For about the last fourteen years I have been going to Comic-Con here in San Diego. I found out about Comic-Con indirectly. I was never a huge comic book fan as a kid. I liked Spider-Man and some of the old Star Wars comics but I never really read them consistently. Back then comics were just too expensive for me. My interest in Comic-Con happened by chance. It was around fifteen years ago that there were many computer conventions. About every couple of months there would be a "convention" at the Shriner's hall which was more of a giant swap meet for computers. Once a year there was a big convention at the new San Digo Convention Center here in San Diego. The ground floor was filled with booths selling and promoting all things related to computers. Upstairs were rooms where there were panels that were either seminar like classes on software or discussions about different computer topics. Well, this yearly show died off and the little swap meets became more and more infrequent. When the big show decided to go "more corporate" many of the booths were gone and those seminars upstairs started to cost big money to attend. Gone were the little booths dedicated to local computer clubs and gone were those free seminars that educated new computer users like myself. I remember noticing that there was this thing called Comic-Con being promoted at the San Digo Convention Center . Back then you could just walk in and buy a ticket the day you wanted to go. I was surprised and amazed. This convention had the same format as the computer convention. The were vendors were just selling comic related products instead of computers products. Upstairs there were panels where people discussed comic related topics rather than computer related topics. It was essentially the old computer convention that I enjoyed but with comics as its focus.
At that time Comic-Con had enough movie and science fiction related things that I liked that I went back again and again. I saw the convention grow in size. Tickets were getting harder and harder to get as the show drew closer on the calendar. Now, you need to get your tickets for next year almost the week of the convention this year. I remember maybe six or eight years ago when Comic-Con sold out on a Saturday because the San Digo Convention Center was at capacity. Comic-Con has been a zoo ever since. It had been an event that few people really knew or cared about here in San Diego. People at work would look at me kind of funny that I would be taking time off to go to that "weird" event. Now many of them complain that they can't get tickets for their kids or even themselves. But aside from the fact that Comic-Con has become a very popular event there have been some changes that make it relevant to this technical blog.
The popularity of Comic-Con really started to take off when Hollywood discovered there was money to be made in adapting comic books to the big screen. It was now technically possible to make a movie, with all the technology learned from movies like Star Wars, that wasn't cheesy looking. These new movies became blockbusters and no longer were actors embarrassed to admit that they were in some "children's" movie. These high earning movies were now proudly being promoted by studios and actors found lucrative work in them. Studios discovered that they could easily and cheaply promote a movie to thousands of fans at Comic-Con. Send a couple of production people to sit on a panel and let some fans ask some questions, pretty easy free publicity. You could create a lot of publicity for a movie with just a short drive from Hollywood to San Diego. Then they realized they could send actors and create an even bigger buzz! Then they quickly moved to having booths on the convention floor. Movie studios, toy companies, and video game companies found that they had a lot of product that could be promoted and sold at Comic-Con. The corporate people are now dominating a show that was formerly just a collection of comic book stores and clubs that were there to have fun and do a little business. Comic-Con is no longer about small business but big business. There has been one change that surprised me though.
The last couple of years there have been at least a dozen video game publishers that have had areas on the floor to demonstrate their games. What has been surprising is seeing more computer related businesses make a showing. Last year Intel was at a "booth" that was featuring their new Atom processor. The Atom processor would be installed in televisions and VCR's so that Google TV could be streamed from your Internet connection to your entertainment center in your front room. Not only were the Google TV products being displayed but I was able to talk to one of the engineers who worked for Intel about the processor! There was a gaming magazine that was giving little seminars on the floor from manufactures of video cards, virus protection programs and other computer related products. One year I walked away with a free one year subscription for BitDefender antivirus as a promotional give away. This year on Comic-Con's website I saw that one of the prominent sponsors is AMD. A computer chip manufacturer for CPU and video cards is now at Comic-Con? I love it, I am slowly getting back the computer convention I have missed for so long.
This year I hope to cover Comic-Con a little bit from a computer technical perspective.
While waiting to go to Comic-Con I came across a pretty good video preview from GameSpot of Comic-Con from a computer game perspective. It focuses mostly on the video game related panels and the promotions they will be doing at Comic-Con. I don't know if I will be able to go to any of the video game panels though. Comic-Con has gotten really crowded so sometimes you have to stand in a line to stand in a line, to get into a panel and sit through it, so you can be sure to get into the panel that comes after that you really want to go to. I know that is a run on sentence but not like the run around you go through at Comic-Con nowadays. Hopefully there will be even more technical things on the showroom floor to report about. Because of the lines I prefer the floor to the panels. You even get into some good conversations with the vendors that are pretty educational. We'll see how this year's Comic-Con experience is like. Hopefully the corporations will not end up killing this convention like it did with the old computer convention. I don't think attendance will go down because of this corporate presence. The San Diego Comic-Con may "die" in the future because there has been a lot of pressure for it to move to another city because of the high attendance. Comic-Con may end up being "reborn" at another location.
Tonight I will be going to preview night at Comic-Con. I will not be searching the floor for comic book related items but computer related items instead. I might go to a few panels but many of them will probably be computer related. The fact that Comic-Con has become so huge is both good and bad. The bad part is that the convention is so crowded. I can't complain though since I contribute to that crowd myself. But the good part is that the convention is big enough to include related but different interests like computers.
