I Will Go To Comic Con
Despite the fact that I live a two hours away from the city where it was held, despite the fact that as a youth I saved my allowance money to invest in Near Very Fine Issue #27’s of Moon Knight, despite the fact that I end up however much I gripe about them seeing every movie that comes out featuring a protagonist in a cape, despite all this I have resisted these many years visiting the annual Comic Con convention.
Not merely resisted but held the proceedings in active disdain, spewed venom each July on anyone within arm’s length about how terribly wrong it was, Comic Con and all its ways.
And now, here I find myself awake in 2011, standing on the brink of Comic Con, to which I will drive in just minutes.
My issues with Comic Con stem from my own mixed feelings about my nerd past, at once deeply ashamed of that chapter of my history while at the same time enormously resentful that I don’t get more credit for it. In the late 1970’s (yes, that was an actual time, not just a Instagram setting), when I would ride three buses once a month to the Ambassador Hotel for a monthly comic sellers convention, there was no glory awaiting my return; no crowds of cooing girls in nerd glasses waiting to applaud my astute purchase of four copies of Frank Miller’s Daredevil/Kingpin cycle. There were no women in sexy superhero costumes at the convention. There were no women at all, not one, except for the guy who put the thing on’s mother, who sold the tickets. In fact, there weren’t even any other teenagers there, just sweaty, overweight middle aged men, people who looked very much like I do now…
So now, in a new century, you all go down for a big costume party in San Diego and bask in the glow of being “geeks.” Well, la di f-ing dah.
Yes, I have nursed this heady cocktail of shame and resentment for decades now, bringing it to a boil every year during Comic Con. But now a concatenation of circumstances (a friend is throwing a party and I got a good deal on a hotel room on Priceline) requires me to confront the demons that have lurked within all these years and venture to my worst enemy: the enemy that is me. Only better looking.
I will file reports as events warrant. Please check this space for details.
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