Last Wednesday, I flew down to San Diego to meet up with my boss in order to load up a truck and make the drive to Anaheim for SDCC's sister comic book convention, Wondercon. We thought it would be a good place to give the collecting world a sneak peek at what our company (Mixo) had to offer this year, much of which will be officially launching at SDCC.
On the way up, we stopped at Legoland (more on that later) and every day when the convention closed, we headed on over to Disneyland despite the sheer exhaustion that turned our legs into rubber bands. There's just something about the Magic Kingdom that re-energizes you. But that's all another story.
As far as the con went, I have to honestly say that it was all rather "meh." Don't get me wrong, there were some spectacularly bright moments, such as my 26-year-long dream of meeting the legendary Elvira coming true...
Although I did wish that I had gotten a picture with her in full costume (her, not me), I understand that she has gotten away from that in recent years, and considering how sweet and friendly she was, it was still an absolute dream come true.
The other things that I would put on the positives side of the list are how well our booth did, the great feedback we received, meeting people that have started to become genuine Mixo Maniacs since out launch last year and seeing the development of new fans that had just discovered our stuff.
I also made some awesome scores for my collections (more on that in a swag report coming in the next couple of days).
However, I have to point out that the weekend as a whole put a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth. There was just something off about the vibe of the whole show. I noticed that there were a lot of people there with bad attitudes, and the whole thing sort of had this aggressive vibe. For example, I spotted several groups of people that seemed to be there just to "make fun of the nerds". And a lot of the dealers were acting a bit surly, with a couple standing out in my mind as downright rude. I'm not sure what was causing this; perhaps the close vicinity to L.A. (I heard this mentioned a few times), or perhaps the fact that it was in the low 40s and pouring down rain all weekend that had these Southern Californians all grumpy.
I don't know.
All in all, it balanced out. I don't mean to make it sound like it sucked non-stop, but it definitely wasn't as awesome as SDCC or even my local Emerald City Comic Con. In the end, if I hadn't been there for work (and had such great success in that regards), I would consider this con not worth returning to.
But enough complaining.
I posted a bunch of pics on my Flickr account of my Wondercon adventures (mostly pics of cute girls dressed as superheroes), so please swing on by to check those out.
In the meantime, here a just a few of my favorite shots...
Of course, now that I think about it, (to paraphrase an old adage) comic book conventions are like pizza; a great pizza is great, but even a bad pizza is still pretty good. So, I can't complain, really. I spent the whole weekend at a comic book convention, promoted our products and got killer responses, and spent my evenings riding the Haunted Mansion ride over and over again.
Life is good.
But I'll tell you one thing, I can't wait until San Diego Comic Con!
