After being sore and tired and worn out yesterday I experienced one of the great bonuses when it comes to traveling west- I got to sleep in without sleeping in. My body thought it was 10:00 AM but the clock only said 7:00!
I headed out knowing that there was very little on my plate when it came to sessions I wanted to go to so it would be an easy day enjoying the exhibit hall and maybe, just maybe finishing off some of the must do shopping. I started in the typical overwhelmed state trying to figure out where I needed to go and stopped by “The Prisoner” booth to see what was going on. “The Prisoner” is a cult classic from England and it is being rebooted (Hollywood’s new term) on AMC (didn’t that used to be American Movie Classics?). It does look interesting and I went ahead and gave them my email address so I could become 234 and a citizen of the village. I decided that it would be cool if Cecil had one too. So knowing that all they wanted was to reach their quota of collected email addresses I asked if the monkey could get one and since he does have his own they went right ahead (after some some slight Jedi mind tricks) and took his photo. The funny part was when the gut who does the cards got to that picture you could just see the confusion on his face.
So then I took my time on a quest to get some things done. Get “Winter 1152” from David Peterson and get my copy of “Fall 1152” signed. Find Chris Giarrusso and see if he was still doing his really cool crayon drawings and get one. He was and I did. Then I was determined to find Scott Sava’s booth WITHOUT consulting my program. This was a bad idea. I remember seeing it Wednesday night and not going over (don’t know why, just didn’t). I now wanted to make sure I knew where it was and see what stuff he had (Scott does the webcomic Dreamland Chronicles and a bunch of all ages stuff that is really great). I would hate to have seen my trail as I kept looking and finding nothing… I found a bunch of other cool booths and kept ending up in some different places. Finally after a quick break I gave up and looked in my guide. I’ll be back sometime before Sunday to pick up the books I need.
So I’m wandering around and there is Andy Runton’s Booth. Andy does the wonderful comic “Owly” which is a great book and was my very first geocache. The cool ting about it is any kid can read it since it has virtually no words! The story is told entirely through pictures it is so cool, so I picked up a complete set of his books and some other stuff. Andy was so nice he even gave Cecil a pin on Wormy (if you had read Owly, you would know WHO wormy is) that Cecil has been wearing since.
I also picked up the DVD of the Jeff Smith documentary, before heading off to my only panel of the day. Jimmy Gownley does the comic book “Amelia Rules!” which is about the life of a girl and her friends… its about growing up, its about being a kid, its just plain cool. I have a bunch of copies in my classroom not because I like but because it has a strong female character that kids relate to (and because I like it). The panel was on self publishing, but really it was the story of how Jimmy started creating comics and how he (and his wife) got people to read the comic. Inspiring, and since it wasn’t about Twilight (Jimmy started off with something about “Thank you attending this panel on How Twilight has impacted American goth culture…” or something like that) it wasn’t full. And I feel that most of the sessions I will want to attend will be like that. I really don’t care too much about the latest Hollywood blockbuster that just got announced. While I love Disney & Tim Burton’s work, I didn’t really want to wait hours in line to try to get into Hall H to hear about “Alice in Wonderland” although the net was abuzz over Johnny Depp showing up for that panel. James Cameron is a fantastic filmmaker and I’m sure Avatar is going to be a great movie… again did I need to be there? Some girls on the Trolley back had waited a couple hours to get into one of the main halls and finally gave up when they realized that there were still about 1,000 people ahead of them. That has been something I doubt I have heard the last of- overcrowding. There are a lot of people here! trying to move in the exhibit hall in some places can be almost impossible. This does not bode well for my plan to attend the Eisner Awards or the Masquerade, but if it happens great, if it doesn’t, so be it. I will at least have tried there are other things going on or I could maybe get some of the comics done for next week.
Today though, was not just for shopping, or learning about one of my favorite comics… it was for Cecil and taking the time to let the monkey help me break down some of the barriers that keep me from actually being more outgoing. For some people this may seem a shocking statement, but I am an introvert. Talking to people and being outgoing are against my nature. I don’t know if it was something that happened in my dark childhood (maybe the butler told me to shush too many times) or what, but anytime I’m in a new situation I have to push myself to be social. Cecil has helped- I’m not self confident enough to come up to a girl in a metal bikini and ask if I can take her picture… even if thousands of other guys are. But to chronicle Comic-Con I wanted to really help everyone understand what was happening, so Cecil has to be the one to get me to push beyond and ask “Can I get a picture of you with my monkey?” Be it an artist I admire, or a guy in a crazy costume or a girl in a metal bikini, Cecil does get the photo because he is one spoiled monkey that no one can refuse. So check out the Flickr account and see Cecil’s latest photos. Friday is Star Wars Day so I’m sure he’ll get his share of Stormtroopers and other inhabitants of the Star Wars Universe. Saturday is the Masquerade so there will be a lot more costumes then. The cool thing is these are people who are enjoying themselves taking some time from their hectic lives to be someone else to escape. Having Halloween in July, and that is so cool.
Final note: Geocaching wise- I looked for three different caches today and found none. Mostly (I know this will come as a shock) because of muggles (and muggles dressed as wizards, and super-heroes, and zombies, and vampires, and… you get the picture), but some because I may not have been looking in the right places, I’ll keep trying hopefully finding a few before I leave.