San Diego Comic-Con

This is the view from the Pacific Surfliner Train as you roll to and from San Diego.

Downtown San Diego is what happens when you leave the Crate& Barrel in charge of urban planning. It's filled with restaurants and nightclubs that are so tastefully decorated, you want to kill yourself out of the boredom. Two pretty good restaurants to check out: Ch1ve, a restaurant so pretentious it uses numbers as surrogates for vowels (I didn't just have fries, I had spicy feta cheese shoestring fries), and Rama, a Thai place with excellent decor and decent food.

I found San Diego's pedicab subculture fascinating. It's something I haven't noticed in any other American city: immigrants from some indeterminate Central/Eastern European nation (they always have thick accents) pedaling bicycle taxis through the streets of San Diego for exoribtant prices.
You even have female pedicab drives, which is pretty amazing and unexpected in and of itself.

The best days to go to Comic Con are Wednesday and Thursday. By the time the convention hits Friday, pedestrian traffic inside the convention center resembles a pedestrian version of the 405 freeway. It took me about ten minutes to walk from one end of the floor to the other on Friday, which was compounded by the definite, inescapable man-stench about the event.

The show floor is a melting pot of corporate commerce, indie artists, vintage pornography, and obsessive nerdery. It's a much more overwhelming experience to sensory faculties than even E3, which is simply a collection of large media conglomerates showing off their home stereo systems.

I attended a panel on Star Trek, in which an eleven-year-old boy asked the show's creators about slight differences in the visual effects of phasers in two different episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. Star Trek fans never disappoint.

For research, I saw the pilot of the new NBC series "Heroes". It was solidly mediocre, although the Japanese otaku-telekinetic has some funny moments.

It's definitely worth your time to walk through the rows of indie artists who have set up shop on the convention floor. You'll most likely discover something you like - I picked up quite a few indie comics at the show, and while they're not completely successful, they all contain at least a few interesting ideas.

Somehow, American culture has meandered from the Great American Novel to the Great American Screenplay, and now, to the Great American Comic Book. I spend plenty of time reading novels, watching movies, and I am impressed by the surplus of young comic book writers who have interesting ideas, and actual stories to include them in. It's a medium that isn't drowning in its own orthodoxy and pretentions, and allows young writers to grow and develop their talents. I don't think I've ever read anything by Brian K. Vaughn that actually works as a story, but I don't know if I'll be saying the same thing five years from now.

Surprisingly, the most popular cosplay character isn't any Marvel or DC superhero, but rather various characters from a certain hidden village in the country of fire. Naruto is such a juggernaut that he singlehandedly takes up an eighth of the convention center floor. Judging from the massive array of Naruto merchandise on offer in its booth, the Mattel corporation owes its current solvency to Mr. Uzumaki, it seems. Anime chicks love wearing the Konoha forehead protector in the style of Sakura. Surprisingly, nobody dresses up as Naruto himself, probably owing to the extremely loud orange jumpsuit that he is always attired in.