San Diego Comic Con - The Past

Inside the Convention Center

What's the point of having a blog about comic books if you don't talk about the single-biggest convention in the US? That's one of them rhetorical questions. I realized I have not posted in a while and I haven't said one word about this convention. To be honest, I didn't follow as closely as I have in years past. In my next post, I will do some quick thoughts on what has me excited coming out of that convention.

Instead, I thought I would write about my experience going to comic-con in 2013. I had posted about this before, so if any of this is known to you, indulge me. Maybe I got funnier since the last time.

Comic Con was a once in a life time experience. Something I can knock off the bucket list. By the end of this post, you will see why I probably do not feel compelled to ever do it again.

Getting Tickets
So anyone that has been to a big convention (Dragon Con, Otakon, PAX, etc.) knows what a pain it is to sometimes get tickets. Comic Con takes all of those and throws them out the window. To say it's near impenetrable is an under statement. So here is how it goes. You first have to sign up an account for the Convention itself. Having a login becomes important later. Feel free to get emails that get you both excited and disappointed in their frequency.

The day comes when you have to buy tickets. The ONLY place you can get their tickets is through their website. On a set day, at 9:00 am PST, the site opens up for ticket purchasing. Within 10 seconds, the site will crash with everyone trying to get tickets at once. No joke, my friend and I hit the site at the exact same time. We sat on the phone with each other fifteen minutes beforehand, so we can get ready. My nervousness and excitement was palpable.

Anyways, the site crashed for me and my journey ended. In the span of 10 seconds. So to recap, weeks of waiting for this moment and it all ended in a matter of seconds. My friend was able to get through. Four day tickets sold out almost instantly. He was fortunate to get four one day passes for each of us. In this day and age, given the popularity of this con, you would think they'd have load balancing on their servers or ANYTHING to keep it up with all the traffic that they should expect. But I digress.

Tickets were bought and this was just the first hurdle. Our stress was not over.

Reserving a Hotel
Unless you have some connection, you are going to have to pay money to stay near the con. For convenience, you want to be as close as possible. The convention has a list of hotels near by at low convention rates. Not so fast, you can't just call up and get a room for this either. On another pre-determined day, you have to repeat the shenanigans for getting tickets to get rooms. From their list of hotels, you have to pick SIX that you would like to stay in. If you're lucky enough to get into the site to reserve a hotel, you have to put down your six preferred location. Once you've done that, you MAY hear from one of your six hotels a few days later. For this leg of the journey, I accomplished this task. Surprisingly, this was easy and we got our #2 hotel. That's something.

Buying Plane Tickets
This was the easiest part of our journey. I won't detail it here. All I will say is that the convention starts on Thursday, we wanted to fly in on Wednesday so we can get a lay of the land and do some sight seeing. We expect to be busy.

Arrival and Ticket Pickup
After we arrived, we immediately went to the San Diego Zoo to do some sightseeing. We took a cab out there and cabs would be our way of getting around the city. Unlike our trip to Seattle, everything is not nearby in San Diego. Once we were done, we had to go pick up our badges. This is a ritual unto itself. While heading over, our cab was stuck in traffic for almost an hour. You see, the badge pickup is in a location nowhere near the convention center. That would make too much sense. So traffic is backed up for miles as everyone is heading over to get their tickets. This is the first of many logistical nightmares we would run into.

Once we finally arrive, we are introduced to our first line (first of many). Surprisingly, the line moved pretty quickly. Well, quickly for this convention. I think we were in and out in under an hour. It was cool to see the excitement in everyone's faces. We were all so ready to do this.

This was all the stuff before the convention. To keep this short, I will do a separate post on the convention itself.