Legoland and Comic-con

July 31, 2008
NSFW.ARMY

The weekend started with a day at Legoland for my friend Laura and I and our daughters. Legoland is interesting for kids, but without a child, I don't think I'd enjoy more than a few hours there. And I actually still enjoy making Lego sets with my daughter. When I was a kid, I had a lot of sets from the original Castle series.

Getting ready to geek out at Comic-Con the following day, I got an airbrush bat logo on my wrist.

One of the unique things at Legoland is a mini city where kids drive cars and navigate streets that have stop signs and lights. In a world full of branding, it's not a surprise that it has a sponsor, Volvo. I loved the Volvo SUV made of Legos. The only thing on this that is real is the wheels. Even the license plates and model number are Lego.

We crashed for the night at her brother's place in south Orange County. Thanks for being such an awesome host. I still feel horrible for letting them talk me into taking the bed while they slept on couches and air mattresses.

Sunday, on the drive the rest of the way to San Diego, Laura was about ready to kill me when I told her that we could have seen a panel with the stars of Supernatural if we had gotten up a couple hours earlier. She said she would have woken up at 6am for that. In my defense, I DID send her a link with a list of all the panels. She didn't open the link.

Parking was super easy because I let Laura and the girls off out front, and looped around to some off-site parking by the cruise ships, and took a free shuttle back to the convention center. Laura didn't make it into the Supernatural panel, but in true celebrity-watcher fashion, she did get to wait in the hallway outside and saw Jensen and the other guy walk out. While I went to see Carnal Comics, she took the girls to a different seminar where they saw the voice actors from the cartoons Chowder and the Misadventures of Flapjack.

Carnal Comics is a company that has been doing X-rated comics for a long time. The comics can be the biography of a porn star or a fantasy scene where a porn star is the main character, and they have a series based on a character called Demi the Demoness. They were promoting the Demi movie demidemonessmovie.com and Sinn Sage who played Vampirooni was there. I know she looks a lot taller than me. She's wearing stripper platform shoes, and i'm wearing skater sneakers, so we're actually probably about the same height.

I brought along my notes to the most recent draft of the Tricia Devereaux comic script, and went over them for a minute with S Crompton, who created Demi. I'm really honored to have Jay Allen Sanford come back and be the writer of my story. He's amazing, and I can't apologize enough to him for being so distracted. If it wasn't for my holdups, my comic probably would have already been printed before this weekend, let alone not even into storyboard yet.

The rest of the day was spent being a consumer at the show. I gave up on the panels because of the long lines and focused on the show floor. At the Warner Brothers booth, I got Tshirt giveaways of Charlie Brown and Terminator Salvation.

Here's a few highlights from the day:

Nightmare Before Christmas set, Batman pinball

Iron Man and Predator statues

Quantum of Solace (007) with the new Aston Martin

Harley Quinn at the Lego booth, the Mattel booth entrance

there was Star Wars: The Clone Wars stuff all over the place,

Revenge is Coming 2009 Transformers

This is Pinup Artist Nicole. She was signing autographs and selling prints at the same booth as Armando Huerta. Here's her myspace.

Finally, what's Comic-Con without a stormtrooper picture?

As we were heading out, we saw a line with a Twilight poster at the front of it, so we ducked into the line. It was for a voucher to get a HUGE poster of Twilight and a picture with the cutouts of the stars, which they emailed to me.

Twilight is book 1 of a modern-day vampire saga that is getting turned into a Hollywood movie that releases on December 12 this year. It stars Kristin Stewart (Panic Room) and Robert Pattinson (Cedric from the Harry Potter movies), and is directed by Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen). Book 4 of the series comes out in 2 weeks, and many bookstores have said that this is the first time that they're opening at midnight for a book release since book 7 of Harry Potter.

As we were getting on the shuttle to leave the convention, I spotted this guy, who I've decided I'm in lust with. I also saw him at a Renaissance Faire a couple months ago. I think I'm going to start stalking all the places where people dress up in costumes, just to look for him again.

Maybe next year, my comic will be finished and I'll be signing at the Carnal Comics booth. Either way, I'm going back. Except next year, I'll buy my ticket ahead and won't have to pay $200/ticket on eBay.

-July 30, 2008