Kelley Lindberg

Postcards from the Comic Con Edge

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By Kelley Lindberg

Me and my son — I mean Link — at Comic Con.

Last week was the first Comic Con ever held in Salt Lake City and the first I’ve ever attended. Comic Con is a giant convention for fans of science fiction and fantasy held at numerous cities across the country every year. Although I think they started originally as conventions for comic book fans, they now cover a lot more territory: comic books, books, movies, TV shows, video games, board games, animation, robotics…if you love it, it’s there. At this one, there were panel discussions on everything you can imagine SF/fantasy geeks might want to discuss, talks from icons like William Shatner and Stan Lee, and an exhibition hall where vendors offered everything under the sun to keep your fan-heart thumping.

40,000 of my closest friends

Estimates range from 50,000 to 80,000 tickets sold for Salt Lake’s 3-day Con, with more than 40,000 showing up on Saturday alone. They ran out of wristbands, swag bags, and other items after the first 2 days, and on Saturday the fire marshals weren’t letting new hordes in until old hordes left, even if you had pre-purchased tickets. They apparently turned away thousands of hopefuls who hadn’t yet purchased their tickets. I was there Saturday, with my teenage son and some friends. Yes, I’m still recovering!

Things I learned at Comic Con SLC 2013:

1) 40,000 is a lot of geeks in one place at one time.
2) I can still be reduced to a giggly, blushing teenager with a single wink from Adrian Paul. (Uh-oh, there I go hyperventilating again. Back in a minute.)
3) If you’re a 14-yr-old boy dressed up as Link from the Legend of Zelda games, random girls will come up and hug you and ask for photos with you. Not one random girl. Not two random girls. MANY random girls. All day long.
4) Some people shouldn’t be allowed to buy Lycra. Ever.
William Shatner, live and larger than life simultaneously
5) William Shatner is still funny. Really funny. Putting Nimoy’s bike in the rafters? Oh, yeah!
6) Just because you have 2 yards of white belt/webbing doesn’t mean the rest of us want to see you wear it. Leeloo didn’t wear that the WHOLE movie, now did she? (But thanks for wearing the lime green panties. At least there was something between your skin and my burning eyeballs.)
7) Spending 2 hours standing outside in the sun to get into the building, even though you’ve already purchased a ticket, seems kind of insane. Especially for those of you dressed in full-body ninja gear, Wookie suits, full armor, or thick face-paint. But more power to you, because you did it. You wacky souls, you.
8) If you’re going to dress like Thor, you should probably be sporting 6-pack abs, not a keg. I’m just sayin’.
R2D2 gets a little maintenance. I kept waiting
for a hologram projection to appear. It didn’t.
9) An awful lot of folks are amazingly creative. Some of the costumes were downright fantastic. Hats off to you (or helmets off, or Deadmau5 ears off, or masks off, or Loki horns off, or cyborg-glowing-eyed heads off, or…).
10) How scarring would it be to be at Comic Con with your family, and all of you are dressed up like sexy zombie nurses in miniskirts and fishnets — even your dad?
11) Apparently not scarring at all, because the kids looked fine with it.
12) Some celebrities from the 1980s have aged really well. Some…well, they look a lot like the rest of us now, so that’s kind of cool, too.
13) Although I went into the convention thinking I’d go see some of the panel discussions that were focused on books and authors, I ended up just walking around for hours people-watching. You can’t make that stuff up.
14) The world is a funnier, happier place when people don’t take themselves seriously.
 
 

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