This time last weekend, I was feeling no shortage of jealousy over not being at San Diego Comic-Con Special Edition, the official name given to the mini SDCC running over Thanksgiving weekend. It wasn’t that I wasn’t enjoying time off and spending it with Chloe and the family here at home, just the opposite; but I would check social media or websites and see people who were there, talking about how it was a Comic-Con like SDCC used to be, more than a decade ago; where it felt more about the comics and less about the movies. Where it wasn’t a mass of humanity that felt like a crowd at every moment for a five day stretch. Where it might even have been — dare I say it? — fun.
(I saw a report that said that Hall H, the mammoth room where the big movie presentations normally happen, had been transformed into a COVID testing area, which felt like some kind of larger point was being made about the world we’re living in now, but, well, this is the world we’re living in, now.)
I’d check in and see people I know post photos of places I know, and I admit it; I’d feel as if I was missing out. If only I could just be there, it would be just like old times, I thought to myself wistfully, because I miss comic conventions and seeing friends the way things used to be.
And then, all the news about the Omnicron variant started breaking, and I thought, well, at least I didn’t have to travel and hang around in airports when that was happening. And then the news this week broke that the second person identified as having the Omnicron variant had attended an anime convention in New York in mid-November, and I thought to myself, really, what are the odds that someone from that convention was also at San Diego Comic-Con Special Edition? Probably really good odds.
That, dear reader, is how I learned to stop worrying and give up being jealous about not going to comic book conventions. At least, this time around.