ku10

Yesterday, I went down to San Diego for Comic Con, the world’s biggest comic convention yadda yadda. I’ve got nothing against comics—in fact, I rather like the web and manga variety—but as far as U.S. comics go I’m pretty clueless. So, I spent a lot of time randomly wandering around, collecting free things and watching geeks.

Observations?

• There are lots and lots of people who are very, very good at drawing things. Alf and I dropped by one booth, Design Studio Press, full of ridiculously talented Art Center College of Design students and instructors showing off their books. It was pretty sobering.
• American comic posters (generally speaking) get kind of boring after a while. A lot of them have extravagantly drawn characters in flashy dynamic or dramatic poses. Because they’re so uniformly flashy/dynamic/oversaturated/laborously drawn they start to look a bit flat. It’d be a nice to see some variety, may be throw in some relatively understated stuff.
• Geeks are damn horny. The evidence is… abundant. I mean, yeah, you’ve got your asexual geeks, but they’re definitely in the minority.
• Comic Con is a b.o farm. In the exhibit hall, which is practically wall-to-wall bodies, sweaty fellow’s unique musk gets added together a couple dozen thousand times over under the lack of a God is readily affirmed.
• Geeks are a whiney lot. I don’t know if it’s because complaining makes for an easy conversation or what, but damn does your average geek love to do it. (Although, to be fair, it’s not like there was a lack of things to complain about.)
• There were lots of artists/writers/etc. around looking to give out autographs, and not a lot of takers. Generally, it seemed that people swarmed the popular figures and left the rest to rot. I felt bad, but I guess that’s the way it goes.
• Mackenzie totally doesn’t sound like the way she sounds when I’m reading her blog.
• It’s weird to see the cartoonists behind the comics I read on the web (Lesnick of Girly, Tycho & Gabe of Penny Arcade, etc.) just sitting around. Lesnick didn’t have a lot of traffic and looked kind of bored; Tycho & Gabe had a freakin’ line that wrapped around their booth, plus staff selling a bunch of their crap. T & G, incidentally, are both bald pasty white dudes.
• The S. Korean government has an agency that promotes Korean manga and anime, and which had a hefty booth at Comic Con. They even staffed it with a rather bored-looking Korean lady wearing some big-ass frilly blue dress costume. That’s pretty cool; all the U.S. g’ment promotes is itself and its guns.

On the way back, I fought valiantly to stay the fuck awake. I turned up the music, turned up the a/c, slapped myself, sang loudly, drank a bottle of water… and finally, turned the radio to KIIS. That did the trick.