Before I bury you with an avalanche of Comic-Con 2010 coverage so thick and so avalanchey you’ll be screaming with nerdy frostbite (if this happens, you are reading this website while in a snow bank, so get out of that snow bank), allow me to give you the backstory of my first-ever Comic-Con experience. It’s like a “losing my virginity” story, only the mathematical opposite.
This story is titled, “So That’s What Comic-Con Is, Obviously”
Five years ago, my friend Matt Little was asked to organize a comedy show to perform at the New York Comic-Con, so he collected a handful of stand-ups and sketch groups and asked us all to perform our nerdiest, most Comic-Con fan-friendly material. My sketch group arrived ready to go, only to find, intimidatingly, that we’d be performing in the entryway of the Javits Center, an absolutely massive airplane-hangar-like space with ceilings literally about 100 feet high, and our audience would be the line of people waiting to get into the main showroom.
Undaunted, we launched into our sketches, determined to win over a mostly indifferent crowd of people walking by — all the while screaming into microphones to make ourselves slightly audible in the gargantuan room — and sure enough, midway through our set, we noticed a group of four dudes in Jedi costumes walking over to our stage, and they patiently stood there and watched the remainder of our performance, laughing appropriately.
As the other performers went on, we noticed that more and more Jedi — but specifically only people in Jedi costumes — kept coming over to watch our show, which, to our fragile comedian egos, could only mean that we were indeed triumphantly winning over these initially-skeptical Comic-Con faithful with our irresistible hilarity. “Comic-Con can wait – I know we’re dressed up as Jedi, but we must witness this show first!” they were obviously saying to themselves, all of them, in unison, verbatim, with happy F-words.
Turns out, that wasn’t…totally…entirely…true in any way.
