Thursday was a reasonably easy day. I spent much of the day gathering materials and prepping for all the panels that I would be covering. The system Jonah had implemented had me helping Andy out doing live coverage of panels, which was a great way of going about things considering I had no experience covering panels before. Which meant that Friday we would be live blogging three panels in a row: Mondo Marvel, Secret Invasion and DC Nation. Yeah you can imagine that I was close to shitting myself.
I had a bunch of things to handle before meeting Jan for the Daily Show. He would be getting in from Baton Rouge and staying with Katie. With Uma Thurman! You can imagine my excitement. Now I have a confession to make: I’ve lived in New York for almost four years now, and I have to say that I am totally ashamed that I haven’t been to Jon Stewart’s show even though I consider him, like many others, my hero.
So, Jan explains to me that we have to get there mighty early, between 3:30 and 4:30 otherwise we won’t get into the show. Other reason why Jon Stewart is my hero? His show is FREE. Though like all things that are free, there is a catch, you have to get in line and there is only two hundred seats in the audience. So only those people got in. Like the neurotic social liberals we are, Jan and I made it in line at 3:30, and the line had already wrapped around the corner. The security guards were like Soup Nazis saying such things that there will never be any flash photography and cell phones must be turned off because even if they are set to vibrate the microphones pick it up and, “You will be thrown out for any cell phone use.” One security guard told the story that they had to pull someone out of the audience because they had reached down to put their phone on silent when the show was already in progress and had to be thrown out. Not so cool, and I’m the jack ass that brought his camera, so I was going into a nervous sweat thinking that I’m going to fuck up the whole thing for us because I brought a camera.
It turned out to be a total amount of stress for nothing, because once they announced that they would be taking the crowd in just after 4:30, fifteen minutes later they said the theater was full. And we were all turned away, but we could email in and get VIP tickets. Our disappointment was palpable for a few moments until Katie suggested we try going to a show or a movie or something. We met up with Katie’s fellow CUNY Journalism grad student Erin during our search to figure out something to do now that our Daily Show plans had gone up in smoke. We ended up going to the St. Mark’s Hotel bar, where we watched the Yankees game and drank pitchers of Brooklyn Lager. Followed by lingering off to a nice outdoor hookah bar and narrowly escaped a time at karaoke bar much to my glee.
Friday began, as it probably should have, with calm and nervous apprehension before the convention. This would eventually transform into nervousness in doing the live blogging of the three major panels. I loved this strategy as it would be my first experience on the other side of the fence, and I definitely needed to learn the ropes in convention coverage that I previously had no experience with.
I got to the Con early, or through the various comics pros that had started following me on Twitter, I had gotten there fairly late. I met up with Andy at the Journalism panel that Heidi had informed me about Tuesday night that our boss, Jonah Weiland, would be on with IGN’s Richard George; an old friend of Jan and Katie’s from their Metroland days, ComicMix’s Rick Marshall; Brian Heater (from the aforementioned Daily Cross Hatch) and Newsarama’s own Matt Brady.
It was a fascinating panel in regards to the questions going back and forth on the state of online coverage and the emergence of blogs doing their own reporting of the medium. A year ago, a discussion like this may not have been something I had previously thought about, or even cared about, but up until I realized that I could do some of the coverage these sites had been doing that this panel was exceptionally interesting to me now. My career had now combined both my experience in reporting and my love of comic books. Both of these facets had been an integral part of my life from an early age and up until a year ago I never really thought far enough ahead to think that I could combine both and put myself in the position I have now. So, what I had previously turned my back on a year ago (and was completely childish on my part), that being journalism, had now put me in a position at this con where I met all of these wonderful people.
I’ll get more into that in the concluding chapter of the series, I’ll just do the blow by blow for now. After the online journalism panel, Andy, Jonah and I headed to the Avatar booth that CBR was sharing. We set up the banners and whatever else before Andy prepped me on what he would need me to do during live coverage of these panels. So while running the gamut, and much of the coverage coming out of all these panels were nothing to really write home about besides NARC’s Joe Carnahan taking on the Taskmaster series. Other than that it mostly commentary on what’s going to not happen in both the Marvel and DC mega events “Secret Invasion” and “Final Crisis.”
Marvels panels are a bit more organized that DC’s. Though it was observed that the DC fans seem to be a bit more rowdy, and love the idea of being quick and sharp witted. If one had a transcript of DC’s panels it would probably read like a West Wing script. Where Marvels are a bit more sarcastic which I can appreciate.
After our marathon of panels coverage we absolutely had to bust out of the convention center because GOD DAMN the humanity, we frankly couldn’t get enough of those pocket disinfecting agents that the people working that giant Andromeda Strain prop had been handing out. After leaving the Javitz Center, we met up with Andy’s friend Brendan, an intellectual property lawyer who Andy interviewed following in the wake of the Siegal Superman copyright decision, and Jeremy Love (creator of Zuda Comics’ webcomic Bayou) and his lovely girlfriend for beers. We sat there and drank for a long time after Jeremy and his girlfriend went back to the hotel to take a nap before their drink-up at the Heartland Brewery beneath the Empire State Building. Brendan, Andy and I hung out there at the bar for a little while drinking it up until about 9 or so that we decided to get Jeremy for our own dinner at this classy burger joint near the W hotel. Ultimately we deciding to call it an early night at around 2am, considering Andy and I had to be at the Countdown to Crisis panel by noon the next day and Saturday was sure to be a marathon run. Which, it was.