Discarded child-corpses: The yearly, post-Comicon heartbreak.

Well, my plan to do a series of daily posts about my Comicon adventures was thwarted by the fact that I didn’t do that.  My vision of several posts at the end of each day, not unlike my Supanova posts just didn’t pan out, as, unlike Supanova, I had almost no free time while conscious at Comicon, devoting every waking moment to either walking on feet that no longer had bones in them, just padding painfully along on water balloons of flesh filled with organic shrapnel and boiling hot blood, talking despite the absence of an audible voice, or pretend dancing to show just how unhappy I was by cleverly appearing to dance while filled with a burning rage.  You know the dance – sooner or later we all do it, just before we die.

Since I didn’t do the daily updates, I don’t think I’m going to try to recap every day.  No, instead I’ll just hurl all my various memories and musings on the adventures of the past few days into a delicious stew upon which you may all feast with these humorously oversized spoons I have supplied you with).  I hope that, by arranging these memories just so for you to frolic through, you will feel very much like you were there, nestled in my pants like a little newborn joey, along for the ride through my worst nightmares and most beautiful dreams come true.

HOLD ON, JOEY!

• CROWD CONTROL –  When people talk about Con, those who have experienced it and try to convey the overall experience to those who have not always begin “FUCKING GOD IN HEAVEN…”  No joking.  Just try and do this yourself and no matter what you think you’re going to say, those profane words will always come out of your mouth.  I recommend trying to tell  a priest about Comicon.  What then follows is generally something about how crowded it is, and how just trying to walk without ramming your elbow or face into someone’s gut or neck is next to impossible.  It’s all true, and it gets worse every year.

The name tells you “Comics” are the focus, but more and more Hollywood and the big games industry saunters in like an exponentially growing cave troll, throwing the salon doors open and parting the comics like so many styrofoam peanuts, establishing itself dead in the center of the convention hall, making you have to cross seas of humanity to get to anything comics related.

I’m not saying movies and games are bad at all, and, admittedly, I’m probably a bigger games enthusiast than I am comic collector, but if cave troll’s ass keeps getting bigger, then he’s gonna need more room, and more room is not what happens every year.  Every year more and more people are packed into that same convention hall, raising some alarm when you wonder what would happen if someone even pretended there was a fire in there, setting off a stampede of terrified fanboys running to save their copies of visionary comic creator Tyrese’s MAYHEM and special edition ‘All Good Things’ Enterprise toy (with the silly looking 3rd nacelle on the top of the ship).

Imagine dying from being tramped, and the last thing you see with your one good eye (the other got stabbed by a Silk Spectre’s heel) is the nightmarishly gelid ass-flesh pouring out from a Cammy’s thong.  “Cammy’s legs aren’t covered in cammo.” you think, your life ebbing from your fleshy prison, until, with your final ability to comprehend anything, you understand that “Cammy’s” legs are just spotted with pepperonis from the pizzas they sell at the food court, glued there with cheese.  I DO NOT WANT THIS.

As you shove your way slowly through the mob, a single cell in a crawling river in the clotted arteries that are Comicon’s aisles, you are pitted with the horror that is CROSSING THE STREET.  For the entire stretch of the convention hall’s body there is only one street crossing area, and it’s as terrible as that sounds.  The only thing missing from this awful scenario is accompanying music by Philip Glass to complete what would otherwise be a stunning and beautiful scene out of Koyaanisqatsi.  Someone please commission Glass to sit in an all seeing spot above that intersection next year where he can improvise some appropriately psychotic scales to the constant flow of humanity surging through that chokepoint.

Because I’m so big on tower defense games, I just kept thinking, as I crossed the street at the speed of death, that this would be a damn fine place to position the mortars and flamethrower towers.

• SIGNING AT SLG –  SLG’s booth was a more intimate affair, and by that I mean everyone was just fucking everyone like mad there.  Oh, I tell a lie.  But intimate is as good a word as any to describe the vibe there this time around.  It was fewer artists signing at a time, just four or so at a go, instead of the 360 degree ring of commotion that the booth has been in years past.  I don’t even think there were any real weirdos that showed up to make things memorable in that bad way that they do, just a steady ebb and flow of relatively decent fans.  It helps that, as the days go on I am less and less “there”, sort of watching it all from a tiny room in my mind that feels like it’s all hundreds of miles away from my reality.

It might have been that recent post I did about people coming up to me at conventions that kept a lot of people from going batshit insane on me, or maybe those once-loony fans have grown up and out of those days, enjoying the newfound maturity that comes with being 12.  Either way, most everyone was pretty nice and I think I did a fairly good job of only making about half of them think I was a total dick.  Not bad, eh?!

I still don’t know what it is about people in desperate con situations that makes them think tapping you on the back while you’re wearing headphones, talking to a friend, and deep in concentration while trying to diffuse a bomb is an acceptable way of getting your attention.

• HOT DOGS – I ate one, okay?

• SIGNING AT 2K GAMES – Was a fairly smooth operation, and probably the coolest little setting I have signed in, that Bioshock inspired study.  The prints they made of my artwork were a bit smaller than I was expecting, and maybe a bit on the dark side, but all in all it went well.  My nieces, the ones that posed for the Little Sister reference images, even showed up and got into the spirit of things by murdering a guy in line and harvesting the adam with those crazy syringes of theirs.  Adorable, really.  Everyone let out a big “Awwwwww”, except for the guy, who only let out one of those death rattles and loosed his bowels.  Also adorable.

• THE REST IS ALL A BLUR – Honestly, this last con was pretty awesome in terms of getting to see friends and such that I only get to see once a year, usually, and meeting other people who make things that I think happen to be  pleasant diversions from life’s absurd, soul crushing horrors.  Sure, they were also some of the most grotesque, excruciating  couple of days I can recall in recent memory, but that stuff fades away to be replaced by only the glossy, attractive bits, like managing to not actually slip and fall on the urine soaked restroom floors.

• I’M GOING TO GO NOW – Good day.