they hit a new post every time, but this batch all went straight into moderation. You’d think after you posted 20 comments and none of them showed up, you’d get the clue that it’s not worth posting 20 more…

Update 9am: I installed a plugin last night to block those comments from even reaching the moderation queue. Then laaate last night I noticed that it was screwing up comments with apostrophes, so I disabled it. The moderation notices started coming in immediately. 60 of them from around midnight to about 6am this morning. And none were ever displayed on the site. (Thank you, WordPress!)