I’ve been to 13 Comic-Cons. And every year I go back, I get this crazy feeling. It’s a combination of exhaustion and déjà vu and girls in costumes that warps me into a headspace where I believe that Comic-Con is my only true existence. The rest of my life – the other 364 days – seem like a dream. What I think of as “Real …
12 Minutes 49 Seconds with Chris Weitz, Director of New Moon
I grabbed a quick interview with Chris Weitz on Thursday afternoon at Comic-Con. It almost didn’t happen, because I had a signing right before it, which ran over (and which mostly consisted of me watching Jacqueline Carey and Patrick Rothfuss signing books for fangirls anyway. But you know, dedication to the craft and all). Then Weitz …
The Best of San Diego Comic-Con, and Goodbye to All That
Best thing I saw: it’s a three-way tie between Ponyo, Tron: Legacy, and Kick-Ass.
Surrealest moment: having a dude dressed in some kind of mechwarrior armor blow past me while I was in line for Iron Man 2, and realizing that the dude was Jimmy Fallon
Can I Post From an iPhone on a Moving Train?
San Diego Comic-Con: In Which I Host a Fantasy Panel, and Subsequently Hit Bottom
I will leave it to Matt to talk about the Simpsons panel, which I just walked past the line for. It took me 10 minutes just to walk the line. Then I paid $4 for a pretzel and sat down on the floor to gnaw it. (Dry, because my personal beliefs prevent me from paying $3 for a soda.) It is Saturday afternoon at Comic-Con and I’m bottoming …
San Diego Comic-Con: Meeting Miyazaki
Yesterday afternoon I went up to a door on the second floor of the San Diego Convention Center. I twisted in the wind with a skeptical security guard for 20 minutes before a Disney publicist came to rescue me. She escorted me out to a white table on a sunny terrace outside. I zealously forbade the other journalists who were milling …
San Diego Comic-Con: Join Us, It’s Bliss
Spent two hours in the Warner brothers indoctrination chamber this morning: Where the Wild Things Are, The Book of Eli, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Box, Jonah Hex, and (the reason I came, as they intuited, since they put it last) Sherlock Holmes.
Comic-Con doesn’t make it easy for you to like things. There’s so many fans here, …
San Diego Comic-Con: In Which I Find the Movie of the Con
This is what it’s like to be press at Comic-Con. It’s not that you don’t feel like an ass, when you walk past a mile-long line to get into a big screening, fans who have sweated and ground out the hours it took to have a reasonable shot at a reasonable seat. You wave your flimsy little purple construction-paper pass, go in the side …
Fear and Loathing at San Diego Comic-Con
I type this from the WIRED Cafe, where they have wifi and free food and also deafening house music.
Spend any time at all at Comic-con and it’s hard not to go all Hunter Thompson. There’s just so many damn people. Nerd culture has gorged and gorged, and then bloated, then collapsed under the weight of its own flesh. The excess flesh …
Comic-Con Is Dead, Long Live Comic-Con
Tonight I went over the top in the first wave at Comic-Con: doors opened 6:00 on the dot.
First impression is of rampant confusion. The show floor is a ravening fleshpit. Who the eff are all these people elbowing me out of the way so they can take a picture of a 6 ft Buzz Lightyear made out of Lego? I don’t identify with them. It’s …
Notes from Azkatraz, a Harry Potter Convention
I’ve spent the past few days at Azkatraz, a Harry Potter convention in San Francisco.
It’s a pretty intense scene. Something like 1,000 (I’m speculating) Potterphiles in one hotel in downtown SF. You immerse yourself in it, and the whole non-Potter-related world just vanishes. I was going to say it’s like being at Hogwarts, but …
And Speaking of E-books
Barnes & Noble is partnering with Plastic Logic to do one.
This strikes me as not a foolish idea. There’s room for more players in that market, and B&N’s general failure to challenge Amazon convincingly online has been a huge fail. This gives them another shot at becoming meaningful in that market. Plus, Plastic Logic’s e-reader is …
