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!

Nothing official happens at SDCC until the early afternoon, when the finally open the doors and start letting people in to trade in the barcode printout that they send to attendees sometimes 11 months earlier (and woe be onto you if you accidentally deleted that email, Charlie – no barcode with matching photo ID, no ticket), so you need to find shit to do until that happens. Thankfully, there is a certain amount of spectacle to be found just around the convention center and the town, as displays and gear begin to be deployed in anticipation of the start of the convention proper. I mean, we saw the fucking Oscar Mayer Weinermobile just parked in the street on the way back from breakfast, for Christ’s sake. How often do you see something called The Weinermobile, with the phrase “Bunderstruck” associated with it, outside of the scope of a local TV news story that opens with, “…in a fraternity prank gone horribly wrong…”?

And upon our return to the convention center, we found that the people handling the giant, blow-up Tiny Titans had finished putting together the Lego version of Bilbo’s house from The Hobbit, which was kind of a cool thing to see… meaning now we only had four hours to kill before we could go pick up our laminates. Now, once upon a time, we would take this as an excuse to go somewhere and get liquored up before hitting the floor, but this is no longer an option, for reasons which will soon become apparent. So instead, we decided to walk down to Seaport Village (named after the old Mexican word phrase for “tourist trap”, which lies about two miles from our hotel. This is a fine way to knock off a few hours, and to build that anticipation for the convention! Because once you realize that maybe you’ve tweaked your ankle two hours before anything convention-related has actually happened, you will start anticipating stuff! That stuff being crippling pain!

So after a nap and several aspirin, we made our way over to pick up our badges. And, of all the changes and the exploding size of the convention, this is one area of SDCC that has actually gotten easier over the years.

If you wait until, say, 3:30 p.m. to go the the convention center for your badge, there is almost no line. They get you in, get to the the staging area, and usher you to one of literally dozens of check-in terminals, where a quick scan of your barcode and driver’s license gets you your badge. We were in and out in probably ten minutes… unlike the people in the professional and press checkin lines. We spoke to one person with pro credentials (who didn’t want to be identified, because she likes having a pass for Comic-Con) who said that, even as late as 7 p.m., the professional checkin line went from the convention center to the Marriott, fully a block away. And while I would, someday, like to secure press status at the convention, there was a way that this professional slurped at her beer, in a way that indicated efforts to kill pain, that made me think maybe I’ll just keep buying passes for as long as I can get them.

But that beer was after we attended Preview Night. We no longer drink before Preview Night, which is something that we used to enjoy. It was fun to whack away four or five Stone Arrogant Bastard Ales, then wander onto the convention floor, roll around like lunatics and making a lot of noise, taking weird pictures and giggling at the spectacle. That was something that you could legitimately do until, say, 2008. It is not, however, 2008. And here is the proof.

In what, for years, was a benefit night for a small group of diehards who were looking to score a convention exclusive or two has become no different than any other day on the convention floor. Where just a few years ago it was possible, on Preview Night, to run drunkenly into the toy retailers section and get a goofy picture lounging on a giand Jabba The Hutt sculpture, last night that area was almost literally impassable. The area around Hasbro, near some of the movie and TV studio booths, was a crosscut intersection that took us no less than five minutes to negotiate the fifteen feet.

And the other problem is, there is sometimes really a dearth of actual news to be had on Preview Night. Whereas last year we scored some early tidbits from the DC Entertainment booth, what with the Man of Steel Superman costume, the previously-unseen Arrow costume, and some rumors about what villains would be appearing in the Injustice: Gods Among Us video game, this year DC used their space to celebrate Superman’s 75th anniversary (and the fact that Man of Steel was actually a big enough hit that they haven’t lost sight of Marvel Studios’ taillights) by displaying a variety of Superman costumes from movies dating back to 1978’s Superman: The Movie. I’m guessing they would have displayed George Reeves’s suit from The Adventures of Superman, but they couldn’t get out the bloodstains (Boom! Headshot! Seriously… that’s how he went out. Hello? Is this thing on?).

So yeah: not a lot of news to report from Preview Night… but there was spectacle, and even a little cosplay (which you never used to see on Preview Night). So here’s a load of the photos we took from the event, which you can enjoy while we trek out to hit the floor again and attend a few actual comics panels, to try to bring you some actual comics news. Click any of them to check them out full-sized (and if the image page cuts the image off, just click the picture again to see the whole thing)