Comic-Con 2007: So many geeks, so little time

I am not a comic-book geek but my life partner is. Early on in our mid-1990s courtship there were signs of this I chose to ignore. One of the first movies we ever went to see was “Gamera: Guardian of the Universe.” One of the first books he ever tossed my way to read was “Watchmen.” He has a favorite era of “Wonder Woman” comics (that would be the ’70s, when she was stripped of her Amazon birthright and became instead a martial-arts-dispensing, mini-skirt wearing “women’s libber.”) He would decorate our apartment with Justice League posters if I would only consent. And because I stuck around for all this, I just finished attending my seventh San Diego Comic-Con in as many years.

A little history: The SDCC is 37 years old and has grown from 300 people in a big room somewhere to about 120,000 attendees this year. Every day of the gigantic San Diego Convention Center sold out. New, aggressive, annoying crowd-control procedures and staff were in place. The geeks were in full battle (aka shopping for action figures) positions.

My partner and I were lucky. We got a hotel room within walking distance of the Convention Center. We didn’t have to deal with the nightmare of parking. And we each had press passes. But in terms of our ability to report on the proceedings we were both at a distinct disadvantage. For our respective outlets, we were the sole journalists. Until I’m able to clone myself, this wrap-up will necessarily remain micro, not macro, in scope. Here’s a little of what I experienced…

1.  “I’m in ur 3000-seat convention hall, passively watchin’ ur big studio genre movie trailerz.”

Denis Poroy / AP Jessica Alba and actor Dane Cook talk about their new film "Good Luck Chuck" at Comic-Con.

Hollywood has finally woken up to the fact that their money-bleeding B-movie product can benefit from a little pre-release massage. And to that end they are prepared to offer you, the consumer, the amazing opportunity to stand in line for two hours and then to sit in huge halls on somewhat-padded folding chairs and look at movie trailers you’ve already seen on YouTube.

You’re also allowed the chance to gawk hard at Jessica Alba and Clive Owen on a jumbo screen while they sit up on the stage being foxy (Alba) or bemused (Owen). Then you can ask them a question like, “How did you do that thing where you slide along the floor like that shooting the guns?” and hear them say stuff like, “I never wanted to be James Bond anyway. I wanted to make this rip-off of ‘Hard-Boiled’ and ‘The Transporter’ instead.”

Denis Poroy / AP Clive Owen goes to Comic-Con to promote "Shoot 'Em Up."

In defense of New Line, however, who’ll be releasing the Owen-starring “Shoot ‘Em Up” soon-ish, they did show off several moments of “The Golden Compass” even though they couldn’t convince Nicole Kidman to sully herself with a tacky in-person publicity moment. I heard she did do a pre-taped video segment begging people to buy a ticket to “The Invasion,” however. (“Cheers, Comic-Con! I can smell you all from here!”)

Meanwhile, Fox pulled out of their presentation at the last minute in a flap rumored to be due to the R-rated qualities of their “Aliens vs. Predator” clips and Comic-Con’s insistence on maintaining a more family-friendly atmosphere this year. I don’t know if all that’s true or not — Fox’s official word is “not,” even though studios lie all the time about, well, about everything.

2. In the kingdom of straight white males who don’t get lots of sex, the one-legged babe is Queen.
OK, that’s not fair. This was a really hot uni-legged Rose-McGowan-with-machine-gun-appendage-in-“Grindhouse” look-alike, and she’d be desired by just about any heterosexual man. And I’d be a liar if I painted all the male attendees as unwashed strike-out kings. But stereotypes exist for a reason, and all of those reasons were on hand at the Dimension booth on the retail floor while the nice young lady in question did lots of snaky moves on a stripper pole, becoming the lust object of a million little cell-phone cameras.

If aliens were visiting San Diego they’d return to their home base and file the following report: “We visited a happy bubble planet where ‘Grindhouse’ and ‘Serenity’ were hugely successful motion pictures, everyone watches some TV show called ‘Farscape’ and the entire population is salivating over an upcoming splatter-fest called ‘Midnight Meat Train.’”

3. All attendees unite in a common emotion: hating the ELITE security company.
“No, you can’t walk down this hall. It’s an exit-only hall. Oh, you needed to go the bathroom and then return to your panel? Too bad because the doors are permanently closed now. Go walk a quarter mile around the Convention Center to get back in. And see that velvet rope? It’s here to block a major walkway, creating a frustrating bottleneck. That’s the only reason it’s there: to create that obstacle to walking freely so that thousands of people have to pass through it no matter which direction they happen to be going. But if you are wondering why it’s there and you question it, then I, a 19 year-old Marine recruit from Camp Pendleton, making some extra cash for the weekend before being shipped off to Iraq, will be happy to yell in your face that you should simply MOVE IT ALONG!”

I wonder if any of them yelled in the face of legendary “Spider-Man” co-creator Stan Lee. I hope so. And I also hope someone caught it on their camera and posted it online.

4. Celebrity comic-book authorship is the somewhat-less-embarrassing alternative to writing a children’s book.
Because, really, who would you rather emulate, Madonna and her scoldy Kabbalah-for-kids narratives or the crushworthy “Sin City” star Rosario Dawson and her awesome and weird-as-hell comic “Occult Crimes Taskforce”? The correct answer is Dawson, who made her second Comic-Con appearance this year and whose real-life superpower is cool-person brains and charm.

Best moments from her panel: a 9-year-old girl asking the actress what it was like to have her throat ripped out in “The Devil’s Rejects.” Dawson’s response: “Your parents let you watch ‘The Devil’s Rejects’?” Dawson also related the horror story of her comic-book­–collecting grandmother having Action Comics No. 1 — the debut of Superman — thrown out by her great-grandmother. The crowd gasped in unison.

Slideshow   The week in celebrity sightings Flavor Flav gets roasted, Suri Cruise likes soccer, Jude Law promotes peace and more. more photos

Meanwhile actor Thomas Jane appeared at the Con to flog his own comic book, as did porn-trepeneur Jenna Jameson and the father-son team of Nicolas and Weston Cage. I don’t know or care a thing about Jane’s. Jameson seems to be waffling on whether or not hers will be “erotic” in nature (because, you know, people suddenly want something other than that from Jenna Jameson now).

In this slowly gathering-steam field, only the Cages seem to have their vision together with their title “Voodoo Child.” The elder Cage is especially on his game here, having recently put aside a respectable acting career to be the conductor of a bullet train to Kook-Town with the comic-book-based film “Ghost Rider” and nutjob nuclear bomb thriller “Next.” And it looks like he raised a smart super-Goth son in the process. (The secret, according to their panel: H.P. Lovecraft bedtime stories.) And unlike most Hollywood parent-child combos, they seem to really like each other. Heartwarming!

5. When you’re signing your own book at the gay-centric Prism Comics booth and want to momentarily distract those around you, all you have to say is, “Hey look, there goes Tara from ‘Buffy’!”
Tara from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s” actual name is Amber Benson and she did walk by as my partner and I signed and sold a mindbendingly successful nine copies of our own books. So for a second there it all seemed way more exciting than it was. But hey, you nine people? Thanks. Seriously. We loved your money. I bought a really nice entrée of grilled salmon with greens and little polenta cakes with that cash. Meanwhile, there was a lot of queer stuff I just plain missed out on, like the “Love & Rockets” panels, the cast of “The Sarah Silverman Program,” the “300” DVD release announcement panel and the newly Isaiah Washington-enhanced “Bionic Woman” TV series panel.

MORE FROM MEDIA

New York Times says magazine photos altered

New York Times says magazine photos altered Bronzed ‘Bruno’ bares all on cover of GQ Photographer behind iconic Saigon image dies   Add Media headlines to your news reader: