On The Road Again

Comic-Con is well and truly over now, and we are packed and preparing to flee the city before the workmen pull down the Comic-Con trade dress from the convention center, thus exposing San Diego for what it truly is: a simple midsized American city with a heavy military presence, and a climate tailor-made for junkies, crackheads and homeless alcoholics.

We will be in the air most of the day, but we’ll try to post more photos and videos later this evening, once we are safely reensconced in the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office in Boston.

We Have Walked Through The Fire

The annual goodbye party for the San Diego Comic-Con – a screening of Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s season six musical episode, Once More With Feeling – concluded about an hour and a half ago.

And, as last year, the proceedings started with Nicholas Brendan live on stage, singing his old, “Wicca good and I’ll be over here,” in shades and a douchebag Fedora, continued with repeated and rousing denunciations of Dawn as the ruiner of all things good and fun (and at least one loud “Fuck off!” after Dawn sang, “Does anybody even notice?” – you’re welcome, Fandom), and ended, as always, with a bittersweet run for the doors.

Comic-Con is now officially over, which is always a strange feeling. As Amanda and I say every year: we wish it would never end, but if it didn’t, we don’t think we could take anymore. We are exhausted, and we still have panels to write about and video and pictures to upload. Not to mention a cross-country flight to pack for.

But those things can wait. Because we have, after all, survived, and that requires a little celebration. Which means that this is the end of our broadcast day.

So while we do that celebrating (we are posting this from my phone at the Hyatt bar) and packing…

See you tomorrow, suckers!

Hitting The Floor: SDCC 2013 Preview Night

One of the biggest problems wth Preview Night at San Diego Comic-Con is that it happens at night. It’s not the biggest problem, but it’s up there.

Here’s how Wednesday at SDCC works for your typical attendee (and at this point, we still buy our own passes, as opposed to trying to obtain press credentials, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment): you get up and you have some coffee and something to eat. Congratulations! It is now, say, 9:30 a.m. Now you need to find something to do for the next four, five hours!

Calm Before The Geekstorm

You cannot find a Dunkin’ Donuts in San Diego. This is more dire than it first might sound.

We take our Dunkin’ Donuts coffee seriously in New England. There isn’t a highway offramp between Providence and Bar Harbor where you can’t find a D & D within half a mile, and it is the morning beverage of choice for everyone other than the hipster douchebags who live near Boston University or in Cambridge or maybe Brookline, and no one gives much of a fuck what those commies think anyway.

As an example: while waiting in line for the TSA security screening at Logan Airport yesterday, there was a teenaged girl, who looked as exhausted as Amanda and I felt, slurping on a large Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee when the security drone told her she couldn’t bring any liquids through the checkpoint. She asked the guy if there was a “Dunkies” after the checkpoint, and when he told her no, she left the fucking line and went to the back so she could finish her dollar-fifty coffee.

So when I woke up at 5 a.m. local time here in San Diego, jetlagged and hung over, I asked my magical new smartphone if southern California had heard the word of God between last year and this year, it turns our that had… but not in any way that would help me.

Sure, there’s a Starbucks in the lobby of our hotel, but as a Bostonian, I believe that Starbucks hot coffee tastes as if it were heated with napalm while being filtered through crushed Galouise cigarettes. So I trudged off toward downtown to see what other options the good people of San Diego might have for a visitor who is wishing for either coffee or a quiet death.

And, as with every year, I was struck by the feeling of calm. The calm before the Geekstorm.

Boots On The Ground, Brainstem In The Gutter: Arrival At San Diego Comic-Con 2013

Editor’s Note: The following post was written from an outdoor patio, soon after arriving in San Diego, while we had no hotel room yet, nor Internet access from which to upload it. It is probably being uploaded hours later from some friendly bar with free WiFi, with far more photographs than are described in the post itself. In fact, many of the posts you read here this week will be written in one place, posted from another, with photos and video captured rom yet other places and uploaded when more than a bar of WiFi shows up on one device or another. In short: welcome to San Diego Comic-Con.

The toughest thing about the San Diego Comic-Con is that it is in San Diego. And while this is not a problem for the Los Angeles-based television and movie people who attend the convention, making it the biggest genre and pop culture convention in the Western world, it is a problem for a couple of people running a two-person comics Web site… at least it is a problem when that two-person comics Web site is based in Boston.

There are only two effective ways to get to SDCC from Boston: fly, or go on a desperate and full-throttled whiskey bender sometime toward the end of June and hope that you emerge from the blackout there. And considering Column B has not worked out in my favor any year between 1992 and now, that meant an airplane.

The problem is that there are only two airlines that fly non-stop between Boston and San Diego (and I must fly non-stop; any longer than eight hours in the nicotine-free airline system, and I will wind up in the nicotine-free prison system): American Airlines and JetBlue. And that really means that there is only one airline possibility, because careful personal research has proven that American Airlines sucks.

The tricky part is that JetBlue changes the times of their non-stop flight to San Diego every year, and sometimes more than once a year; literally every year I have booked tickets with them prior to this year, I have received an automated phone call advising me that the time has been pushed out, sometimes by hours. So it was without too much trepidation that, back in February, I booked two tickets on JetBlue’s 7 a.m. flight out of Logan Airport, because hey: they were gonna change it. Right?

Yeah, no. So this morning, our alarm clock fired at 3:30 a.m. to get us ready for a 4:30 a.m. cab ride to Logan to get us there in time to remove our shoes and our dignity for the Transportation Security Agency’s screening process. The 7 a.m. flight left promptly at 7:25 a.m. (because hey: Logan Airport), and made record time dropping us here in beautiful downtown San Diego five and a half hours later. Unfortunately, with the time zone changes, that meant it was 10 a.m. local time. So my body was screaming for lunch while it was really breakfast time, and as of this writing, it is whimpering that it is Beer O’Clock… while we still have two and a half hours to go until we can even check into our hotel.

So with that kind of time to kill, we wandered the downtown area and took some photographs of the spectacle that will, in about 27 hours, become San Diego Comic-Con 2013. And you can find those pictures right here. Not everything is completed, and some of the hype attracters are still in the process of being constructed, but at least you can get a sense of what is coming, once things go into full blast during tomorrow’s Preview Night.

How To Survive Comic-Con Without Really Trying: 2013 Edition

We are in the final throes of preparation for heading to San Diego for Comic-Con 2013, which means we don’t have a lot of time today, but it does mean that we’re in the process of putting into place a bunch of the stuff that we’ve learned about how to survive what amounts to a six-day forced march through spectacle, excitement, a marked lack of easy-to-access Internet, crowded restaurants and line – dear God, the lines.

But as we did last year, we’ll share a few of the lessons that we’ve learned about how to survive the process. Now, since our time is limited today, I’m not gonna go back and read what I wrote back then, but simply vomit some stuff into the keyboard… which in and of itself will be good experience to prepare for a six-hour session of daydrinking in the sun at Dick’s Last Resort on 5th Avenue.

Long Con To Short Con: Boston Comic Con Releases Panel Schedule

The Boston Comic Con was originally scheduled to take place in late April, but had to be postponed for the most mundane of reasons: a mad bomber who had blown up a part of the street where the convention was scheduled to be held was on the loose, leading to a five-city cop lockdown and to most of the population of Eastern Massachusetts to scream at their televisions, “Just turn the dogs loose on the prick so I can get to the fucking bar!” You know, everyday irritations.

Well, the convention was very quickly rescheduled for August 3rd and 4th. Which was great, and we couldn’t wait to throw our support behind it… until we realized that that weekend was less than two weeks after the San Diego Comic-Con, which is an experience that normally takes us an entire week from which to recover from the fatigue hysteria.

Oh, make no mistake: we’re still going. It might mean that by mid-August we are so ravaged that we are unable to write anything more complicated than, “Comics are neat,” but we are going.

Because not only has the guest list ballooned since the reschedule, including Dan DiDio, Scott Snyder, James O’Barr, Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez to name a few, but the convention has just published their panel schedule for the event. Now, make no mistake: Boston Comic Con is still a small convention as these things go – San Diego’s panel schedule fills a magazine-sized book every year, while Boston’s fits comfortably on a single Web page – but still, you need to remember that as recently as 2009, Boston Comic Con wasn’t big enough to host any panels. So following that growth path, maybe in a few years I’ll be able to attend a massive comic convention without having to spend five and a half hours on a smoke-free airplane.

So yeah, there are only a few panels over the two-day event… but there’s one or two that you won’t be able to see anywhere else. You can get the whole schedule here, but as we did with the San Diego Comic-Con event schedule, I’m gonna call out a few that look particularly interesting to us.

Rising Conflict: San Diego Comic-Con 2013 Saturday and Sunday Panel Schedules Released

San Diego Comic-Con is many things to many people: a giant excuse to get drunk in a setting where you can strike up a conversation about Batman with whoever happens to be sitting next to you at the bar, a chance to get pictures with celebrities, a way to get loot you can’t get anywhere else, or an excuse to dress up like a superhero and jam up floor traffic every time you strike some form of pose.

And it is true; SDCC is all of those things to some people But there is one thing that Comic-Con is to all people: a scheduling nightmare where, no matter what panel you think you might want to see, there is at least one panel opposite that panel that you equally want to see.

And SDCC 2013 is no different. The convention has released the panel schedule for Saturday and Sunday, and there is a veritable pile of cool and interesting panels to check out. And you can get the full Saturday and Sunday schedules at the Comic-Con Web site, but as we did with the Thursday and Friday schedules a couple of days ago, we’ll call out some that look interesting, some that we’re gonna try to get to and report on… and some that just seem… a little weird.

#TheFourth – New Tom Baker-centric Doctor Who Promo Clip

Bleeding Cool has posted about a new video from BBC Worldwide. It features camera panning over illustrations of the fourth Doctor’s companions, with audio clips from selected companions and Tom Baker. While it could be that the video is a promo for an upcoming Doctor Who DVD box set Doctor Who: the Doctors Revisited 1-4, which will be released on July 16, it could also be as simple as BBC Worldwide being a bit tongue in cheek – it was released on July 4th. Probably not directed at us Americans for our nation’s birthday, but who knows? The series’ massive popularity of late here in the United States is why Stephen Moffat remains still employed, to the eternal bafflement of many fans of the classic series and the earlier Russell T. Davies reboot episodes.

Decisions, Decisions: Thursday and Friday San Diego Comic-Con Panel Schedules Released

We are in the middle of a heat wave here in Boston; temperatures have been above 90 degrees outside with extremely high humidity… and until about 90 minutes ago, temperatures inside the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office were roughly the same. However, a nice man came out and said he needed to work with something called  “blower motor,” which, after ascertaining that he wasn’t using code to seek a favor other than money to Make Cool Air Engine Go, has begin to cut through the disgusting humid stew in which we have been living for almost 48 hours.

All in all, it has been enough to make a man seek out a different climate: one with cool breezes, next-to-no humidity, and where air conditioning is a nice bonus as opposed to being the only piece of technology separating humanity from regular frustrated stabbings.

Which is a long way to go to say that we are beginning to develop a powerful anticipation for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, and that it has been good timing that they have begun to release their programming schedule over the past couple of days. Specifically, they have publicised the panels for Thursday an Friday, which you can find here for Thursday and here for Friday… although I’ll be commenting on some specific panels that look promising – or ridiculous – after the jump.