Boots On The Ground, Brainstem In The Gutter: Arrival At San Diego Comic-Con 2013

Editor’s Note: The following post was written from an outdoor patio, soon after arriving in San Diego, while we had no hotel room yet, nor Internet access from which to upload it. It is probably being uploaded hours later from some friendly bar with free WiFi, with far more photographs than are described in the post itself. In fact, many of the posts you read here this week will be written in one place, posted from another, with photos and video captured rom yet other places and uploaded when more than a bar of WiFi shows up on one device or another. In short: welcome to San Diego Comic-Con.

The toughest thing about the San Diego Comic-Con is that it is in San Diego. And while this is not a problem for the Los Angeles-based television and movie people who attend the convention, making it the biggest genre and pop culture convention in the Western world, it is a problem for a couple of people running a two-person comics Web site… at least it is a problem when that two-person comics Web site is based in Boston.

There are only two effective ways to get to SDCC from Boston: fly, or go on a desperate and full-throttled whiskey bender sometime toward the end of June and hope that you emerge from the blackout there. And considering Column B has not worked out in my favor any year between 1992 and now, that meant an airplane.

The problem is that there are only two airlines that fly non-stop between Boston and San Diego (and I must fly non-stop; any longer than eight hours in the nicotine-free airline system, and I will wind up in the nicotine-free prison system): American Airlines and JetBlue. And that really means that there is only one airline possibility, because careful personal research has proven that American Airlines sucks.

The tricky part is that JetBlue changes the times of their non-stop flight to San Diego every year, and sometimes more than once a year; literally every year I have booked tickets with them prior to this year, I have received an automated phone call advising me that the time has been pushed out, sometimes by hours. So it was without too much trepidation that, back in February, I booked two tickets on JetBlue’s 7 a.m. flight out of Logan Airport, because hey: they were gonna change it. Right?

Yeah, no. So this morning, our alarm clock fired at 3:30 a.m. to get us ready for a 4:30 a.m. cab ride to Logan to get us there in time to remove our shoes and our dignity for the Transportation Security Agency’s screening process. The 7 a.m. flight left promptly at 7:25 a.m. (because hey: Logan Airport), and made record time dropping us here in beautiful downtown San Diego five and a half hours later. Unfortunately, with the time zone changes, that meant it was 10 a.m. local time. So my body was screaming for lunch while it was really breakfast time, and as of this writing, it is whimpering that it is Beer O’Clock… while we still have two and a half hours to go until we can even check into our hotel.

So with that kind of time to kill, we wandered the downtown area and took some photographs of the spectacle that will, in about 27 hours, become San Diego Comic-Con 2013. And you can find those pictures right here. Not everything is completed, and some of the hype attracters are still in the process of being constructed, but at least you can get a sense of what is coming, once things go into full blast during tomorrow’s Preview Night.