Ah, Comic-Con. Where has the time gone? We're closer to the 2015 show than we are the 2014 version, and yet here I am, still showing pictures from last year. What can you do? All of these pictures are from Sunday, the final day of the event, which was, all things considered, fairly low-key but still included a lot of great moments. Here are a few.
Parodying the Comic-Con protestors never goes out of style, and sometimes includes horse masks. The handles are, I guess, Instagram accounts, because they don't show up on Twitter. A shame.
A big part of Sunday, for me, was spent back at Nerd HQ for their "Conversations for a Cause" series, which, as I've stated before, is pretty incredible. I got tickets (thanks to Larry) for the Nathan Fillion panel. The 2013 version was so much fun that I had to make it back this year for an encore. It was more laid back as I already had a year under my belt. Still, it was fun to see Fillion and Firefly companion Alan Tudyk again in this intimate setting.
As always, the very generous Zach Levi introduced the panel guests.
Fillion was gracious and funny as always. He mentioned that he sometimes walked the convention floor, dressed in a costume that also covered his face, from time to time. I wonder how many celebrities do something similar. It's not a bad plan for blending in.
Firefly will never die, even if Wash did.
There were a lot of great items auctioned off this year. I'm amazed at how much people are willing to spend. It's great that all the money goes to Operation Smile, Levi's charity of choice. I'd like to win something one day (one day...).
The NerdHQ team handled the photo booth better than they did last year, which included a mad rush after the panel had ended. This year, if you had a ticket to the panel and $20, you could get your picture taken with both Fillion and Tudyk. My wife and I are fans of Fillion's well documented photobombs, and so we asked to be included in that storied history. I'd say we got a good one. So we didn't lose our nerd cred, we were also wearing Futurama brain slugs at the time.
One of the walls at NerdHQ was dedicated to the people who donated to help fund the event. I had to chip in a little as I take advantage of this offsite event at different points during Comic-Con. My name made it on the wall right about...
After the panel and picture session ended, it was time to head back. Do these Pokemon outfits count as onesies?
And it was time for another trip across the bridge, which called for yet another picture of the convention center and the city...but this time...it was a panoramic view. How nice.
One thing brought about by more events taking place on the back lawn is a longer line to the vaunted Taco Truck. It was a bit distressing...but there was still a fairly short wait to the front of the line, and the Taco Truck is worth every minute spent waiting.
Here's the man in charge. I love him. And his burritos.
Here's a fairly prescient costume, given the ending of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Good on this kid, though I'm surprised that anyone under 30 knows who Howard the Duck is.
Let's call this "battle damage Iron Man". A nice job.
Another nice job by Aquawoman, unintentionally standing by a Ghostbuster.
It's strange to look behind you and see someone dressed like this following you. Kudos to him for taking the picture in stride.
Here's a picture that illustrates how everyone feels at the end of a long convention.
This gentleman probably had the best costume at Comic-Con. Apocalypse here is affiliated with the Cinema Makeup School, and questions as to if this "counts" as a legitimate fan costume are brought up. I think it counts. Either way, it's a heck of a costume.
Catwoman was standing next to Apocalypse. She did a nice job, but that's a tough act to follow.
Battle Damage Dr. Mrs. The Monarch.
Love the original Trek uniforms.
To the side of the Cartoon Books booth stood this life size RASL statue. Really cool.
How many times did this guy get described as "outrageous"? Heck, what's one more time?
This is not the end. There are still more pictures to show. And show them we will. Soon.
My Tick collection has grown a bit since...um...since I started writing the book. What can I say? There are a few items I picked up recently that must be shared.
First is a page of original art. This splash panel is by Eli Stone, from the much admired "Big Blue Destiny" story. There were a few panels on top that were added at a later date. This page is signed and personalized to, perhaps, the guy I bought it from (I'm not sure if that's the case, but I think it is), and it reads, "For John, Thank you for the advice. You're a bitter man and I love you! See you in LA!" Apparently, all Tick creators make their way to southern California eventually.
I'd love to meet Eli Stone one day and talk to him about this run on the book. It was weird and wild and, at times, serious. This is a pretty cool item to add to my collection.
I also managed to grab another animation cel from the Tick animated series. This is my second and, if I may say, favorite of the two, as it also includes Arthur and is episode specific. But the best thing about it...
...is that it is two cels in one! Arthur is on his own sheet. He's got a chain leading to a metal collar on his neck, if that's not clear. On the top is an authentication sticker from Saban (the production company).
And speaking of The Tick, there's a new issue coming out in May for Free Comic Book Day! This issue features a new story with art by Duane Redhead as well as a reprint of a rare Cereno/McClaine tale! It'll be fun on a bun (whoops, mixing properties). You can check out a preview of the story here: http://issuu.com/richjohnston/docs/stk666141?e=1268187/11292548
Where else can you find a picture of Disney's Maleficent eating concession stand nachos? NOWHERE ELSE. That's another sign that it's time for yet another batch of Comic-Con 2014 pictures! Seriously, I still have more of them. These photos take us all the way to the end of Saturday, after my wonderful encounter with "Weird Al" Yankovic earlier in the day that I wrote so much about.
As Saturday drew to a close inside the convention hall, I stopped at the New England Comics booth once again. I was able to chat with Ben Edlund a bit and learn some news that has since been revealed to the general public: that The Tick was returning to the small screen, as a pilot episode has been ordered for Amazon's streaming original content service. The news broke shortly after the convention, but it was honestly difficult to keep it in after finding out about it. But I kept my mouth shut (I promise). I was able to get this nicely framed picture with Ben, Supernatural's Jenny Klein and Ben's very talented daughter. Jenny obliged with the duck face.
My love for the convention affects my judgment, for sure, but I think that San Diego is such a beautiful city. Here's a requisite bridge shot as the sun sets.
The people by the tents are leaving the convention, not, I hope, lining up for Sunday morning. But you never know.
I went over to the Interactive Zone next, where I found these great Spaceballs cosplayers.
The Adult Swim Fun House, so great in 2013, was back for another round in '14. This time, there was a domed Meat Wad experience to see. They ticketed these events and handed out wrist bands, which was probably a bit more organized than the 'get in line and hope' approach taken the year before. In any case, here's a shot of the inside of the dome, before we got back in line for the Fun House.
We waited in line for quite a while, because even though tickets were given out for specific time frames, a whole crowd of VIP ticket holders (I believe they won these tickets by spinning the giant prize wheel Adult Swim had inside the convention hall) cut in line in front of us poor schlubs who only had regular tickets.
Luckily, there was a dancing Mooninite there to entertain us.
The Fun House was almost the same as it was in 2014. I don't blame Adult Swim for not mixing it up, because if you pay for a giant, inflatable fun house such as this, you might as well get some use out of it. And the new dome was a nice addition as well. I found a few different passageways this time around that I missed in 2013, and I was able to go down the giant slide at the end, too, so it was pretty fun.
Oh, and I met Santa! He gave me a Black Jesus candle. Thanks, Santa.
Would you believe that I have more Comic-Con pictures to share? Of course you do, because I mentioned it just a little bit ago. Sunday is coming up. Get ready.
Saturdays at Comic-Con are often the busiest days of the entire event. It has a feeling of "let's squeeze in as much as we can before it's all over". Sunday, in contrast, is pretty mellow and relaxed.
I was nervous about this particular Saturday weeks in advance, though, because it was announced that "Weird Al" Yankovic was going to make a rare Comic-Con appearance in the form of a panel at the Horton Grand Theater.
The Horton was a new offsite location for Comic-Con in 2014, and it took some obvious cues from Nerd HQ and its intimate celebrity panels. Nerd HQ does everyone a favor and distributes tickets to its panels before the events, so there's very little time spent waiting in line, a staple of Comic-Con-run panels. As the Horton Theater seats only a few hundred people, I had nightmares of waiting in line overnight just to get the chance to take in this panel, which was at the top of my list for the entire show.
Comic-Con, though, chose to hold a random drawing for tickets on Saturday morning, much in the same way it gives out tickets to autograph signings and certain (LEGO) exclusive offerings. I had never waited in line for a random drawing, and I found the entire concept a bit suspect to begin with, so there was a lot of trepidation over whether it would even be worth it or not to try and get tickets for this event.
I'm glad I gave it a chance, because it obviously worked out, and it was much more painless than I imagined. Of course, I say this as someone who was able to get one of the few tickets available, but overall I think that Comic-Con has a good system in place when it comes to events like these.
I got in line about an hour before the doors officially opened for Saturday, and by this time the line was already stretched out of the convention center, down the stairs, across the street and onto the sidewalk near the water. Some people thought better of it and left when we didn't seem to be moving by 9:15, but soon after we were steadily on our way to the entrance.
Once inside the autograph pavilion, the lines split up further depending on what event you wanted to go and see. There were quite a few people who wanted to try for the Weird Al tickets, but still, I would say that before 10:00, it was my turn to grab a ticket.
The system is so low-tech to the point of being ridiculous. Comic-Con volunteers hold a cloth bag with generic "keep this ticket" tickets inside. You pick one, and if there's a stamp on the back (for me it was an image of a frog), you win. Luckily, if you get a ticket with no stamp, you can get in line once again, which by this time only takes five or so minutes to get back to the front. Even luckier, my wife pulled a winning ticket. Luckier still, each winning ticket gets you two event tickets, so we were all set, and not much worse for the wear.
At this point, I decided to press my luck, and I got back in line for the Weird Al autograph session, which required a different ticket. My wife took off for the George R.R. Martin line, and - wouldn't you know it - we both got tickets to those. I'll talk more about the autograph session in a bit.
The tickets to the event came in an envelope and looked like the picture above. For me, it was pretty cool to get a specially printed ticket with the Comic-Con logo on it, and I was even happier that we were able to keep our tickets after we entered the theater - they were checked, but not collected and not even torn. So I got a nice keepsake from the event that I was somehow able to keep in good shape all the way back home.
The Horton Grand Theater was a few blocks from the convention center, and it's obviously designed for small performances, either theatrical or musical. It sat probably 300 people. There was a lot of nervous energy in line as we waited to enter the building. Once inside, there was a poster with the Mandatory Fun branding on it, as seen above. I wonder who walked home with that thing. I'm sure someone claimed it.
Once inside, my wife and I got seats about six rows from the front, as assigned on our tickets, which were great. After a few minutes, the event organizers asked to see if there were empty seats, as they would then let in the "stand by" hopefuls, otherwise known as the teeming masses who took a chance and waited outside the building. There just so happened to be two seats in the very front row, and I grabbed them up quick.
Al and the host, comedian Jonah Ray, came out a few minutes later, after a video introduction, and the crowd, of course, went wild. Keep in mind that this was a matter of days after the Mandatory Fun album was released, and almost right after it was announced that the album had reached #1 on the Billboard charts (Al's first, and the first comedy album in about half a century to hit that mark...which is a really big deal!). Everyone was excited to be there and especially happy to be one of the few to see the event in person.
The panel itself was a lot of fun, though nothing revelatory transpired. Jonah Ray might have been the most excited person in the hall, and that led him to talk...and talk...and talk about how much he enjoyed being there. That's great, and I probably would have felt similarly, but I suppose he didn't realize (or didn't care) that no one in the hall was there to see him. Seriously, I hate to gripe about it, but rather than moderate the panel, Ray wanted to interject his own opinion into everything that Al said and every question that was asked by the audience. Now I know a lot about Jonah Ray, I guess.
About half way through the panel, a Q&A session broke out, and I was able to leap out of my seat and in front of a microphone, which was placed not too far away from where I was sitting. The session was as strange as you might expect, with some people asking the almost requisite "do you remember me from..." questions to one lady telling Al that she sat on his lap at some point back in the '80s.
From my time at the Toonseum, I had learned that Al had recently been given the ACE award (Amateur Cartoonist Extraordinaire) by the National Cartoonists Society. I knew that he had always been a fan of Mad Magazine, but I didn't have any clue that he did any drawing of his own, so I was able to ask him about it. The end of my question was something like "I'd like to know why don't we see any of these drawings...and can I have one?" The last part was a joke, of course, but it got me the meanest look you can imagine from the staffer who had earlier asked us all what our questions were going to be. This in itself was pretty funny.
Someone sitting on my side of the auditorium, near the back, managed to record sections of the panel (about half altogether), including most of the discussion between Al and Jonah Ray:
You can pick me out in my trusty gold Steelers hat near the beginning, as seen below. You could probably also see me by my enthusiastic fist pumping:
The panel ended after about 50 minutes...but it wasn't Al's last appearance of the day. I had mentioned earlier that I had also gotten a ticket to a signing event. This event was to take place before the panel. And even though I've got probably too many things signed by Al in my possession, I thought it would still be fun to get in line, say hello and get an autograph if I could.
Earlier that morning, Shout! Factory made the announcement, obviously with Al's Comic-Con appearance in mind, that they were releasing a 25th anniversary Blu-Ray edition of the movie UHF later in the year. I caught it, purely by chance, on Twitter, and as I knew that Shout! had a booth at the show, I decided to seek them out and see if they had anything - I was thinking a postcard or flyer announcing the release - that I could grab to get signed.
This was around 10:30, so the convention hall had already been open for quite a while, but I walked down to the main floor and found the booth, only to see an incredible UHF poster print resting against one of the sides of the booth. I looked the guy working the book in the eyes, pointed to the poster, and said, "uh, what is this?", fearing that they'd be on sale for, like, a hundred bucks.
HOWEVER! It turns out that I really hit it big. The first 50 people to ask ask about Weird Al were given a wrist band to an exclusive poster signing later in the day, right after the panel at the Horton theater. This was not announced! It was pure luck that I was there at the right time.
HOOOOOWEVER!! I was an idiot and was worried about getting back into the convention hall in time to make the signing. This wasn't completely unfounded, as it is difficult to walk from one side of the hall to the other at Comic-Con, and I was coming from outside and blocks away. So I asked the guy if I could forgo the wrist band and just get a copy of the poster, which, I figured, I could take to get signed at the event that I already had a ticket for.
The guy looked at me like I was crazy, and to his credit, I kind of was. The posters were on hold until the signing event, so I couldn't get a wrist band and still get a poster, but I could, he told me, get a poster with no chance of getting it signed later.
I took him up on this proposition and, a little bit later, went up to the autograph pavilion...only to see literally hundreds of people waiting in line to get Al's autograph. Realizing I had made the (terribly, horribly, inexcusably) wrong choice, I nonetheless waited at the back of the line for about 15 minutes...only to not move at all. I was one of the very last people in line, it seemed, and in the time I was waiting, only about three other people showed up to stand in back of me.
At this point, I had almost nothing to lose, so I went back to the main floor and the Shout! booth and asked if I could make the trade, once again, of the poster for the wrist band. It just so happened that there were still about six wrist bands left, so my monumental stupidity didn't end up costing me on this day. And it's a good thing, too, because the signing was really great!
After the panel ended, I beat a hasty retreat back to the convention hall. I, of course, understood that Al had to travel the same distance, but I imagined him taking a secret underground route or something reserved for celebrities and was thus anxious about getting there in time. Not to worry, though, as I was about 20th in line and it was still about 15 minutes before Al walked in.
Convention security did, as it turned out, kind of sneak Al in through the back. Probably for the purposes of crowd control, the signing wasn't advertised, so there were a lot of stunned people standing near the booth when "Weird Al" Yankovic came walking in to sit behind a table. A lot of people (innocently enough) tried to sneak in line only to be told of the wrist band policy.
Being first in line sometimes has its benefits, but I find that there are sometimes more benefits to being back a bit, as was the case with this signing. The first three or four people in line got a poster, said hello, got it signed and were on their way. As the signing progressed, everyone loosened up a little bit, and soon people were chatting away with Al, getting their pictures taken, shaking hands, asking questions, the whole bit. Al started personalizing the posters after the first half dozen or so, too. I know that not everyone likes to have autographs personalized, but this was one item I was happy to get my name written on.
Shortly after Al arrived, he was joined by another special guest - UHF director (and Al's longtime manager) Jay Levey! Not everyone knew who he was, but listen, people: he played the lead role in the "Gandhi II" spoof from UHF! This was a big deal!
The line moved fairly quickly and the crowd of onlookers grew. The overall mood was pretty low-key throughout. Check out that oversized UHF print behind Levey...I also wonder who walked away with that.
I've been looking to give Al a copy of the UHF "Six Panel Cinema" that Jeff McComsey and I worked on a few years ago for a while now. I took it to his Washington, PA concert in 2013, but didn't get a chance to see him after that show. So when I heard about his Comic-Con panel, I thought that I might was well lug it to San Diego with me in case I was able to toss it at him from me seat or something. It was a gigantic stroke of luck that this just happened to be the day that the Blu-Ray was announced. So many things came together - what were the odds that I'd get to meet Al in this context and actually have the UHF print with me? But it worked out and I was able to give him a copy, which both he and Levey seemed to enjoy. This was - of course - a big thrill for me.
Other things of note:
1) I was wearing my Transformers "Dare to Be Stupid" t-shirt on this day. Both Al and Jay noticed it and hadn't before seen it; "Dare to Be Stupid" is a song of Al's that made it onto the 1980s Transformers movie soundtrack, hence the reference on the shirt. I told Al where I bought it (the locally-based 80sTees) and he pulled out his phone to search it out.
2) This is probably the best picture that I'll ever take with Weird Al. I should have played the lottery this day. So much was going my way.
3) McComsey's Six Panel Cinema later took a trip to the first page of Reddit, at which point Al tweeted a copy of the UHF entry to his (literally) millions of followers (if you'd like to buy a print, you can do so here).
4) The poster, thankfully, made it back to Pennsylvania with me safely. I bought a protective sleeve at the show and it has stayed in there ever since. I realize that this is a pretty rare Weird Al collectible, but I'm just happy to have this memento from what turned out to be a pretty good day.
5) The poster had what turned out to be the front artwork for the Blu-Ray release of the movie, which is out and available to purchase now. It is very similar to the previous DVD release, with a notable exception: it includes the entire Comic-Con panel as a special feature (I wish it also included footage from the signing event, which was filmed in its entirety). It's a more professional feed than what was on YouTube, which is nice...and I also make a couple appearances on it.
6) Mandatory Fun won Al his fourth Grammy award, which continues quite a year for Mr. Yankovic, and he's also announced the dates for his upcoming Mandatory World Tour. He'll be in nearby Greensburg on May 31st. I'll be there, too. You should also come.
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