SDCC 2011: The Curtain Falls

This is my buddy Brandon in the shot he orchestrated to commemorate his Comic Con experience.  It wasn't easy to get--mainly because the ladies got a lot of attention and were difficult to get to.

I managed to make it over to the few gaming related booths (Chessex and Steve Jackson Games for rpgs).  There was also a "Cthulhu Library" booth right next to SJG which had Lovecraftian merchandise of all sorts, including games.  I picked up Kenneth Hite's Bookhounds of London, and let myself get talked into a purchase of Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity on the grounds that the hardcover limited edition is hard to come by.  This delving into Yog-Sothothery led to the stunning revelation that Brandon had never heard of Cthulhu or HPL!

Needing to patch this gap in his geek education, I encouraged Brandon to buy one of Penguin's Lovecraft collections.  Later this afforded me the opportunity to mock him, by dramatizing his discovering HPL for the first time.  He took a picture of it:

Our luck with panels wasn't very good (all the ones we wanted to attend were had too long lines), but we did get into the Immortal panel by inadvertently breaking in line.  After hearing Tarsem Singh talk about his artistic goals, and seeing more footage from the film.  I'm a bit more interested in this than I was before.

That's the Con highlights.  It was interesting comparing this year to last.  The crowds seemed less on Thursday and Friday than the previous year, and the convention floor seemed less busy, whereas the panels seemed moreso. One thing that doesn't change is that it remains quite a spectacle.  Where else can you see four slave-girl Leias crossing the street in a loose approximation of the Beatles on Abbey Road?  Alas, I was too slow to photograph that bit of quintessential con, so you'll just have to take my word for it.