Love’s Labour Lost: No Badge Resale For San Diego Comic-Con 2014

We’ve written more than once about the Herculean, if not Sisyphean, effort it takes to attend San Diego Comic-Con these days. The Hercules metaphor is probably more accurate, since between pre-registration, registration, hotel registration and assorted travel and vacation time booking, the steps you need to complete to make it to the show approach Twelve Labours. However, for many people the Sisyphus analogy is more apropos, because when it comes to Comic-Con, if you make a single misstep, the rock will roll right back down over you.

With that said, there has always been one final chance for all comers to attend Comic-Con: the final badge resale. For the past few years, what has happened is that, once the first cancellation deadline for hotel rooms passed (which happened on April 30th this year) and the convention badge refund date has gone by, the nice folks who run the convention sell the returned badges to desperate people who haven’t been able to navigate the process fully successfully.

So that’s nice, isn’t it? No matter what happens leading up to the final date, everyone gets one last bite at the apple to attend the biggest pop culture convention of the year. So that final badge resale should be happening any day now, right?

Yeah, not this year.

From the Comic-Con Toucan Blog:

In past years Comic-Con International has been able to hold a sale of returned and unallocated badges in June. Unfortunately, due to an extremely low rate of refunds and cancellations this year, we are not able to hold a resale of Comic-Con 2014 badges. Thank you for your support and understanding.

So what does this mean? Well, beyond the cold fact that there are no more 2014 passes for sale, I’m not sure really. But if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the high-pressure, trial-after-trial nature of attending SDCC since about, say, 2011, has led to a pool of people who will only go through the process if they fully intend to attend the convention no matter what. As late as the late 2000s, it was possible to preorder tickets right at the convention and take the next nine months trying to figure out if attending can be finagled. I’m sure a lot of those pre-purchasers returned the passes when they found out that they couldn’t book the room next to Joe Quesada at the Hyatt, leading to a nice pool of tickets to resell in June.

These days, when even the pre-registration for prior attendees requires a minimum of two and a half hours on the Internet on a Saturday, often from two different locations to make sure you can actually obtain those tickets, well, it’s not like you’re putting yourself through that headache based on an idle whim that you might go to the con, if only Jasmine can swap shifts with you at your Starbucks day gig.

No, you’re debasing yourself in that fashion because you are going to the convention even if half of San Diego is on fire while the other half shudders impotently into the bay during the Godzilla earthquake. Which means that you are not highly likely to turn around and put your tickets back up for sale… and I’m guessing that this is, for good or ill, the new normal. Historically, a major change in SDCC registration never reverts to a prior, more convenient state. And if that trend continues, it means that there will likely never again be a June badge resale for SDCC, which will only further mean that pre-registration and registration will become even more heated and crowded and difficult to navigate.

San Diego Comic-Con is possibly approaching a Singularity, where only the neckbearded and terminally obsessed can attend on a year to year basis. Which is good news for me, but which will be tough for everyone else.