Tag: San Diego Comic-Con

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Stay At Home Con

The reality of there being no San Diego Comic-Con has fully set in by now, of course; this is the day I should be in the air on the way to Southern California for a week of overwork and panicked socializing, seeing people in person that I’ve only talked to via email or Slack for a year. Alas, this year, it’s not to be, and I’ll admit that I’m still struggling with that in a number of ways.

Don’t get me wrong; with everything happening in the world, I don’t want to be in a packed convention center with hundreds of thousands of other people right now, especially not in all-too-warm San Diego, with everyone sweating over each other — if ever there was a perfect petri dish for infection, it’d be that scenario. (Also, at this stage of quarantine, even the idea of being in that kind of crowd feels unreal and more than a little scary; imagine going from being cut off from the rest of the world for four months to suddenly being seemingly surrounded in close quarters by it!)

But the fact remains that the loss of SDCC feels like the true signifier that this year has been lost to the plague, for some dumb internal system waiting to reach a particular level before sounding the alarm. This is where the true break is for my ridiculous broken brain. If there’s no San Diego Comic-Con, then all is lost, apparently. Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico…?

It’s that the SDCC trip has been, perpetually, the closest thing I’ve had to a summer vacation in — what, a decade, if not longer, by this point…? That’s part of it, and that it is a place (and event) that resonates so strongly for me for a number of reasons, as well; more than any other convention — the others all feel like “work trips” far more than SDCC, even though I traditionally work irrationally hard at SDCC — it’s become a traditional place to see friends and have experiences that are often surreal and heightened and a break from reality in some indistinct, but very real, way.

Perhaps that’s what I’m missing the most from the absence of the show this year — that break from the norm. 2020 is a year that’s “not normal,” of course, but it’s steamrolled everything into this new shape where everyday is more or less like the one before because we’re in the same space, doing the same thing, all the time. If ever there was a need for something unusual and special, it’s now — but, instead, SDCC has been cancelled and replaced by an event online that we watch from the comfort of our own homes, like everything else.

I miss the alternative, is all.

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The Fruits of Your Labor

Every now and then, I remember that there’s no San Diego Comic-Con this year, and I get newly sad all over again.

I mean, it only makes sense — even if organizers and the state of California had made the utterly nonsensical decision to go ahead with the show for some ridiculous reason, I don’t think I would have actually attended, because, well, global pandemic and all — but, still. I write “I don’t think” intentionally, because before the show was actually cancelled, I found myself thinking, please just properly cancel it, if you go ahead, I know that far too much of me will still want to go even though it’d be far too dangerous. I know my dumb, dumb limits.

It’s not just that I’ve been going to SDCC for more than a decade now, although that matters, somehow. It’s part of my year, every year, when I map it out in my head — there’s a week long break that’s not actually a break, but actually a stressful, enjoyable, surreal work-filled experience, in the middle of the year every single year that I look forward to. A week unlike any other, for better or worse, when it feels like things get turned up to maximum and it’s just go go go. I love that.

I love the San Diego trip every year — the weather, the break from routine, the seeing familiar faces that I only get to see once or twice a year but adore nonetheless. There’s a very specific, hectic, frenetic rhythm to the trip, the way that the boredom of the traveling transfers into a palpable anticipation and tension as the actual show nears, and then pow, it’s happening and it just stays happening for five days. I love that rhythm, as unhealthy as it is. It’s become tradition, or more, by now.

San Diego Comic-Con is also personally important in ways that are near impossible to explain; professionally, it’s easy — I’ve made connections, friends, there that are important and necessary. But there are memories and moments from multiple trips that have nothing to do with work that matter just as much, if not more so; the epiphanies I’ve had, feelings I’ve felt, during those shows that have changed and shaped my life moving forward. The show matters to me, on some strange, real level.

And so, no San Diego this year. Next year, who knows…? But until it returns, until I return, I’ll miss it and, every now and then, miss it and think about what it means to me.

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The Fireworks That Happen

What I took away from this year’s San Diego Comic-Con wasn’t how achy I felt at the end of each day — perhaps it’s just me getting older, or perhaps I’m out of shape more than I knew, but boy, did I feel the effects of running around the convention more than I used to, my poor feet — or anything about the excitement of the news announced, or the stress of getting those announcements out as PR folk got very nervous about the whole thing. (That happened a bunch, actually.) Nope, it was about the people I was there with.

I have, for awhile, said that the best part of San Diego is seeing the people I only ever see at the show each year — my THR crew, various folk who work at publishers scattered across the country, across the world — but this year brought that home in a manner that was, for want of a less sentimental term, heartwarming. The highlights of the show for me weren’t panels or booths or anything contained in the convention center at all. (No, nor were they the off-site “activations,” either; those remain exhausting and make the convention seem claustrophobic at times. Sometimes, you just want to leave the convention. And they weren’t the parties either, although those remain a strange and wonderful thrill.)

What I’ll remember — and, to be honest, treasure — were the meals and conversations away from everything, utterly unrelated to work, with people I’ve known for years but never really had the chance to just… sit down and talk to, properly.

Last year’s San Diego Comic-Con was amazingly big for me, personally, for all manner of reasons. I flew into the show this year in a strange state of mind, filled with a knowledge that this year couldn’t compare for obvious reasons, and… as I write this, on the last day of the show and with the memories of the last few days in my head, I think I might have been wrong. This year’s show was, in some inexplicable sense, about being included in a community — or, perhaps, knowing that I have built a community around me and been accepted by it, completely. Words can’t describe what that actually feels like, properly.

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The Importance of Being Idle

By now, I’ve got San Diego Comic-Con coverage down to a fine art. (Writing that ahead of time, as I’m doing, is tempting fate; for all you know, I might actually be having a mild nervous breakdown as you read these words.) I’ve been covering the show as press for more than a decade at this point, which is honestly somewhat surreal to think about, but it’s also allowed me to have a reasonable sense of what is needed and when, and how to do it. I actually — as shocking as it may be to actually admit — enjoy the show now, working it and the surreal experience of the whole thing, and the pressure of work that comes with it.

Part of that is, mind you, that the amount of work I do for THR, who I’ve been covering the show for for the past few years, is significantly less than other outlets. (The io9 days, I still shiver when remembering.) That’s not to say that I’m not actually working, mind you; it’s just that I know what I need to do and I know I can do it. The stress level is significantly lessened from previous visits.

There was, however, one year when I really did pretty much do almost no work at the show. Or, rather, I didn’t do anything immediately. I was working for an outlet I won’t name for fear of embarrassing anyone related to it, but the decision had been made that the approach to coverage would be very different on that year, compared with others. The many of us who were attending on behalf of this outlet were tasked with three things:

  1. Posting images and brief commentary on the outlet’s liveblog throughout the show.
  2. Interviewing people for stories to be written and posted after the convention.
  3. Working on a large thinkpiece-type story to be posted after the convention, but focusing on a trend or news story that we found at the show.

As if this didn’t seem breezy enough, midway through the show, I discovered that the third option was off the table, meaning that I could pretty much wander around, talking to people who seemed interesting and taking the occasional photo, and that counted as work.

At this point, I’d been to Comic-Con as press perhaps four or five times, and each year had been a shitshow in a series of new and increasingly ridiculous ways. Suddenly, I was given this surreal gift of being able, essentially, to have a vacation at Comic-Con. It was an utter joy, and even as it was happening, I knew it would never be this good ever again.

(Yet, despite the above, I still think that Comic-Con 2018 was the highlight of all my years at the show.)

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Those Were The Days, My Friend

It’s the first day of San Diego Comic-Con 2019. (Well, it’ll soon be Preview Night, technically; but that’s the first day, really.) As you read this, I’ll be in the air on the way to the show itself, but I thought I’d share this piece of Comic-Con ephemera — me on Preview Night 2008, looking every bit of the excitable nerd that I was back in the day. (Look at that smile.) I’m pretty sure this is the first year that I covered the show as press.

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Ess Dee Ay Dee

It’s San Diego Comic-Con this week, the time of the year when the comic industry gets even more self-obsessed, and the rest of the genre entertainment industry joins in; I’m not going to the show this year – Second time running, although this year I had a period of thinking “Do I want to go? Maybe I do,” unlike last year’s very definite sense of “I don’t want to go, not in the slightest, how can I get out of this?” – but that hasn’t stopped me from having at least one San Diego Anxiety Dream.

On the years when I covered the show for io9, I would get those every single night of the week or so before the show; covering the show for that site was a big deal; we were all (“All” being, in this case, five of us) given schedules for where we were meant to be on each day, what panels we were to cover and write up, what parties or extra-curricular activities we were expected to attend, and so on. Your time very definitely wasn’t your own, but that was part of the thrill of it in a weird way; you were being “a journalist!” and so everything was okay. But with that weight of expectation came the week of pre-show nightmares, each one a melodrama of missing a panel for whatever reason – it was always something mundane – and the result being calamity and disaster. Everything will be your fault if it goes wrong, the dreams explained, and you know you’re going to be late for something, don’t you?

I always thought I was the only person who had these dreams until recently, when I saw various other comic journalists write about them on Twitter. It was a weird moment of shared weight and shame, and also incredible relief that I’m not going to be at the show this time around. As I said, I’m still getting the dreams, but I wake up and remember that I don’t have to be at the convention and everything seems much lighter afterwards.