Thanks for Being Kind to a First-Timer, Comic-Con
Among the WIRED culture team, I am not the comics junkie. I greatly respect the medium, but have never taken the plunge into ink-and-panel fangirldom. The barrier has just always felt too high â youâre either a collector and a cosplayer or you leave it to the pros. After all, do you know anyone who just reads Moon Knight and says âNot my bagâ to everything else? I donât. Itâs a way of life, and turning into a weekend warrior at the comics shop feels like Iâm condescending to the readers who have invested years of their lives in these mythologies. Iâm not saying thatâs the way it has to be; thatâs just how it plays out in my head.
Movies, on the other hand, thatâs my wheelhouse. Movies are what I love, and when it goes just right, theyâre what I get to do for work, too. So over the last five years, Comic-Con has really become a lot more for people like me, the people who knew the big names and knew the stories and grew up thinking Christopher Reeve invented Superman. I couldnât tell you off hand when Lex Luthor first appeared to face off against the Man of Steel, but with the big screen as my gateway drug and a deeply curious mind, I now want to know answers to those questions. (It was Action Comics issue number 23 from 1940). And armed with that deeper understanding of my beloved screen heroesâ origins, I can grow to love them more fully, and find out why so many others have loved them for so long. And Iâm pretty sure I owe Comic-Con and its die hard attendees big time for getting these characters into theaters for me.Â
This was my first time at the convention, and Iâve heard tell of Hollywoodâs colonizing ways at the annual gathering. I didnât know what to expect. Shills from Paramount pictures stepping all over the Image Comics booth? Legendary coming in and shouldering Dark Horse off into the wings? Avengers cosplayers in West Side stand offs against Smodcast super fans whoâve been coming to San Diego to see their hero and unofficial King of the Con, Kevin Smith, since he started attending the event in 1995? I envisioned a degree of madness and a hum of tension running through everything, but thatâs not what I found at all. I found people having fun! I found people willing to love something so much theyâd stand in line for 10 hours in the Southern California heat just to be within 200 rows of it. I found people who dressed up as Loki for a day, but who will get to be Loki forever in the pictures fellow convention-goers post of them on Instagram â or maybe even put in their old-fashioned scrapbooks! And most hearteningly, I found people like me, who love fantastical characters and just want to be close to the creators of the art they love, regardless of whether itâs made for the page or for the screen.
So when Iâm walking around the crowded halls and side walks of the San Diego Convention Center, I admittedly donât recognize many of the other worldly characters meticulously recreated around me. (Just so weâre clear, though, I know my Avengers and my Boba Fetts and I can pick out an assassin with a creed.) But even if I canât identify that red flaming super heroine wielding a sledgehammer to my left, I can identify with the passion. The commitment and dedication to celebrating a popular art form is familiar and wonderful to me, and if movies and television betting the farm on comic book characters can serve as a bridge between me and my sci-fi/fantasy brethren who started coming to Comic-Con for actual comics way before it was fashionable, then I, for one, am glad that the fringe and the center have found their way to one another. You were a big old hot mess of blue body paint and zombie marches and red spandex, SDCC, and I look forward to visiting you again next year.