Shattering Conventions: Commerce, Cosplay and Conflict on the Expo Floor

1992.

1

COMIC-CON HOLY WAR

I WAS HURRYING, but there was no hurrying at Comic-Con.

I had less than 30 minutes until my scheduled interview with a spiky-haired pro wrestling champ called The Miz, but I wasn’t even inside the San Diego Convention Center yet. A half-hour would’ve been more than enough time to make the interview if this were any other event held there, like the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Metabolic Bariatric Surgery, the Rock and Roll Marathon and Health and Fitness Expo, or even the goddamned ‘96 Republican Convention. But this was Comic-Con, a spiritual rite for the nerdy and obsessed, a hajj of mass fantasy co-mingled with consumerism. The con drew an estimated 140,000 fanboys and geek girls that year, and at that moment it seemed like all of them were swarming the streets surrounding the convention center. I was only a few blocks away, but they were going to be very long blocks.

A full-sized military chopper carted in on trucks to promote an upcoming alien invasion blockbuster stood partially constructed in front of the Hilton, making San Diego’s bayside real estate resemble a Middle Eastern war-zone. The priests and priestesses of different sects moved past the simulated wreckage with indifference.

The order of the enslaved Princess Leias, garbed in their bronzed bikinis and bearing choker chains around their necks (a vestige of their former bondage to the vile Jabba the Hutt), moved in the greatest numbers. They were often flanked by the worshippers of Boba Fett who, in contrast to the barely dressed Leias, were covered from head-to-toe, making their vestments of intergalactic body armor a kind of male equivalent of the burka.

There were also more than a few Heath Ledger Jokers and Johnny Depp Pirates, although they didn’t seem to travel in flocks like the Leias and Fetts. Then there were those that clung to chosen deities who had failed at the box office, like the guy who insisted on dressing like the Frank Miller version of The Spirit.

I turned onto Third Avenue towards the crosswalk that served as the sole access point between the convention center and the rest of downtown San Diego. The walkway ahead of me was jammed with a full squad of Return of the Jedi scout troopers, all pushing imperial baby strollers. Some dark part of me wanted to tackle those imperial surrender monkeys—I mean they lost to Ewoks—but think of the children. Crushing toddlers was never good.

I played a human game of Tetris instead, hopping into what small, open spaces there were to gain some yardage. But I weighed over 300 pounds, so this still wasn’t a good idea. I’d slipped past the imperial strollers, but one of my hops left me teetering like a felled buffalo. I was about to fall on the most adorable Batman and Batgirl you’ve ever seen. They must’ve been about three and four years old. Both of them looked up at me through their cowls with pleading eyes. I waved my arms and regained my balance, and kept moving. No toddlers were crushed.

I made it to K Street, but I was caught in a maelstrom of swag. At its center, a team of zombies more convincing than anything out of a George Romero movie shambled around in circles to promote AMC’s The Walking Dead, while hula girls in grass skirts handed out cards hyping the new reboot of Hawaii Five-O and some Showtime interns begged passersby to apply temporary tattoos of a gaping razor slash to drum up interest in the latest season of Dexter. It was getting hard to tell who was dressed up because of an inner calling, and who was on some network’s payroll.

Pressing forward, I crossed the lightrail tracks. This was progress, but the closer I got to the crosswalk, the more the masses of nerds seemed to congeal into one slow-moving, multi-legged organism.

In a patch of dirt just after the tracks, an Asian man stood with an oversized sign that read Justice? CIA is EVIL in big, handwritten letters across the top with the six reasons that the sign-holder was the #1 specimen of the CIA’s human brain control study listed below. Reason number four read, Used to teach intermediate calculus. Reason six: Nonsmoker, nondrinker I’m homeless. At first I thought he might have been another corporate shill working some clever gimmick to promote an upcoming TV show on the SyFy Network, but then I figured that he was just your garden variety, mildly schizophrenic urban crazy drawn by Comic-Con’s strange energy. There were a lot of them around.

The light at the crosswalk turned green. The horde in front of me trudged across East Harbor Drive. I took my place in front of the line just as the Don’t Walk sign started to flash and the traffic cop doing crossing guard duty motioned for everyone to hold up. While waiting for the light to turn green again, I nervously looked to my right and spotted more crazy signs. A regular looking guy in a checkered shirt held a piece of Day-Glo cardboard with GOD HATES KITTENS scrawled across it. Next to him, somebody dressed like Bender, the cigar-chomping robot from Futurama, held up a placard that read KILL ALL HUMANS. This whole thing was obviously a goof on something, but what? The mentally ill guy on the other side of the tracks? That didn’t make sense.

I gazed a few yards down the road and I found my answer. She was a hard-bitten middle-aged woman with an American flag wrapped around her lower half. In her hands she held four signs that made her resemble a multi-armed pagan goddess of intolerance. One sign read, FAGS DOOM NATIONS, in bold, blue letters. Another screamed, AMERICA IS DOOMED in patriotic red, white and blue. Beyond her were more members of her clan with equally apocalyptic signage. They were the God Hates Fags people, the disciples of Pastor Fred Phelps and members of the Westboro Baptist Church. They could usually be found harassing the families of dead soldiers at military funerals, but now the Westboro Baptists were waving their screen-printed hate at Comic-Con.

Across the five-lane boulevard, nerds massed on the ramp leading from the convention center, their crudely fashioned cardboard signs held aloft like the banners of a medieval army. A man in a Starfleet uniform bore a piece of brown cardboard with the words God Hates Jedi hand-drawn in block lettering, each character filled in with a Sharpie. Further up the ramp, a woman in a Robin the Boy Wonder suit waved an oversized sheet of butcher paper that read, The Dark Knight is by my side, while Edward Scissorhands photographed her with his point-and-shoot camera. Another sign-holder offered Free Hugs if U Don’t Like Phelps, and a more succinct message just read, Fuck God.

This was shaping up to be a crusade, a clash of civilizations, with Bender the Robot and his cat-hating pal forming a beachhead for secular humanism. The nerdy triumphalists fighting for the love of Steve Jobs, George Lucas, Marvel Comics and skimpy anime costumes were on one side. The Westboro Baptists were on the other, doing their damnedest to summon the fire and brimstone of their Lord’s wrath. All of a sudden, the six million or so cable viewers that watched the Miz wrestle every Monday night and all of the clicks that he could bring to my blog didn’t seem to matter so much. Something was going on—something that couldn’t be arranged by sweet talking a publicist—and I was in the middle of it.

I sprang into action like a combination of Peter Parker and Clark Kent, only without the super-powers. If I was going to do this thing, I had to do it right. I couldn’t just call it a day after interviewing the sci-fi nerds. As revolting as it was probably going to be, I also had to talk to the Phelps people too. While the mob of nerdy counter-protesters were still crossing the street, I moved past Bender the Robot towards the Westboro Baptists, but my drive came to a stop almost as soon as I’d started.

Getting to the zealots wasn’t going to be easy. Standing between them and me was a row of San Diego cops in pressed blue uniforms with the authority to tase me, cuff me and throw my fat ass in jail. I had to get through the police line somehow, but I didn’t even have a press pass.

2

THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT

THINGS WEREN’T LIKE THIS the first time I went to Comic- Con in 1992. The only crazies that showed up back then were the mostly virginal guys lugging around stacks of immaculately bagged and boarded comic books for their favorite artists to sign.

And I was one of those guys—a longhaired perpetual man-child, living in the same room that I’d slept in since I was eight years old. I had a lifelong commitment to a two-year college and didn’t even have a raging penchant for green bud to explain it all. Sure, there was a recession going on. I could use that as an excuse, but in reality I was paralyzed by sheer nerdiness, a social paraplegic whose career and personal development had been rendered motionless by incessant viewings of John Carpenter movies and reruns of Star Trek. But there was always a listlessness, a feeling that I should’ve written a run of Alpha Flight comics or directed my first lousy zombie movie already.

This listlessness combined with fannish devotion drove me to plunge into the ninth circle of my geeky obsessions like a postmodern Dante Alighieri (or at least the protagonist in the paperback fantasy novel Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle where a science fiction writer makes his way through hell with the guidance of Benito Mussolini). I went to the travel agent around the corner from my mom’s house (there was no Priceline.com back then) and booked my flight to San Diego for the 23rd Annual Comic-Con.

Referred to simply as San Diego by the comic collectors in my inner circle, Comic-Con was already the biggest event of its kind in the nation even before A-list movie stars started using it as a vehicle for hyping CGI-laden blockbusters. It was also one of the only events where a big nobody like me could show his stuff to the editors of Marvel and DC Comics in the hopes of breaking into the business, not that I had any stuff to show. But that still didn’t stop me keep me from seeing this trip as some kind of professional enhancement junket anyway.

Trying to make it may have been the bill of goods that I was trying to sell myself and my mother, but the real reason I made the pilgrimage was to meet Jack The King Kirby. I first begged my dad to buy me comic books off the squeaky spinner rack at the local pharmacy before I could even sound out the content of the word balloons. Even then, Kirby’s work leapt out at me like Captain America with overly squared finger tips fleeing something called the Mad Bomb, or Kamandi the Last Boy on Earth being pursued by a Roman legion of anthropomorphic tigers. Kirby’s panels crackled with energy and hinted at a living universe that continued beyond the edge of the pulpy page.

As the creator or co-creator of Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Nick Fury, the Avengers, the Inhumans, the comic book version of the Thor, the Silver Surfer, the New Gods as well as an army of accompanying villains (Dr. Doom, Magneto, the Red Skull, etc.), Kirby had conjured up as big a chunk of American pop culture as Walt Disney. In doing so, he also shaped my very consciousness. I can’t even begin to piece out where my thought process begins and Kirby’s vast creation ends. Those splash pages of Norse Gods battling Galactus, the devourer of worlds, or dinosaurs being stampeded by UFOs cast their shadow over everything my neurons could fire. By meeting Jack Kirby, I was meeting the god of my childhood imagination.

The Comic-Con of 1992 looked almost threadbare when compared to its 21st Century counterpart. In 2010, the movie studios and toy manufacturers crowded the main floor of the con with enough statuary to overwhelm the grounds-keeping staff of a Byzantine emperor. In ‘92, the biggest media companies in San Diego were the actual comic book publishers themselves, and they made do with nothing more elaborate than those folding tables that pro wrestlers tossed their opposents through and poster board displays leaned against easels or clipped onto office partitions. The biggest TV star there that year was Mr. T, who was signing 8x10" glossies to promote his new T-Force comic book, an enterprise that had short-lived written all over it.

I’m gonna’ eat the competition, Mr. T said, waving around a gold plated fork and spoon that hung around his neck on his signature gold chains.

You tell Superman and Spider-Man that Mr. T is gonna’ eat ‘em all up.

I pity the fool.

Mr. T’s bravado had a mesmerizing effect on the fanboys who were just starting to filter into the convention center. A long line formed at his table, even though he was about ten years removed from his A-Team glory days. I waited my turn like everyone else. When I got to the front of the line I asked him to say pain like he does in the scene from Rocky III where he predicts the outcome of Clubber Lang’s rematch with Rocky Balboa.

I stood nearly a head taller than Mr. T, but while he still possessed muscles hewed from corded steel, I was made from uncooked Pillsbury biscuit dough. I was actually a little scared as Mr. T furrowed his brow as only he could and said, PAAAAIIINNNN, drawing out every vowel and consonant with a low, rumbling growl. After this flash of momentary fear, we posed for a quick picture where we both gave the thumbs up sign because That’s what you do when you’re standing next to Mr. T.

I ran into Jack Kirby a short time later. He was standing in front of an independent publisher’s booth in a brown pullover shirt and a pair of slacks. He looked like a Jewish grandpa because that’s what he was. At today’s Comic- Con, all it takes to generate a long-assed line is to put any industry-type in a conference room with a microphone, but there was Kirby, the creator of half of everything celebrated by the con itself, out in the open with no lines or fanfare. I asked him to sign my beat-up copy of Fantastic Four No. 5 with the first appearance of Doctor Doom. He refused politely. Too many assholes had tried to get him to boost the value of their collections by autographing an entire long box worth of Mighty Thors so Kirby had stopped signing altogether.

While he wouldn’t sign, Kirby was more than happy to bend my ear for a while.

Now Captain America was based on real tough guys that I knew growing up on the Lower East Side, he said. I knew guys who took on six guys at once, you know. They’d kick a barrel under their legs and wallop ‘em as they fell down.

Any questions that I’d saved up for him over the past 15 years of my existence went out the window. I just listened as Kirby recounted how he was inspired by James Cagney movies to leave his Jewish enclave in search of an Irish guy. Back in the 1930s, you just didn’t leave your familiar row of tenements, so young Jack straying over to the potato-eater side of town wasn’t all that different from the Fantastic Four exploring the outer reaches of the Negative Zone.

I wanted to meet an Irish guy, he recalled, and when I finally found one, he beat the tar out of me.

My barely adult brain was overloaded by all of this. Jack Kirby was shooting the bull with me. It was something that I’d fantasized about when I was a kid about as much as I dreamt of flying the Millennium Falcon. I started to drift away, thinking that my moment with Kirby was done, but he followed me down the aisle. He wasn’t done talking to me yet.

He told me about serving in Patton’s Third Army during World War II, recounting how his colonel was never anywhere near the frontlines, but General Patton could always be seen driving around in his jeep yelling at them. You men are supposed to be dead, Patton said to Kirby’s unit before riding away in a huff.

There was this big explosion behind the German lines, Kirby continued as we turned around and walked back towards his table, and this big Kraut started running towards me, buck naked. The explosion had blown his uniform clean off of him, so all he had on were his jackboots. Now his schlong was whipping back and forth as he ran towards me, and he had a big one too.

Kirby paused for a second as an old man’s sly grin crept across his face.

I made him surrender to my buddy, Kirby explained, I was embarrassed.

When Kirby and I made it back to his table, the line of Marvel Comics fans that should have been wrapping around downtown San Diego to worship at the source still hadn’t materialized. I said good-bye to the King of Comic Books anyway even though there wasn’t any reason to. I’m sure he would’ve been happy to jaw with me for several more minutes, but I was too awestruck to process the situation. I didn’t even give myself the chance to ask him how he did it, probably the most pertinent yet mundane question I could’ve mustered. But whichever way Jack had broken into the business in the 40s wasn’t anything like how I would have to do it in the late 20th Century. Stan Lee, Jack’s partner at Marvel in the 60s, got his first job in comics by answering an classified ad in the paper. Only ten years after I went to Comic-Con, there wouldn’t even be any classified ads in the paper.

Meeting Jack Kirby at Comic-Con was the closest thing I’d ever had to a religious experience. He was a diety to me even though he didn’t wear an oversized headdress with adamantine horns jutting out of it at crazed angles; nor did he wield the power cosmic, the cosmic cube, the uru hammer or a shield made from case-hardened vibranium; he also didn’t span the spaceways on a silver surfboard, hop around the galaxy with a boom tube, or descend into a subatomic microverse; and he wasn’t the All Father, High Father, High Evolutionary or the devourer of worlds. What gave the experience its religiosity was that Kirby was none of these things. He was just a nice old guy in sport shirt, not all that different from my mom’s aging suburban neighbors who spent their days trimming hedges and drinking ice-cold Fresca. Kirby was the hero who could be you, as the tagline to the very short lived Marvel Comic Captain Universe used to read (a book drawn by Steve Ditko and not Kirby, but what the hell).

Like any experience that you would deem religious or spiritual, my meeting with Kirby changed my life. Kirby’s tales of brawling in the Bowery or fighting World War II left me with the inescapable conclusion that in order to be good at creating things, even shit as divorced from reality as Ego Prime the Living Planet or Grottu King of the Insects, I had to get some real life experience. I had to get my act together.

And I did—kind of. I got out of my mom’s house, moved to San Francisco, toured the U.S. and Europe with a weird punk rock wrestling show, and wrote a book about it. It wasn’t quite like having big schlonged Nazis surrender to me while freeing the world from fascism and then going on to lay the creative groundwork for The Avengers, but it was something; it was mine. And it’s not like there’s a whole ton of people out there who have wrestled guys in Chewbacca suits while people tossed food at them.

It might be too much to say that I wouldn’t have done any of these things without going to Comic-Con in 1992, but it sure helped. For a few minutes, I was on the same level as the King of Comic Books, and this thing called a convention is what made it all possible.

In 1984, somebody at MGM got the bright idea to release a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, set in the then futuristic year of 2010. The resulting film, named 2010: the Year We Make Contact is only watchable now because of how incredibly wrong it was about everything that would happen during the year of its title.

While 2001 avoids depicting the political situation of its future, the Soviet Union still exists in 2010, making it one big cold war drama that’s set over 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 2001, Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood have tablet computers. In 2010, Roy Scheider has a laptop that looks like a huge IBM Selectric with a black and white TV monitor welded to the top of it. It’s true that both films were way off base about the state of space travel in the early 21st Century, but Stanley Kubrick’s zero-gravity ballet transcends its 1968 release date by creating a new state of the art, while 2010 writer/director Peter Hyams stays mired in the bleakest aspects of the Reagan years, creating the most depressing 80s night of all time.

In the months leading up to the real 2010, I was researching rich people and figuring out how to get money out of them for U.C. Berkeley. I got the job in 2008 right before Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns were wiped out and real estate bubble exploded, causing a financial apocalypse of bankruptcies and foreclosures.

The University of California endowment reported a billion dollars in losses by November 2008. The California state budget, which was never what you’d call good even during boom times, sank like a stone encased in concrete and weighted down with a heavy chain attached to a truck axle. The Terminator was our governor, but he was all out of ammo and steroids. Arnold Schwarzenegger was powerless against plummeting tax revenues.

This left me spending 2009 white-knuckling it through team meetings about a new cost-cutting initiative devised by Bain and Company called Operation Excellence, while the mauve-colored partition walls of empty cubicles still bore the nameplates of co-workers who’d been