Andrew W.K. teaches us how to party. (Photo: Shannon Cottrell)

By Friday morning, San Diego Comic-Con was starting to drag. It wasn’t particularly bad, but something was different this, something was missing. I couldn’t quite place it.

I haven’t been going to Comic-Con for that long, only four years, so I never experienced the convention without the crowds or the big movies and TV shows. Despite the size, though, it was magical, like a nerd Disneyland. There were massive street marketing campaigns and loads of people in costume (not as many as Anime Expo or Dragon*Con, but still a lot). If you walked around the Gaslamp Quarter after dark, you could still see crowds of people running around in costumes from party to party.
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I’m not doing what I want with my career. I wanted to write, and while I’m definitely doing a lot of that, I’m also locked into one form of writing. I like working in non-fiction. I like writing about people who do awesome stuff. However, there’s other things that I want to do. Journalism isn’t everything, but, right now, it’s everything that pays. So I put focus on that, perhaps at the expense of the comic book I should be writing and the other stories that are wandering through my mind. There has to be a balance. Maybe I’ll find that here at Comic-Con.

My friends are a lot like me. We’re working creative people, so we have heads filled with thousands of ideas, but we also have that hardened sense of reality where we know we aren’t going to do everything we want. Thursday at Comic-Con, we decided to hit up some panels for that extra push to move forward.
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Comic book inspiration.

I went to Comic-Con as the biggest loser on the planet.  For days, i was in a complete state of panic, not because of the stress that comes along with the biggest convention in the country, but because I had already made plans to go to this thing and I shouldn’t even be there. I hadn’t finished the projects I wanted to have on hand at the event. I’ve been working harder than I ever thought I could on freelance stuff just so that I could have the money to go to this and do more work that may end up lost in the glut of other Comic-Con reporting. On the eve of my fourth year at San Diego Comic-Con, I was still a virtual unknown completely incapable of making any kind of waves in a scene so large.

It’s hard to admit online that you suck. It opens you up to trolls, probably makes you look bad to potential employers, etc. Since caring about those sorts of things has only made my life more miserable, I’m taking the opposite approach today.
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