I’ve nothing left to say about Comic Con, but I’m gonna say it anyway.

For the last few years this infernal San Diego gathering has been Hollywood Elsewhere’s idea of Evil Central — the absolute dregs of cinema culture congregated en masse, goofballing and cosplaying in one ten-square-block area of downtown San Diego, ripe for strafing as they fiddle with this or that pathetic fantasy…anything to distract them from the general drift and hollowness of their day-to-day lives.

Last year I said I wouldn’t go there with a knife at my back and a $1000 cash bribe in a brown paper bag. My refusal price has since gone up. This year I wouldn’t attend Comic Con with an offer of (a) $1500 in cash, (b) a RT flight to San Diego in a private jet, (c) ten gratis sushi dinners, (d) a year’s supply of dark Italian Starbucks Instant and (e) a $300 gift certificate from The Kooples.

Okay, the British guy who managed to actually fly around like a low-altitude Iron Man deserves a round of applause.

“Cons are for partying and cosplay and raucous behavior,” a “retired organizer of genre cons” named faustidisq wrote last year. “This attitude attracts so many different people now and not just the fat basement dwellers who used to be the only types. But at least those comic book guys weren’t pushovers to taste. They were well-read and quite articulate and knew their movie history. Nowadays, it’s a ‘look at my costuming group’ and ‘can I sneak into that press event, dude?’ attitude.”

Me too: “Except for noteworthy exceptions like Ant-Man, Avatar, portions of the 2014 Godzilla, the original Guardians of the Galaxy, the first two Captain America flicks and others I’m forgetting right now, the Comic-Con influence is the nexus of evil in the action-movie realm.

“Comic-book/superhero/fantasy/CG/fanboy culture has obviously been good for Hollywood’s bottom line from time to time, but it’s been poisonous in terms of its formulaic reliance and suffocating repetitions, and the general dilution of the influences and traditions of 20th Century dramas, spectacles, comedies and action films.

“The ComicCon mentality is a sworn enemy of the actual realities of life on the planet earth, which is to say recreations of same for centuries, going back to the time of Shakespeare. ComicCon-ers are the aesthetic locusts of our time — a blight, a dustbowl drought visited upon potentially fertile imaginings.”