Comic Con = Cheapskates?

Posted on June 21, 2008

It’s long been a mystery to comic fans why the city of San Diego seems so uncomfortable with Comic-Con International. After all, with upwards of 100,000 people coming in for 4 days, renting hotel rooms, buying meals and drinks, and so on, we must be giving the city an annual boost of extra income, right?

Okay, there’s the usual love-hate relationship between any tourist destination and its clientele. Plus some people get freaked out by anyone in a costume. And sure, some attendees don’t understand basic concepts of hygiene, or bear an uncanny resemblance to the Comic Book Guy. But most of us are normal people (and shower every day). And besides, we’re bringing in all this business, right?

Well, maybe not. The New York Times writes, in an article about Hollywood’s uneasy relationship with the con, that the con is “decidedly low-rent.”

No. 33 on the official tip sheet* lists the grocery chain Ralph’s Market as an alternative to dining out. The Bio International Convention in San Diego, a gathering of the biotechnology industry, with one-sixth as many attendees, produces about double Comic-Con’s $41.5 million in economic impact on the city.

Yes, that’s right. A biotech conference brings the city 12 times as much per attendee as Comic-Con. The city puts up with 6 times the strain on their roads, public transportation, and other infrastructure, for only half the reward?

No wonder they don’t like us.

So here’s a mission for those of you going to San Diego this year: Head down to the reservations pavilion in the convention center lobby at least once, and make a reservation at a nearby restaurant. The Gaslamp District is right across the street from the convention center, so there’s plenty of good food to choose from. Be clean. Be polite. Don’t order the cheapest thing on the menu with a glass of water. Tip appropriately. Overall: make a good impression.

(via Comics Worth Reading)

*Not that I can find this “official” tip sheet anywhere. Plenty of unofficial tip sheets — heck, we wrote our own a few years ago — but no sign of an official one.

Comic-Con: Hotel Anxiety

Posted on January 31, 2008

Kelson

Spent a good chunk of last night looking at travel websites. Accomplished 2 things:

Arranged for a hotel to stay in San Francisco next month.
Arranged for a back-up hotel for San Diego Comic Con, just in case we can’t get a room through the convention desk.

Hotel rooms during Comic-Con have become a scarce commodity over the last few years, as attendance has shot up by thousands (it actually sold out before the doors opened last year!) but only a few hundred new hotel rooms have been added to Downtown San Diego. Rooms in the convention blocks have been selling out in a matter of hours. The con website has crumbled under the stress, and the phone lines have caved. Last year it took me over an hour just to get through. This year, they haven’t even published a list of which hotels are involved, and it looks like they’ve dropped fax from their options. And booking downtown hotels directly isn’t an option: either they’re sold out, or they want $350/night-plus.

So, just in case I can’t get a room downtown when they go on sale next week, we can at least stay someplace near a trolley station. And if I can get a closer room, even if they charge me $25 to cancel the first reservation, it’s worth the peace of mind.

(Originally posted at LiveJournal. Brought over here to fit with the rest of my convention posts, and as a snapshot of the days when you could get a backup hotel. Not downtown, but in…it might’ve been Old Town? In any case, I cancelled the room once we got our confirmation from the convention block hotel sale.)

Strange Sights of San Diego

Posted on August 5, 2007

Kelson

Night Eyes Our first night in San Diego, we picked up our badges for Comic-Con, then went out to see Avenue Q. We took the trolley back, and as we walked up the hill from the Little Italy trolley stop, we saw a pair of giant cartoon eyes looking out over the city from a balcony near the top of a nearby building. I thought they might be satellite dishes with convenient lighting, but then I remembered the number of odd publicity stunts connected to the Simpsons movie. No idea whether it’s related or not.

The shuttle route from our hotel to the con passed by this mural, which plays with the nature of the constructed reality. The wall is a newspaper page. The face is a sculpture, a painting. The hands holding the chisel and paintbrush, of course, are just as artificial as the face being created.

Mural on a building

We noticed an interesting coincidence at Horton Plaza. Just a few doors down from the Post Office was an Aeropostale clothing store:

Aeropostale and Post Office

Bench: Sit. Stay. Heal. This bench was in front of a hotel, probably the Hilton San Diego Gaslamp. I suppose that makes the pun on dog training more appropriate, since it’s a block away from Petco Park stadium.

Quiznos Drink I’ve always figured standing out on a street in a mascot costume must be miserable, especially in summer. But how much worse to be dressed as a giant soft drink? I suppose this would go with last year’s walking sandwich.

Now, you have to wonder about AMN Healthcare. It’s clearly a set of initials…but how often do people complain about health, insurance, and the healthcare industry? It’s just one letter off from “Damn Healthcare.”

AMN Healthcare

Awning: Sin Niteclub Back to the shuttle route, next to (or possibly connected to) the Martini Ranch spotted in a previous installment of this series, was this nightclub that made no pretensions about what people are going there for. Also note that it’s a “niteclub” — is that a nightclub with fewer calories?

Then there’s this place, which employed the ultimate euphemism:

F-Street: San Diego's ultimate sensual well being adult store

That’s got to be the most convolutedly delicate way of saying “sex shop” that I’ve ever seen.

Strange Sights of Comic-Con

Posted on August 3, 2007

Kelson

I wanted to call this “Oddball Comic-Con,” but decided that might be a little too close.

Stormtrooper Elvis has become such a fixture that I almost didn’t bother taking a picture of him when I saw him this year… but then I noticed his pose, and the Sauron statue in the background.

There were a number of people walking around with “Free Hugs” signs, most of them women, but a few men. I never actually saw someone take one of them up on the offer, though.

On the subject of “Free” signs, I found it amusing that the Bantam Dell booth was trying to attract people with a hand-lettered cardboard sign proclaiming, “FREE!”

At one point I looked upward at the ceiling of Ballroom 20. With The Dark is Rising being made into a movie, I saw this lighting fixture and cross-beams and immediately thought of the Sign of Fire.

This guy had the ultimate cheap costume: A roll of tape. He just took every freebie flyer that was handed to him, and taped it to himself.

There’s apparently a band called CKY. Some of their merchandise manages to work the name into a rather rude saying…

There was a group of women in identical red dresses, with identical hairdos, and identical shoes. I saw a few of them wandering the floor on Saturday, but didn’t realize just how many there were until we left the convention center for dinner, and saw them crossing the street.

Edit: Mystery solved? The Resident Evil panel featured 17 Milla Jovovich doubles wearing her iconic red dress. This looks like more than 17, and the dresses don’t seem to be ripped in the right place, but this could be them.