Comic Con - Thursday and Friday

The disparate cultural spheres of modern day America - the blogosphere, the classical mamas-basement and postmodern hipster-nerd strains of geekery, kids pulling bored parents, white trash strippers modelling Wonder Woman wardrobe advertising for the bar down on Market street, shysters advertising third-strain derivations of pseudo-popular buzz comics (a retro-future for every retro genre - steampunk, neo-Victoriana, wizards on spaceships, Huck Finn fights the aliens, future noir, Romeo and Juliet with robots), barely-famous actors seeking a second life on the geek circuit - was that David Arquette appearing live to promote his new film, directed by him for the massmarket direct-to-video audience?

Comic Con has nothing to do with comics and everything to do with the world that comics have created. Most of the biggest stands inside of the massive San Diego Convention Center are big corporations advertising megabudget TV, Film, or Video Games - there's the Sci-Fi channel's trademark actual-size spaceship, with little plasma screens scattered around advertising the mass of crap that is Sci-Fi original content (with the exception of "Battlestar Galactica," the great American TV show cursed with an unmarketable name and an awful network). There's ABC's giant "Heroes" stand - "Vote Petrelli" pins are everywhere by early Thursday afternoon, finalizing "Heroes' " arrival as the great Nerd-Pop object of the moment; the sundry "Dharma" paraphernalia feels immediately out-of-date, and the free-handout "Bionic Woman" t-shirts seem entirely too-soon.

"Vote Petrelli" - it's the kind of in-joke that could be fan-generated, so what matters that it's also cheap advertising for the one show that's saving NBC corporate? It's a bit like the popular baseball caps with "FRAK" written on the front - it's advertising for people who already watch, an in-joke inviting people to understand it, at once the proud mark of a cultish believer and an invitation to an outsider.


"Battlestar Galactica" was never a comic book; neither was "Heroes," but both shows feel like a natural part of Comic Con, just like all the video game companies peddling their next-gen wares. There are several bestubbled nerds wandering around in Metal Gear Solid "Snake" outfits - impressive, though not as intense as the various Jack Sparrows who went the distance with the weirdo facial hair and the movie-precise dirty Pirate garb (though watching them try to imitate Johnny Depp's drunk-fop sashay is painful - a bit like seeing a kid move his middle fingers toward his wrist and say "thwip!" in imitation of web-swinging - what seems so cool and exotic onscreen (or indeed, in a comic) seems so horribly lame in real life).

Comic books aren't very important to Comic Con anymore. Not to say that the actual practice of printing stories in graphic panel form has been forgotten - one half of the Convention Center is still covered with small press publishers - but comics are about as important to the comic book industry as movies are to the movie industry - they're a foundation for other, more profitable media. A movie is really just an advertisement for the DVD, the theme park ride, the action figures, and the merchandise; a comic book is the advertisement for the movie. Most of the indie comics that you see aren't really telling you a story - they're illustrating a concept which can be rewritten into oblivion by a cabal of poorly-paid screenwriters, directed by a crapp director, and released briefly onto movie screens before finding a new life on the low-budget direct-to-DVD cartoon series market.

I got handed a free comic book called "Cowboys and Aliens" which illustrates this idea perfectly. It's the kind of high-concept idiocy that we used to lambast studio execs for - "it's "Red River" meets "battlefield Earth." It's less an actual story than a chemical compound of two visual aesthetics - six-shooters and laser guns, horses chasing space ships. It's such a shameless advertisement for itself, a graphic novel that doubles as a treatment. Creating a comic book today is really about recombining two existing aesthetics. Watch, I'll give you some free ideas for new comic books: Ninja Priest, Baseball Samurai, Space Janitor, Futuristic Western Anthropomorphized-Lizard Noir. By the time I finish this sentence, two of those will be comic books, and one of them will have a first-look film deal.

Most people don't read comics, but everyone understands them, because everyone has either a) played a video game or b) seen a summer blockbuster in the last few years. Comics, videogames, and blockbusters, though vastly different media, all share a defining storytelling style - atmosphere is more important than character, mythology is more important than plot. The actual storyline of most RPGs is unrepentantly lame - tattoo "true love conquers all" on your eyeballs - but it's the window dressing that separates the great from the poor. "Pirates of the Caribbean" demonstrates this most of all - based on a theme park, it feels less like a movie than a catalogue of cool places with ever-more elaborate decoration. You could freeze frame any part of the "Pirates" movies and have an awesome picture; you could watch any scene without Johnny Depp and feel simultaneously bored, confused, and angry.

I went to the "Lost Season 4" presentation. If you were looking for the intersection of high geek culture and low white trash podunkery, this was the place - it was like a Dungeons and Dragons competition sponsored by Nascar. There onstage were Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, the ubernerds of geektopia, the great mythologizers of the modern age, drinking in the adoration of a capacity crowd. "Lost" is either the smart show for stupid people or the stupid show for smart people, a kitchen-sink comedy-drama-SF-romance-adventure-satire that titillates you with time travel and mind control while keeping things just realist enough so your girlfriend can watch without shame.

Oh yeah, the girls. There are alot of them here - and, shockingly, many of them are hot. As I walk past yet another ugly balding man holding hands with a cute girl, I am left to ponder - how many nerds have gotten laid because of Seth Cohen? "The OC" made nerd culture cool - comics, manga, HK karate films, cartoons - and Seth Cohen put a handsome-hipster-carefree face on a nation of megageeks. Seth didn't just convince a hot girl to fall in love with him - he convinced hot girls everywhere to fall in love with what he represented. And he convinced nerdy guys everywhere that they could get the girl by just being themselves - but crucially, he also convinced nerds that "being themselves" meant being cool.