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Overnight Open Thread and Post Advisory – Comic-Con Preview Edition


pizzathrower.jpg
Yes, a life-size TMNT pizza thrower will be there

I’ve been going to Comic-Con since maybe 2000, and much has changed over the years. Notably, that what I used to call “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” has become the thing I stress out about the most. I started just writing about it on my personal blog, managed to get a cover story about it in the OC Weekly, and for five years, reported on it for top online movie trade site Deadline. The first year, I was told, “What you’re interested in, we’re interested in.” The last year, “Beat our competitors to the movie news.”

In 2013, I tried using my Deadline training to beat even the big sites to the news, and found it to be much harder without the kind of access the big-name outlets can get you. Six hours in line for Hall H, all day. No thank you. Back when print newspapers weren’t in danger (yes, I remember such a time), I thought the best way to cover Comic-Con would be to send a team of ten, to cover ALL the panels, including not just big movie news but all the weird, quirky stuff that makes up the celebration of fandom.

This year, I intend to do my part and have fun. I’ll be interviewing people, seeking out the strangest stuff for sale, maybe even attending some of those oddball panels nobody goes to where criminal psychologists analyze Lex Luthor. Based on your feedback from WonderCon, you’d rather have me doing that anyway, and perhaps I can best compete with others by offering coverage that’s truly different. I sometimes have to remind myself to have fun – because usually when one does, it comes through in the writing. And if my site traffic takes a huge dump, I’ll go back to plan A next year.

Since Saturday will be a full day of posting, Wednesday will be a day off from it, as I drive down to San Diego. Con posting will likely be on a more irregular schedule than usual, but you will get at MINIMUM the same amount of posts you’re used to, and maybe more – just maybe at really odd times. If news breaks and I catch it quickly, we may even run one-sentence headlines, and add the details later. I do have a couple of spies in other areas of the Con to tip me off.

And you can too – we’ll be doing daily open threads so that anything I don’t catch that you want to talk about can also be posted. But with that said, this site is not going 100% Comic-Con: we’ll have Fred Topel’s roundup of the TCAs, Sherilyn Connelly’s J-Pop festival coverage, and the usual mother-in-law and fanfic features. Be sure to follow TR on Twitter (or at least look at the Twitter box on the right side of the page) for first looks at photos that may crop in articles later, and preview night sights tomorrow.

For now, I leave you with the pizza thrower. Talk amongst yourselves.