The San Diego Comic-Con always draws a huge crowd from not just San Diego, but all over the country. They say it’s the largest comic book convention in the world, although nationalities of attendees are hard to gauge when half of them are dressed up like Klingons. I had been to the Comic-Con a couple of times in the late 90s before I moved away from San Diego with my friends Dan and Kiko. Kiko actually went from attendee to exhibitor with his involvement with Penny Arcade, which is a different story in of itself. One major thing has changed from my experience then to now- it’s more about media of all sorts than it is about comics anymore. TV shows, movies, video games, toys, sculptures, you name it. Everything kids used to be beat up and ostracized for thinking was cool, is now actually embraced by mainstream society. Of course the general public doesn’t always do the comic world right, like the first Punisher movie for example, or that thing they are trying to pass off as G.I. Joe… but I digress. It is indeed neat to see the things I was into as a kid brought to life. It was Melissa’s (or MrsMelMitch as I’ve been calling her since the advent of her new Twitter account) first trip to the Con , and she had been wanting to check it out for the last couple of years. Somehow a wedding always kept us away, but this year we made a point not to book anything on the weekend itself. We walked around the floor for a few hours in the slow moving mass of people wishing we had a rope to tether us together to avoid separation. It was definitely busy. All in all I think it’s fun to just walk around for a day, but if you are contemplating attending multiple days you really need to be attending some of the panels and not just wandering. It’s also a lot of people to contend with, so if you get claustrophobic you might want to reconsider. People were all very courteous though, and everyone who dressed up loves to be photographed, which worked out well for me!

- Josh