by Josh
Today is the day! On Wednesday, July 8, Violet, Davey, Tamara and I loaded up the car and made our way down to San Diego. The car was packed, and we were excited to be on our way. It was around 12:30pm by the time we left. Traffic wasn’t too bad other than a small patch about half way down the 5 South. After a couple of wrong turns and detours around traffic, we made it to the hotel for check in a little before 3:00pm.
Click here to skip to our Preview Night Photo Gallery!
Checking In
The Hilton Bayfront is a beautiful hotel. Most importantly, it is right across from the Convention Center, so that certainly influenced our opinion of the hotel. The four of us decided to pay the for the upgrade to get rooms facing the Convention Center so that we can keep an eye on the line overnight. It seemed worth the $30 a night. I mean, we are already paying $300 a night, what is another $30? (I think the sticker shock of a $300+ hotel will hit me after Comic-Con is over).
Badge Pick Up
After checking in, we grabbed our bags and made our way to the 16th floor. We took a look out the window, and saw the wonderful view of the Convention Center. After Violet put the final touches on her Scarlet Witch cosplay, and we all settled in a bit, we decided to make our way to get our badges. We walked by the Hall H line, and saw several chutes full already, but there was no reason to panic yet. Plenty of room to still to get in line. We made our way to the Badge Pick Up area upstairs, and got the badges. We also lucked out on bags this year, getting Batman V. Superman bags. With the exception of Violet that is. She got stuck with a Lucifer bag. As she puts it–She is making up for her year when she got the Dark Knight Rises bag and the rest of us got Vampire Diaries. I am still bitter about that one. The Comic-Con bag-givers are wily with their bag-passing out though–they fold them up with the bag picture hidden so you don’t know what you’re getting. If you look closely, you can figure out what the bag you’re getting is, but it is difficult and the staff does want to keep the line moving.
After getting our badges, we went and picked up our Comic-Con shirts. There were pretty cool Flash ones, along with their basic Comic-Con ones. The process was simple. Just make sure you have your ID and barcode confirmation for both your badge and T-Shirt pick up if you preordered it!
Lunch Time!
After getting our badges and T-shirts, we decided to get some food. Violet wanted to check out The Expanse, which was a restaurant that was themed after an upcoming SyFy show of the same name. Normally this restaurant is called Maryjane’s, but during Comic-Con it takes the theme of various SyFy shows. It was pretty cool inside. The whole restaurant was decorated to the teeth. Walls had character descriptions from the show, the chairs, tables and menus were decorated, there were TVs with footage, and they handed out some pretty cool “VR” goggles you can put your smart phone in to see a spaceship in space. It certainly was a great added touch. The food was good as well. My one complaint is that the restaurant was pretty expensive. $19 for a pulled pork sandwich and $18 for a meatball sandwich! Like I said, it was good, but a little pricey. I guess since it is Comic-Con, we should expect some price increases.
Time to Hit the Floor!
After we finished at the restaurant, we headed for the Convention Center. On the way we saw some “Viral Marketing” of SyFy’s Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No. Does there really have to be a 3rd one of these movies?
We made it to the Convention Center, and managed to get onto the floor a few minutes early. We started meandering about and wound up at the DC booth pretty quickly. Inside their booth, they had the costumes for Batman V. Superman. We saw Superman’s, Wonder Woman’s, and both Batman in his armored suit, and out of it. They look amazing! Luckily we got to this booth early, so we were able to really marvel at the costumes before the larger swarm came in. Violet found some photos on twitter showing they are packed this year.
We continued meandering about, looking at all of the collectibles that we wish we were able to afford, as well as comics, art, and clothing. I always want to spend a lot of money, but well, it is a lot of money. We took some stops at the Legendary Booth and saw an awesome orc from Warcraft. The Walking Dead booth was pretty cool as well. One particularly creepy walker posed for Davey, who was our photographer for the day. She will probably give some children nightmares tonight.
Violet also happened to run into a fellow Scarlet Witch on the floor. Here is the photo:
We meandered about more, and the floor very quickly became packed. We stopped by several more booths: Dark Horse, Minecraft, various collectible companies, and a bunch of others. David and Tamara also bought the documentary The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened? from John Schnepp. This is a guy who works on AMC Movie Talk (now Collider Movie Talk), and wanted to tell the story of how the 90s Superman Movie that Kevin Smith was supposed to direct with Nicolas Cage as Superman fell apart. It looks interesting, so I will certainly want to watch that with them.
Time to Get in Line
The cosplay was a little light on Preview Night, but I am sure it is because people are saving it for the remaining four days. When it got around 8:30pm, we decided to head out to the NDL (“Next Day Line”) for Hall H on Thursday, as wristband distribution was scheduled to start at 10:00pm, and we wanted to beat the crowd before Preview Night ended at 9:00pm. Tamara decided to skip Thursday in Hall H to take her younger cousin to the Call of Duty: Black Ops panel, so just David, Violet and I went for the long walk. It actually wasn’t too bad though. I estimated us being at about 500-1000 back, so there was plenty of room when we got in line. The line started to get bigger and bigger after us though.
They started handing out wristbands around 10:13pm. The process went pretty slow though, and we didn’t end up getting wristbands until about 12:30am, which were B wristbands. At that point, we went back to our room to get a good night’s sleep before having to return to the line the next morning.
Click here to continue to Part 1 of our Thursday Report!
Click here to see our photo gallery of images from Preview Night!
