The Festival Circuit
Remember what I said about people taking subjects and themselves way too seriously?

For the most part, I avoid places where people who are into what I'm into congregate.

The exception would be most places of business.

Take music stores. I worked in them for years. All kinds of people come into them buying all kinds of music. Generally, the average member of the population's taste is horrible no matter what they buy, but at least it's diverse. Besides, the odds are pretty good that unless you end up chatting it up with someone who works there, you're not gonna end upconversing with someone who's into the same stuff unless you already know them.

Book stores are largely the same....and quiet as tombs, generally speaking. I always thought that was funny. Libraries were meant for reading. Bookstores were meant for commerce. (Ok, maybe the really upscale rare bookshops deserve more reverence.) Anyhow, you'd think that people would find something of a literary forum in them. However, especially at Barnes & Noble, you get the library-style dirty look if you're making noise.

Movie shops are largely anonymous. You can tell if it's a movie snob that works there, but you'd have to be tailing someone as they picked stuff up to know about the customers.

Comic shops on the other hand....well, not every customer is a dorky fanboy...but your odds skyrocketed. Customers in comic shops tend to be talking some sh!t either with the clerk or with each other. You can spot a newcomer or someone looking for a present or something from a million miles away. They just don't fit. So with few exceptions, I try to stay out of them for long periods of time. To be fair, I actually find I like most of the clerks. They're into the stuff, but usually nowhere near as annoyingly as the folks shopping there.

Now take that annyoing factor and multiply it by a 1000, and you start to feel the vibe at the San Diego Comic-con.

Before we go there, let me reiterate the first idea I posited above about avoiding congregations who are into my interests, namely festivals.

When I was a wee lad, I did get my dad to take me and a friend of mine to a couple of comic shows in Detroit. They were small affairs, and their primary purpose was dealers trying to hawk their wares. It was long boxes of sealed books on display on table after table, and the only interruption might be some collectible toys or movie memorabilia. If you weren't there to buy, then you had no other reason for being there. Geek Interaction Factor: Low.

Technically I did go to a lot of art and arts and crafts shows thanks to my parents, which were festivals of sorts. Other than the occasional corn dog or Icee, I generally couldn't have cared less. I was already drawing and what not in those times, but that aside I still knew then that that stuff was a small step up from unicorns on black velvet. Geek Interaction Factor: Low. Dorky Middle-Aged Adults W/No Taste: Off the chart.

Then there was that one Lollapalooza that I went to. I spent the whole day watching bands, and largely avoided the festival aspect. It was in Miami. The following day or week (it's a little hazy) Hurricane Andrew wiped out the area. Geek Interatction Factor: Low. Hippie or Drug Scene Interaction: Significant. (Unless you're in the 'pit' or involved in some love-in swaying, you can pretty much stay out of everyone else's way.)

My first real festival came in my senior year in college when I paid in full to attend South by Southwest Music and Film Festival in Austin, TX. Now the previous years I had attended screenings tied into SxSW, as well as screening for The Heart of Austin Film Festival (which occurs in Fall, and doesn't have the huge music component), but I had never gotten the badge and hit the panels and so on. In my final year, I did.

Don't get me wrong, it was fun. I got to meet Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi), Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy), and Billy Bob Thornton. I met B-movie auteur Jack Hill (Foxy Brown, Switchblade Sisters) and his frequent star, B-movie icon Sid Haig, thanks to Quentin Tarantino, a big supporter of the fest. I hung out at a lot of the screenings with Harry Knowles, creator of Ain't It Cool News.com (though I already knew Harry from around town. Keep in mind Rodriguez, Richard Linklater (Dazed & Confused), and several others were also regular fixtures in town and at the University.)

However, the experience was oft marred by three regular features:

1. The Movie Geeks: The weird overly specific questions. The attempts to sound more intelligent than the film-maker. Their all too life consuming obsession with movies that they just bled all over everywhere.

2. The Hollywood Wannabe's: These fell into two groups: Wannabe Scenesters, and Wannabe Filmmakers. The W-Scensters were either acting jet-set or would-be starf*ckers. The W-Filmmakers constantly harped about the projects they weren't actually working on or would never actually complete.

3. Oddly enough the Filmmakers themselves: Not the Hollywood types, the indy directors who got their stuff into the festival. In the course of conversing between them and the wannabe's, especially after seeing their movie, it was this weird mutual mental masturbation that was spewing up the scenery. (Note the clever play on words.) Well, some were cool, but too many were preparing for their next role as a pretentious has-been filmmaker.

So you had to pick and choose what you went into. You had to get in and out of screenings and panels unscathed. And it helped if you had a friend or acquaintance you could stand to keep you company in those long festival lines.

Again, imagine that ten- to one hundred-fold worse...and only in one day.

That's Comic-con.

I suppose because it's even more geeky, fantasy-driven, and looked down upon that it has to get that much more pretentious, out of touch with reality, and with an important "All of this is so cool" attitude.

And I like comics, movies, toys, and animé.

I get thrilled at seeing Lou Ferigno just like the rest of them.

This year, I stuck to the dealers. There were some comics I was looking for, and often Comic-con is the place to get a deal. Problem is, it's actually getting more and more difficult to actually find comics for sale at the con. Now this wouldn't be so surprising if this wasn't the world's largest comic book festival. That's the whole reason we were supposed to be there, but now it's much more about toys, video games and movie stuff in a lot of ways.

Hell, the guys from the movie I'm working on now had a panel there that in addition to having the geeks at the con foaming at the mouth, it has also inspired a net nerd rampage on chat rooms and movie bulletin boards.

All those things go hand in hand, but you would hope that the comics wouldn't fall by the wayside.

Granted, I didn't stay in San Diego, and I only went for one day. I missed out on the scene that went on at the bars and hotels around town. I'm led to understand you could run into a lot of your favorite artists and writers and whatnot outside of the overwhelming autograph driven pushy sweaty lines environment. I was living in Austin so I was a part of SxSW by default, but here I just visited briefly.

About the only guy I got to say 'Hey' too all too briefly was Frank Cho of Liberty Meadows.

Now, I could rehash the material about geekdom and personal hygeine. I mean a lot of it is true. You stuff a couple thousand people with questionable grooming habits in a convention center...well, the B.O. quotient is going through the roof. Not too mention, that once again, I felt like one of the only people who had seen the sun in the past couple of years.

I guess my real problem was the rise in costumes this year.

My problem with fan costumes is that they are never built well enough to be cool. The people in them are lost under the illusion that they look cool. And a lot of times, it's just the complete stylistic ignorance of the fact that what looks cool on paper doesn't always look cool in real life.

That's in addition to my general disgust with permanent 24-hour mental escapism. If it's not the drone automaton who goes to work, comes home, turns on the TV, goes to bed, and does it again the next day, then it's the elaborate b.s. of the geek. I think all this Goth "I'm a vampire" crap stems from the same thing. It's not an effort to be different. It's not an attempt to break conformity. It's an attempt to run away from reality and responsibilty. "Count Couer de morte doesn't need to clean his room. The undead don't care about the world of the living."

It's just like that other stereotype about geeks not being able to get girls. Granted I've seen more girls at comics shops and at the cons in the last couple of years than I ever did as a kid. And I don't mean the utterly creepy geek chicks either, but we're talking average to above average at least in appearance (I didn't bother to get to know them). However, many of the girls you see are working booths. They're scantily clad. They're dressed as schoolgirls and super heroines. They're hawking video games, movies, or...you guessed it...porn.

Of course, they fawn all over these geeky fanboys. If all the blood wasn't rushing from the fellas' heads to their d!cks, they'd hear how fake and condescending most of these girls sound. The one's who do sound somewhat genuine tend to be the real attention whores, and having anyone drool over them is good news to them. But that isn't what really irks me...

It's the fact that these morons walk away thinking that's how these girls really are...all the time. That women are like what they see in comics, movies, and porn. Now granted, I've got an imagination and when isn't the fantasy better than the reality, but you should at least have some practical experience to ground that imagination.

Anyhow, speaking of women, my happiest moment came when I plunked down $20 for a die-cast metal action figure of Venus A, Mazinger's chick. She's new (well, relatively) from a line of Japanese collection of the classic giant robots. I have to admit that I miss metal toys. They generally looked better. Had better paint jobs. Held up longer from kid abuse. And they just had a weight to them. Anyhow, I hadn't bought any in the past because of the expense, so I was happy to get a deal on one. That's about as geeky as I get, and most non-comics people who've noticed her in my apartment thought that she was pretty cool.

In the end, it's all good fun. I try no to be too judgemental. I certainly didn't start flinging nerds out of my way (but I can't say I wasn't tempted). But at the same time, it still bugged me pretty well. Keep in mind, most of these thoughts were afterward, I don't walk around super-aggro, I was trying to enjoy myself.

So that's my report on the con. Fun to go to, but prepare to be scared. If you're not scared, then much of the above might just apply to you.

Cheers.