Comic Con Day Three: The End Is Nigh

An afternoon of car troubles and cartoons, and the rousing conclusion of my quest to recover Jayne’s knit cap.

Day Three began on an auspicious note with the mood-killing discovery that the car wouldn’t start. I had haunting visions of being trapped in a crappy hotel in Encinitas for days on end, my soul slowly being quashed by the overpowering cigarette smell embedded in the walls of the cheap hotel room. It took us a few hours but, after getting a tow and picking up a rental car, we managed to make it down to SDCC just in time to stand in line for Futurama.

As it was only 11 and the Futurama panel didn’t start until 12:45 and we were all the way down at the end of the line that ran the length of the upstairs hall twice, I thought it would be a good time to head down to the Exhibition Hall to finally buy myself a Jayne cap. It took me nearly 10 minutes to get to the booth all the way down in the furthest corner of the hall, but the quest for my Holy Grail had finally come to an end. A $35 end. That was when my cell rang with a panicked message from Adelle that the line was moving. Fast.

Now, for those of you playing at home, I had already jogged/speed-walked up then down the entire length of the southern wing of the convention center, crossed Sails Pavilion, and squeezed my way all the way across and up the Exhibit Hall to the Browncoats table. So when said phone call came through I had to run, like, literally run all the way back from whence I came. That comes out to just over a mile total. Keep in mind I also have asthma and lead a fairly sedentary lifestyle, so, by the time I reached my friends who were by this point at the head of the line, I was half dead. It took me a good twenty minutes to cool off and for my lungs to begin accepting oxygen again. But at least I made it…to the last half of the Family Guy panel and the whole The Cleveland Show panel. Yay?

Actually, neither the Family Guy (Seth MacFarlane, Alex Borstein, Seth Green, Patrick Warburton, and others) or The Cleveland Show (Seth MacFarlane, Mike Henry, Rich Appel, Sanaa Lathan, Kevin Michael Richardson, and others) panels were that bad. They were pretty funny, really. Much funnier than the shows themselves, as a matter of fact. But it was fun to watch the cast do a live reading of a scene set at Comic Con for The Cleveland Show and the entire audience was impressed with Seth MacFarlane singing along with the Down’s Syndrome Girl musical number. (Oh, I suppose I should also mention that the jump quote came from one of those two shows. Can’t remember which one though…) But neither were as DR as the Futurama panel (Matt Groening, David X. Cohen, Billy West, John DiMaggio, Katey Sagal, Maurice LaMarche, Crystal Chesney-Thompson, Ken Keeler, Patric M. Verrone, Claudia Katz, and Lauren Tom).

I love Futurama. I have seen every episode more times than I can count. “Sweet zombie Jesus” is the most popular phrase in my répertoire. The show even premiered on my birthday. Heck, I even like the movies. So I nearly died of over-squeeing when they showed a clip from a Comic Con-centric episode. Later, when I picked up some swag from the fulfilment center, I managed to grab Fry’s handmade comic book, “Delivery-Boy Man,” and, let me tell you, it is all shades of DRATW.

Afterward we ditched the audience Q&A for Futurama (because, really, who cares) so we could hit the “Spotlight on China Miéville” panel. I’ll have more on him in an upcoming post, but I will say he is better than awesome and reminds me of a bald Neil Gaiman.

The remainder of Saturday was spent wandering around the Exhibition Hall picking up last minute purchases and admiring the increasingly weird costumes (and doing a head count of all the gay men dressed as Sailor Moon—last count: 12). But finally it was time to call it a night. We had to return the rental and pick up our own car before it got too late so we assled out of the convention center for the last time and headed off to the shuttle. On the way a man called out to me to ask me about my epically awesome Jayne hat. I explained to him what it meant and he thanked me and I went on my way. Who was this man? Bear fraking McCreary. That’s right. I had a conversation with the man/god himself. I still don’t know how I managed to keep a straight face and not go all BSG fangirl on him, but somehow I survived.

Anyhoodle, that’s the end of the tale of my journey through Comic Con. Stuffs were purchased, lines stood in, noms relished, panels  enjoyed, and squees squeed. It was an epic weekend of epic epicness and I can’t wait to go back again next year. Check out my Flickr stream here to see more Comic Con pics.

Alex Brown is an archivist in training, reference librarian by day, writer by night, and all around geek who watches entirely too much TV. She is prone to collecting out-of-print copies of books by Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen, and Douglas Adams, probably knows far too much about pop culture than is healthy, and thinks her rats Hywel and Odd are the cutest things ever to exist in the whole of eternity. You can follow her on Twitter if you dare…