We’ve Always Got Room For A…: The Goon Movie Panel, SDCC 2013

Editor’s Note: This article was written last night at around midnight Pacific time. It is only being uploaded now because the Internet access I paid my hotel $14 for was unable to keep a connection, what with everyone being back from the convention and presumably watching the hell out of Netflix on their iPads. The annual San Diego WiFi drought has begun in earnest.

I have attended San Diego Comic-Con for the past eight years, and today I saw cracks occur that I never remember seeing at previous conventions. First, there were the trains. The railroad tracks run right down the middle of the road in front of the San Diego Convention Center, and you learn pretty quickly to hear, then grow annoyed by, and then ignore the constant clanging of the trolley bells. The air horn of the freight trains, not so much, but the point is that generally, the trains are a loud and short term annoyance.

Generally, but not today. Both at lunchtime and at at 7 p.m. – prime time for people to be leaving the convention center – long-ass freight trains pulled up in front of the convention center and just fucking stopped. Thus blocking off the primary route between the center and the Gaslamp Village, where all the restaurants and half the hotels are, and turning the area in front of the intersection into a human clusterfuck so bumbling and useless that, if any of the local cosplayers were actually aliens, they would report to their overlords that the human race deserved to be wiped out like a termite nest.

Now I am not under any illusions that the people behind SDCC have any control over the schedule or driving of freight trains. But they do have some control over the clearing of rooms and the start times of panels, and of the three we attended today, two of them started late. With the earlier Avatar Comics panel (which I will likely write about tomorrow), the volunteer line wrangler told us that the panelists were delayed and at least kept us informed… while still preventing us from entering the room so we could sit the hell down.

But with the panel regarding the Kickstarter work on the proposed movie version of The Goon, no one told us a Goddamned thing. They lined us up in a weird accordion pattern, and when they realized that it was a much larger crowd than anyone anticipated (which seems a little odd; the project pulled in nearly half a million dollars on Kickstarter, which, since The Goon is a little indie comic, should indicate that the movie version has a little interest behind it), one of the volunteers tried to get people who intended to stay through the Goon panel into the following panel to split off into a different line, which is truly unprecedented in my SDCC experience… or at least it would have been if anyone paid any Goddamned attention at all to the poor, deluded dingbat. After all, Comic-Con runs on the ability of the truly obsessed to park in a panel room all day if they want to to see something in particular. Had someone implied that people waiting for a particular panel wait in a separate line until that particular panel started say, last year outside of Hall H, they would have found the guy floating face-down in the bay with his volunteer badge choked around his nuts and “Team Jacob” hammered into the flesh of his forehead.

So instead, we all waited in the same line until someone’s shit was finally gotten together at about 6:10 p.m. – ten minutes after the scheduled panel start time. Once inside, we waited another five minutes (my notes read, “Fifteen minutes late – this is not the Superman movie panel, motherfucker”) until The Goon creator Eric Powell, computer animation studio Blur Studios co-owner Tim Miller, and Blur Studios Animator / Director Jeff Fowler took the stage, to the side of a screen showing the world’s most simplistic Samsung DVD player main menu screen.

And where most movie panels open with some hype guy whipping the crowd into a frenzy, this one opened with Powell saying, “Since this is a Goon movie…” and cracking open a can of beer, “That Kickstarter is a hell of a drug.”

Yeah, this panel was not your average SDCC movie hype machine. Which makes sense, considering it is drumming up publicity for a movie that has been in development for five years, and still exists only as a dream that was given life support by a crowdfunding drive only strong enough to create a black and white animatic story reel, all in the hopes of attracting a real movie studio’s attention.

Shit, I’d be drinking, too.

Hitting The Floor: SDCC 2013 Preview Night

One of the biggest problems wth Preview Night at San Diego Comic-Con is that it happens at night. It’s not the biggest problem, but it’s up there.

Here’s how Wednesday at SDCC works for your typical attendee (and at this point, we still buy our own passes, as opposed to trying to obtain press credentials, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment): you get up and you have some coffee and something to eat. Congratulations! It is now, say, 9:30 a.m. Now you need to find something to do for the next four, five hours!

Calm Before The Geekstorm

You cannot find a Dunkin’ Donuts in San Diego. This is more dire than it first might sound.

We take our Dunkin’ Donuts coffee seriously in New England. There isn’t a highway offramp between Providence and Bar Harbor where you can’t find a D & D within half a mile, and it is the morning beverage of choice for everyone other than the hipster douchebags who live near Boston University or in Cambridge or maybe Brookline, and no one gives much of a fuck what those commies think anyway.

As an example: while waiting in line for the TSA security screening at Logan Airport yesterday, there was a teenaged girl, who looked as exhausted as Amanda and I felt, slurping on a large Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee when the security drone told her she couldn’t bring any liquids through the checkpoint. She asked the guy if there was a “Dunkies” after the checkpoint, and when he told her no, she left the fucking line and went to the back so she could finish her dollar-fifty coffee.

So when I woke up at 5 a.m. local time here in San Diego, jetlagged and hung over, I asked my magical new smartphone if southern California had heard the word of God between last year and this year, it turns our that had… but not in any way that would help me.

Sure, there’s a Starbucks in the lobby of our hotel, but as a Bostonian, I believe that Starbucks hot coffee tastes as if it were heated with napalm while being filtered through crushed Galouise cigarettes. So I trudged off toward downtown to see what other options the good people of San Diego might have for a visitor who is wishing for either coffee or a quiet death.

And, as with every year, I was struck by the feeling of calm. The calm before the Geekstorm.

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.

How To Survive Comic-Con Without Really Trying: 2013 Edition

We are in the final throes of preparation for heading to San Diego for Comic-Con 2013, which means we don’t have a lot of time today, but it does mean that we’re in the process of putting into place a bunch of the stuff that we’ve learned about how to survive what amounts to a six-day forced march through spectacle, excitement, a marked lack of easy-to-access Internet, crowded restaurants and line – dear God, the lines.

But as we did last year, we’ll share a few of the lessons that we’ve learned about how to survive the process. Now, since our time is limited today, I’m not gonna go back and read what I wrote back then, but simply vomit some stuff into the keyboard… which in and of itself will be good experience to prepare for a six-hour session of daydrinking in the sun at Dick’s Last Resort on 5th Avenue.

Rising Conflict: San Diego Comic-Con 2013 Saturday and Sunday Panel Schedules Released

San Diego Comic-Con is many things to many people: a giant excuse to get drunk in a setting where you can strike up a conversation about Batman with whoever happens to be sitting next to you at the bar, a chance to get pictures with celebrities, a way to get loot you can’t get anywhere else, or an excuse to dress up like a superhero and jam up floor traffic every time you strike some form of pose.

And it is true; SDCC is all of those things to some people But there is one thing that Comic-Con is to all people: a scheduling nightmare where, no matter what panel you think you might want to see, there is at least one panel opposite that panel that you equally want to see.

And SDCC 2013 is no different. The convention has released the panel schedule for Saturday and Sunday, and there is a veritable pile of cool and interesting panels to check out. And you can get the full Saturday and Sunday schedules at the Comic-Con Web site, but as we did with the Thursday and Friday schedules a couple of days ago, we’ll call out some that look interesting, some that we’re gonna try to get to and report on… and some that just seem… a little weird.

Decisions, Decisions: Thursday and Friday San Diego Comic-Con Panel Schedules Released

We are in the middle of a heat wave here in Boston; temperatures have been above 90 degrees outside with extremely high humidity… and until about 90 minutes ago, temperatures inside the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office were roughly the same. However, a nice man came out and said he needed to work with something called  “blower motor,” which, after ascertaining that he wasn’t using code to seek a favor other than money to Make Cool Air Engine Go, has begin to cut through the disgusting humid stew in which we have been living for almost 48 hours.

All in all, it has been enough to make a man seek out a different climate: one with cool breezes, next-to-no humidity, and where air conditioning is a nice bonus as opposed to being the only piece of technology separating humanity from regular frustrated stabbings.

Which is a long way to go to say that we are beginning to develop a powerful anticipation for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, and that it has been good timing that they have begun to release their programming schedule over the past couple of days. Specifically, they have publicised the panels for Thursday an Friday, which you can find here for Thursday and here for Friday… although I’ll be commenting on some specific panels that look promising – or ridiculous – after the jump.

Finding Your Line: San Diego Comic-Con Releases Floor Map

The San Diego Comic-Con is coming up quick; it’s in about three weeks (which means I just had my fourteenth panic moment in a series of several hundred when I compulsively check my flight and hotel information to make sure I have the right dates), which means two things: we here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives are starting our annual trips out to research, test and collect equipment for reporting on the convention as quickly and comprehensively as a two-person operation can (particularly when the staff on the ground has a 100% incidence of problem drinking), and they information about the convention is beginning to drip out.

This means two things: we only have a few minutes today before we must head out on an appointment to irritate the shit out of some minimum wage drone at Best Buy (“How many finotles does this camera have? Two, eh? Yeah, can we speak to someone who knows that a finotle is not a thing?”), and that Comic-Con has released the map for the main convention floor.

And if you are attending the convention, you should go check the new map out; apparently they have moved some stuff around in the interest of relieving some floor traffic. The videogame exhibitors have been moved to pretty much the other side of the floor, and the art dealers have been moved even closer to Artists’ Alley. Which is probably a good move and should alleviate the horrible scrums of wretched humanity… right until the moment some top-heavy woman in a Power Girl costume strikes a pose for a photo, warping the orderly streams of timely travel more effectively than a TARDIS with a flamethrower.

You can check out the new map, and search for your target exhibitors here.

Last Chance Pass: Single-Day Tickets For San Diego Comic-Con 2013 Going Up For Sale

Yesterday, we here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office were out celebrating a birthday – not that I could testify in court that that’s actually what happened, except for the evidence of the calendar and the credit card slip reading only “Jagermeister” with a ridiculous number of digits next to it – so several emails we received went unnoticed until this morning, when I caught up on our correspondence to distract myself from praying for a merciful and quick death to stop the relentless thrumming in my head.

Which is a shame, because one of those emails was definitely noteworthy, at least to those people desperately praying for some ray of hope that they could find a way to attend this year’s San Diego Comic-Con next month.

Well, that ray of hope has blinked on: Comic-Con International has announced that several thousand people have returned a variety of single-day passes for this year’s convention, and that they have yanked some previously-reserved badges held for some professional departments… and that they will be holding a lottery for those laminates that you can be a part of.

You know, provided you meet a certain limited set of conditions.

Comic-Con International’s complete message and instructions are after the jump.

150 Seconds of Pant-Crapping Terror: SDCC Hotel Registration Is Complete

Our apologies for the dearth of content today, but is has been a busy one here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, between significant personal business, day job obligations… and, of course, the application for convention-priced hotel rooms at San Diego Comic-Con 2013, which occurred in a white heat starting at noon Eastern Time today.

Now, you can say what you want about the fact that, these days, you need to fill out an online form, list some favored hotels (this time, six. No more, no less)… and then wait for a few days to find out if you got what you wanted, what you were willing to settle for, or if you’ll be fighting for space in the men’s room stalls without the glory holes. And that’s after you have to wait for several hours after completing the online form just to get an email confirmation that they even received your application.

But I will say this: compared to the experience of reserving a convention room through Travel Planners, SDCC’s preferred booking agent or hotels, just five years ago, the current twitchy anticipation of waiting a few days to find out what you got is a small price to pay to avoid that tooth-shattering pure, animal rage that the process used to be.

Back in 2008, the Travel Planners site opened at noon on the appointed day… and promptly shit the bed like an infant on Seconal. It took me two and a half hours to get through to where I could actually purchase a room, and by then, well, I’m lucky that finances meant that we were looking for a hotel more than a mile away from downtown. That experience taught me: if you want to maximize your chances at attending SDCC, book a backup room that you can cancel later at a non-convention hotel within a month after the Comic-Con you just got back from… and no, I won’t tell you our backup hotel of choice. I know we’re a news site, but we’re not saps. Do your own damn legwork.

Compared to that pure hell, a little anticipation and apprehension is a small price today, because the process was surprisingly simple. During last year’s hotel reservation process, my browser chugged briefly when the site opened at noon, but I was able to get through the process in about three minutes… with a few minor complications.

So how was it this year?