San Diego Comic Con Thursday Report

Greetings, all! Reporting live from downtown San Diego, home of SDCCI and the Twilight fanbrats who are currently whooping it up right outside of our apartment door ("SHADDAP!!"):

Item one: today was the first gathering of fellow Gatchaman fans under the big black Battle Flag, and we enjoyed company with not one but two Condoru no Joes, one Hinotori no Jun, one Owashi no Ken, and one pint-sized Kentaro Nambu (daughter of one of the attendees)!! Full uniform, lots of photos taken, which will get posted eventually. Cruising around the convention floor after lunch, we ran across a young Japanese woman in an absolutely stellar Hinotori no Jun costume, everything spot-on from headgear to boots, and even with a functioning yo-yo weapon. Her pic will eventually be uploaded as well.

Item two: while wandering about, a vendor handed me a freebie comic book from the publisher APS Physics, which creates comics grounded in teaching scholastic science for a kids audience. This comic was "Spectra", the Laserfest Superhero, and on the cover is the superhero Spectra, a pre-teenish looking kid, partnered with a big musclebound eyepatch wearing commando with a big "G" on his shirt. The title of this issue is simply: "Force". So finally, I have found G-Force themed merchandise, in a completely unrelated, bizarre way.

Well, that's not entirely true. I spotted someone selling bootleg BotP "Complete Series" DVDs for seventy dollars. But sorry, it ain't kosher, as the purists amongst us would attest. Moving on........

Item three: we've come to discover that SDCCI has become such a screaming madhouse of popularity that the management has A: raised four-day ticket prices for the 2012 event to $175 with Preview Night and $150 without Preview Night, thereby eliminating any discount for four-day passes and making the price match the individual day pricing; B: restricted 2012 on-site ticket sales to only three hours per day; and C: restricted those sales to only a certain number of passes per day. The explanation is that they want to encourage folks to order their tickets on-line when they go on sale on an undetermined date sometime this fall, and to also encourage folks to consider buying only one or two days worth instead of the full weekend on the assumption that four-day pass holders aren't there the entire time. The problem this creates is that no one is ever sure which day they want to enjoy most: the four-day passes allows fans to see their favorite panels whenever they may be scheduled, a lineup that's not known when the passes do go on sale. The four-day passes also makes for a good vacation draw out of the entire event for those travelling in from out of the area. Finally, the last on-line release of the passes ended up drawing so many fans that their servers crashed not once but twice, so now, folks are spending the night camped out at the door to buy passes in person because no one trusts SDCCI's on-line system.

That's all for tonight- more tomorrow!


Katharine
Disturbed in NorCal

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-Katharine
Disturbed in NorCal