Well, it’s the week of. On Wednesday, the previews begin of the biggest nerd show on Earth – San Diego Comic-Con 2013. If you’ve been paying attention, you know it’s a mighty obstacle course you have to run in order to secure your place for the big to-do. Many months in advance, you have to wrangle a place to stay (assuming you’re not a lucky duck who lives or knows somebody with a crashable couch in Ol’ Saint Diego), which is much more complicated than you may think. You have to hope you can snag passes to the show before they sell out, be it for a single day or the whole five-day she-bang, complete with preview night, and that ain’t easy – some folks even register for next year’s Comic-Con while attending the current one just to make sure they can.
Basically, I’m telling you that you’re not going to get in this year unless you go through shady routes, like ticket brokers and scalping and other nefarious activities which we do not advocate and which you undertake at your own risk of expulsion, arrest or suplex. Because you know some dudes there are just gonna wanna suplex you.
However, sad to say that it’s not too early to think about next year – in fact, you should be thinking about it now, because the whole Comic-Con process is not conducive to procrastination at all. It’s frustrating, but you’ve got to be on point. Here’s what you gotta do to set yourself up for the big show in 2014.
Make friends with Comic-Con.org as soon as you can. Sign up for a Member ID and make sure you’re in their system. That way, you’ll get email notifications when things are going to start happening – like when they open up for registry and when you are allowed to start looking for lodging. Yes, they control that, as illustrated in the next step.
This one gets counterintuitive, because you can’t just call any hotel in San Diego and expect them to have rooms for you. They can’t even really deal with you directly. Comic-Con is such a huge deal that they have a deal with a company called Travel Planners, which means you have to go through them to get set up with a hotel, and they open up shop several months before the show. Like I said, make friends with Comic-Con.org. Keep in mind that even though the downtown hotels are crazy expensive and sell out like hotcakes, retreating to the “Hotel Circle” isn’t all that bad. They aren’t walking distance to the Con, but they are walking distance to the train, which lets you out right in front of the Convention Center, and that’s just as good. Plus, cheaper and much more likely to be available. You may also want to try sites like Airbnb to try to find some friendly folks willing to share or rent out their apartments for the length of the show – if they’re local, they’re likely to want to get the hell out of town during that week anyway. Better yet, just find a way to make friends with somebody in San Diego by the time next summer rolls around.
Once upon a time, Comic-Con would just let anybody and everybody register and there were no worries about being able to attend the show, since they are good people and they want all the people to have all the fun. That is, until fire marshals started telling them that they’d better put a cap on attendees or be in violation of maximum occupancy and fire safety codes. Yes, the entire San Diego Convention Center – a massive structure – was filled beyond capacity, and you could feel it. You couldn’t move through the mass of humanity and everything sucked and was bad and was dumb. Since then, Comic-Con passes have become a finite commodity, and they sell out like hotcakes when registration opens (and there always seems to be some kind of glitch when it does, so be prepared and be patient). After the initial rush of sales – for which you better be on time – a month or so later, they’ll reopen sales for cancelled or returned reservations, so if you strike out at first, you’ll have another shot. But you’ll have to be on the ball – and if you get shut out, it should still be early enough in the game that you can cancel your hotel reservations without penalty.
One of the great things about Ye Olden Conventionne Centre is that it’s very conveniently located for most forms of transit. It is almost spitting distance from the San Diego airport – maybe a five minute cab ride, so hotels around the airport are fine choices. Also, the Amtrak station is right in the vicinity as well, so you can train it down southwards if you so choose. If you want to use your car, and you’re not going to park it at a hotel and take the metro train to the show each day, be forewarned that parking is miserable and expensive. Thousands of people are converging here, and your automobile will be suffering through all sorts of stop-and-go traffic once you get within an hour of the city, you’ll have to wait for hordes and hordes of people to stop clogging the streets, and you’ll have to shell out 15 bucks or so to get a parking spot, and even then, you’ll have to hoof it several city blocks, too. Technically, there’s a parking garage beneath the Center, but that’s packed to the gills each and every day – so wake up early or be prepared to pay.
Getting access to the show, and then getting to the physical location of the show is one thing – actually experiencing the show is a completely new ballgame. Luckily, I wrote a Comic-Con 2013 Survival Guide just yesterday! The same tips should apply to 2014, too. So study up, and good luck getting to the ball next year! Or, you know, just stay at home and watch our coverage. We’ll tell you about the news that comes out of it, and sneak-peek movie footage is cool, but wouldn’t you rather wait and see it in context when the film actually comes out? Oh, crap, I’m getting cynical again! Everything is beautiful! Nothing is broken!
