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 out.

I don’t think humans were meant to go to all four days of Comic-Con. There’s too much stuff, and the conditions under which you experience it are too unpleasant. The canned air, the constant jostling, the endless lines. The presence of the major studios here, while conceivably at least partly well-intentioned — look, it could happen — has blown the whole event out. It’s a major national event grafted onto the infrastructure of a niche event, and as a result all pores and orifices have clogged and jammed. Even subcultures appear swollen to the size of overexposed, overexploited mass phenomena. The line for the Steampunk meetup was easily a quarter mile long. The line for the Steampunk meetup.