Comic-Con Should Be In Whatever Venue Can Best Guarantee We Don’t Have To Talk About It All The Time

I'm growing more convinced that the sole effect of talking about Comic-Con International more than you have to four months before it arrives is to make you hate it a little bit. And I say that as a flat-out fan of the show and as a beneficiary of its parent company's advertising largesse. Still, people insist, and CCI is a humongous business within comics and as important an institution as is out there, so okay.

The new thing is that Anaheim has put up a facebook page and an open letter campaigning for the show to move there in 2013. Hey, good for them. Press every advantage. I don't know if Comic-Con will move the show, although it occurs to me that it's only important San Diego thinks they might. Seriously, though, I don't know the exact factors the CCI people are bringing to bear in making their decision -- whether it's hotel space, or civic concessions, or exhibition space, or maybe a tax issue, or what. Maybe it's the overall package...? I like the show, and I like it in San Diego; I'm biased that way.

However, aside from the real discussion that's going on even as we speak between the adults in charge, it'd be nice if the imaginary proposals put forward by the competing cities or their proponents didn't suck giant donkey balls. I'd almost consider the internet version of the public face of these proposals from cities not San Diego some sort of ploy by the city of San Diego to make people like them better.

Anaheim has much less of a compact immediate area to host a show, and nobody seems willing to give a forthright answer how Disneyland's proximity -- Disneyland in summertime! -- doesn't ruthlessly punch in the kidneys any advantage that area might have as to parking and hotels. Las Vegas is 40,000 degrees in the summer, it's the worst match in history of a convention city to a convention population that doesn't want to spend money except inside the convention center, the vast majority of the convention population would have to depend on an infrastructure or cabs that likely wouldn't be up to it but would almost certainly result in a black hole of bitching and complaints about the money spent before the weekend was up, and to top things off I'm totally convinced someone would die in the cab line at McCarran and 80 percent of the remaining people spending the two to five hours there Wednesday afternoon would wish that person was them. Los Angeles seems like a much more spread out San Diego that will make the show seem like work for all the Hollywood types and make it actual work for everyone else scrambling to get to the central location each day. Moving to LA would be kind of like when a TV show rebuilds its East Coast sets on the West Coast for some reason no one remembers when the show gets canceled a year later. It does have the advantage of not being an insane option, though. (I have no idea why no one talks about San Francisco, which has the advantage of actually hosting a comics-driven convention twice a year; I'd imagine it's a no-go exhibition space-wise.)

Winning CCI will be for that city like winning the White House is for a presidential candidate. Half the people will freak out, but the other half will grow to appreciate as positive qualities things about the city that never occurred to them before. The (nerd) republic will endure. I just wish it felt like an honest-to-God heavyweight election and less like three fringe candidates hanging around to see if the front-runner gets assassinated.
 
posted 7:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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