Videogum‘s Gabe is my kinda guy. A serious Comic-Con hater who knows how to explain why any reasonable person might feel the same way. Here‘s half of his 7.22 posting called “Comic-Con is Humanly Impossible.”
“It’s difficult to fully capture the scale of this shit show. And I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, or to harp on a broken record about a dead horse, but Comic-Con is a shit show.
“We showed up this morning at what we considered to be a perfectly reasonable time, and it turned out that it was not reasonable at all. A reasonable time to wait in line for six hours to watch ten minutes of a movie that is going to come out in eight months is 6 am. You can see Harry Knowles wheel himself into Hall H against the backdrop of the rising sun. Of course, Knowles has the last laugh, because he was sitting front and center for the preview of Megamind. He probably no longer even sees this Matrix: just a bright string of green numbers: ‘There is no line.’
“There is no wifi service at Comic-Con, and very spotty cell phone service. Bear in mind for whom this conference is intended. In 2010, having no wifi and spotty cell phone service already seems like the plot to Before Night Falls, but at a convention for nerds and blogs?
“The truth is that you are an adult, and you would love to see sneak previews of things if it didn’t require stretching the limits of human patience and discomfort. But an hour later the man will come out and reveal to you, which in your heart you knew all along, that not a single person left the hall after the Megamind panel, and they are all staying for the Tron panel, and so now the line you are in is officially the line for the Salt panel, which begins in another two hours. At which point you realize that there are three more days of this shit.
“What I’m trying to get at is that it seems fully possible for one to spend one’s life in an infinite Comic-Con line with no determinable outcome. You will be like Seido in Inception, getting noodles in your old-man beard, wondering whether shooting yourself in the head would fix anything.
“What [Comic-Con] is about is shoving endless promotional materials for uninspired and/or unnecessary nonsense into increasingly large branded gift bags. If you would like to know how it feels to be at Comic-Con it feels like you are a door, and people won’t stop shoving fliers under you. A door saddled with oversized garbage bags.”
