I won't go to the San Diego Comic Con, which starts today with hundreds of thousands of fans hitting the streets of San Diego. And I have plenty of good reasons why. The San Diego Comic-Con is like going to Disneyland on the busiest, hottest, most expensive and least-organized day of the year at Disneyland. Does that sound like fun?
I know I wrote this guide to comic con if you're interested in what chicks are doing (Oh, look! It's about 1/100th of everything happening at the con) but seriously? I won't be at any of it.
The convention itself has outgrown its humble convention center and is literally bursting to full with sweaty, hot, and tired people who literally hemorrhage money for the entire weekend. Hotels jack up their prices to triple or quadruple (the Marriott, next to the convention, usually charges $150.00 a night. During Comic Con you can pay as much as $650.00 for the same room. Not only that, but the hotels are bought up by corporations months in advance and a regular shmuck must stay miles away from the convention itself and is forced to walk endless lengths in the heat to get there every morning.
The studios present insipid panels on upcoming movies like Twilight, and the auditoriums fill up in the early morning and NO ONE EVER LEAVES THEIR SEATS. That means, unless you arrive first thing and spend all day in an auditorium seat watching panels you care nothing about, you have zero chance of getting a seat for that one panel later in the day in which you actually might be interested.
Worst of all is the way that press are treated; I go as press. You want to write some stories, right? The whole point of being there is to find out what's going on in the world of genre entertainment and report on it. But press is given no access to panels (other than as an attendee) and is forced to jump through some ridiculous hoops to get the coverage they want. Oh yeah - you can't videotape panels. But you CAN go home, transcribe the panel for 3 hours, write up a news story about it, and then the next morning the news will be obsolete. Worth it? I think not. Why not just Not GO to the convention, turn on the computer in the morning, and see what everyone else is reporting on? Because of blackberries, there's about a 5 second lag time between panel scoops and Bloody-Dusgusting.com's posting said scoop.
More than all this, I just don't care. Journalists go to tacky, boring and cramped parties hosted by Lionsgate and Sony and drink and get wasted and meet minor celebrities and it accomplishes nothing.
Oh, and did I mention the retards running around in costumes who look embarrassing?
With no TWILIGHT panel to clog up every square inch of the place with shrieking teenage girls the con may actually be tolerable this year.
But a lot of people seem to think, as you do, that it has outgrown its environment and a fairly radical change needs to happen to either expand it further or shrink it down. Not every single movie in production that won't be out for another 18 months needs a goddamn hour-long panel.
Now I've never been to a big con like this, but I imagine it must smell like a slaughterhouse in there.