San Diego Comic-Con 2010 Diary, Day Two

By Christian Lipski

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Day One’s Diary

By the second day I feel much less pressure; I’ve already made a day’s worth of forays into the wilds, and though I haven’t seen nearly all of what there is, I have a good sense of the floor’s layout and content. I also know that it’s nearly useless to try to get into large sessions, since the amount of time you need to devote to the line-waiting is better spent wandering the floor below.

Deborah dressed up today, portraying the character Blythe from the Vertigo series Air, which has been inexplicably canceled. The author, G. Willow Wilson, was scheduled to attend the Con, but chose not to at the last minute for some reason. I can’t help but wonder if she’s upset at the cancellation. She writes novels and is also a journalist, so perhaps she’s not as attached to the medium of comics.

Warhammer 40000

This day we ventured into the area of the convention floor dedicated to manga and anime. Although all booths are created equal, somehow this area is like a different world. Some great cosplay, and also more kids than even the video game booths. I’m unfamiliar with most of the works involved here, so we didn’t stay long. Also at that end of the floor (more than 57 aisles, each one about 15 feet apart) are booths dedicated to the finer arts, which here means oil paintings and the like. We saw a great artist named Ragnar, whose art looks like Shag meets science fiction, and found out that he is doing the concept art for the new Disney Haunted Mansion movie, which will be directed by Guillermo del Toro.

Catwoman and Hit Girl

Since the inclusion of video games and large-scale Hollywood movies in Comic-Con, the crowd has changed slightly, it seems. It’s weird to be walking around a comic convention and still see people there who don’t like or understand comics at all. Tough guys in wife-beaters with their well-made-up girlfriends walking side-by-side with people dressed in superhero costumes. It’s kind of Biblical, really: “And the lion will geek out with the lamb.”

Deborah’s friend Sam Liu was arriving, so we met him outside and went to the hotel we’d be sharing. The streets around the convention center are a bit crazy to begin with, but when you added hundreds of thousands of attendees, it ended up taking about 45 minutes to get to the hotel. Which was next door.

Walking through the convention center lobby with Sam took almost as long, as he has worked with so many people in his animation career. We were stopping frequently to greet people who recognized him, like Jeff Matsuda and Glen Murakami. Like comic people, I was finding that animation people were also on the whole a great bunch.

Glen Murakami and Sam Liu

By the second day I started noticing the large number of people with “Free Hugs” signs, but declined to partake, feeling a bit suspicious of their motives. Not that they were frotteurs or anything, just that it may have been a religious conversion opening. By the late afternoon, though, I was feeling huggable, and chose a Scott Pilgrim-looking guy to see if he was comfortable with dude-on-dude hugs (and to not seem as creepy hugging strange girls). It was a professional hug to be sure, and no pamphlets were handed out, so I’m much more in favor of the hug people. Perhaps it’s a social experiment to try and spread some simple human contact.

I finally made it to the Artist’s Alley section of the floor, where I found my fellow Portlanders Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett, creators of Boilerplate. Paul let me know that, pending some boring lawyery stuff, Boilerplate was SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, as he put it. They were both very excited, and with good reason. Plus, they were getting close to selling every copy of the book from the ten boxes they came with. Selling that many in a day and a half is a pretty impressive feat. Other Portlanders in the Alley were Steve Lieber (Underground, Whiteout) and inker Ron Randall from Periscope Studio, who were both enjoying their day.

Boilerplate and Anina Bennett

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