Convalescence

San Diego Comic-Con is a hell of a thing. It is something that any genre geek working a job that coughs up two weeks vacation and pays enough to allow you to drink anything higher-end than Country Club Malt Liquor aspires to attend. Attendance requires almost a full year of planning – if last year was any guide, then the presale for next year’s passes for this year’s attendees will be in two or three weeks, and we’ll be booking our backup hotel room by the end of August – and attendance, which is something that one ostensibly does for fun, is completely and utterly physically crippling.

I am writing this at 6:14 a.m. Eastern time. This time yesterday, I was sleeping through 3:14 a.m. Pacific time. Today, however, I have been up for an hour, having awakened with a terrible stitch in my side from sleeping in my own fucking bed. I have a recurring, rolling fever that is giving me something that feels remarkably like the douchechills, and my lower body, after five days of almost nonstop walking, feels like I forgot to keep up on some Winter Hill Gang bookie’s vig. I have the remainder of the week off of my day job because I have long since learned that five days at Comic-Con plus two days travel requires six days of recovery time – two weeks would really be better, but I want to keep that job that allows me to take off for two weeks at a time – in the middle of a crunch delivery time, no less – to gawk and cosplayers and buy odd comic books, exclusive action figures and t-shirts that the the mechanics of the video game Portal to make off-color jokes.

And make no mistake: I obtained all of those things… and they are being shipped to me via a very expensive UPS transaction. Because if I’d had to physically haul all of that through the airline system yesterday, I’d have shattered like old carnival glass.

We do our best to cover the actual news of the convention, at least on the comic book side – getting into Hall H or Ballroom 20 to catch the big movie and TV panels is a sucker’s game. Sure, we could have spent the entire day in the Big Room to see Tom Hiddleston in his Loki costume, and to be amongst the first to live-Tweet, “Avengers 2 is Age of fucking Ultron? What’s next? Is The Amazing Spider-Man 2 gonna be based on One More Day?” but that would have been all we did and all we reported on. Because seeing the events in the big room is a commitment; the diehards who see those panels spend the whole day there. Meaning that they know that Zack Snyder will be directing Batman / Superman… but they have no idea that the guys in the Marvel Ultimates panel dodged the question as to whether there would even be a need for an Ultimates panel in 2014 (and I will be finally writing up that panel later today or tomorrow).

And here’s thing about the big panels: you don’t need to put yourself through sitting in a line like a 1980s communist waiting for toilet paper to see what happened. They always wind up on YouTube anyway. Hell, here’s that Batman / Superman announcement, recorded by some kind soul and uploaded, while Amanda and I were obtaining limited edition Shazam and Superman action figures so I can pose my personal favorite childhood superhero battle on my mantle:

And even making the commitment to just hit the comic panels doesn’t mean you actually can. Last year, a lot of the big comic panels were scheduled in the same room, back to back to back. That didn’t happen as much this year, and besides: we are a small, two-person operation, and those people are both disintegrating as we get older. We really, really wanted to hit the Batman: Zero Year panel, but at 11:15 a.m. on Saturday, we were stumbling from restaurant to restaurant looking for food that wouldn’t aggravate the intestinal parasite I’d felt like I picked up from lunch the day before (note to self: a cheeseburger with beef and spicy chorizo sausage might sound like a good plan and it is… provided you have a lot of reading to catch up on and the maids left extra toilet paper like you asked (protip: they didn’t).

So while we didn’t get as much in the way of news as we could have in a perfect world, the fact of the matter is the we are only human. Human geeks, who wanted a little more out of Comic-Con than to sit in panels and fill notebooks with quotes and hype. We also wanted action figures and the Dr. McNinja omnibus (with a Chris Hastings sketch of the good doctor saying, “Rob: I’m a doctor. I know science,” on the front page). So we tried to get it all.

At one of the panels that we attended, I would up sitting next to one of the name writers from one of the big comics Web sites. And that guy had his shit down to a science, man; where Amanda and I cover panels by me scribbling notes in an old-fashioned reporter’s notebook (old habits from a college print journalism degree die hard), while Amanda tries to live-Tweet through the annual San Diego Late July Internets Drought, both of which I then try to compile into something entertaining that makes some sense, this guy had a system. He sat down, fired up a MacBook, logged directly into his site’s content management system, and dutifully copied down every remotely salient quote that came from the panel. When the panel was all said and done, he pressed the “publish” button and had a complete article about what happened… but there didn’t seem to be much in the way of fucking joy in what he put together. Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure the dude is a very nice man, who attended some of the after hours comic parties by invitation, and spoke to many creators who would never in a million years speak to us (all under the assumption that every word they said was automatically off the record), and I’m sure that he would never write that the idea that turning John Constantine into Captain Marvel sounds as dumb as a box of hammers.

And that’s one way of doing business… but business isn’t any Goddamned fun, is it? And comics are supposed to be fun; you don’t get an eighth of a million people in one place, many of whom are dressed as superheroes (whether they should be or not; I saw one woman dressed as Phoenix who could only destroy worlds by dragging them out of orbit with her own gravity field) and standing in line to buy children’s toys and comic books because there’s a payday in it. Sure, there are some people who are there for the payday, but we call those people the straight media. And if they weren’t there, the celebrities wouldn’t be either, and we wouldn’t have the (remote) chance to laugh at the size of Zack Snyder’s penis at the urinal in the men’s room near the gaming area.

So yeah: we will have some more actual comic news from Comic-Con coming up in the immediate future. But we did the best we could with what we had to work with (as we will with the Boston Comic Con a week from Saturday), and with what we could do, between terrible physical exhaustion (update: this part of the piece is being written at 6:30 p.m., after involuntarily collapsing into a sweaty sleep on the couch for about four hours. Reports from Amanda that I was also muttering, “Just cut off my fucking legs and rent me a Little Rascal scooter” are unconfirmed) and just the urge to experience the spectacle.

I mean, how can any two people make the commitment to spend the day robotically uploading pubic relations quotes from comics editorial professionals when there’s this kind of spectacle around?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go obtain beer of a high enough octane to stop my motherfucking hands from shaking.