Wizard World LAme

So this weekend is the Wizard World LA show. Since I am in town for work I thought it would be fun to go to the show. Little did I know.

My day started at 4:45 AM when my phone alarm woke me up. I showered and headed in to the plant. It was their Friday off so I had the production area to myself. I made a ton of progress. At 10:30 AM, I packed up my stuff and headed to the con. Traffic kind of sucked but I made it to the show a little before noon. I had purchased advanced tickets, so I went to the advanced ticket line. Which is hard to describe. So imagine one of those rope corrals that are the staple of the long line, but without the ropes or poles or anything associated with proper line-age. So instead of a nice ordered line we had a bunch of people in a big group.

About 10 minutes before the doors opened one of the Wizard World Staff members walked up and down the line telling us that if we wanted our freebie bag we needed to stay in this line. Well I am not one to turn down free shit so I stayed. After about 30 minutes, a different Wizard World Staff member walked up and down the line telling us that we did NOT need to stand in line we could pick them up later. I could tell it was going to be another 15 minutes so I headed in.

Before I get in to details a bit about the show itself. It sucked!!! OK more details. The space itself was fairly large but they were only using 2/3 rd of it. There was a large publishers area with huge booths for Hasbro Toys, Wizkids, DC Comics and Marvel Comics. There was also a Huge gaming area that I never saw more then 1/3 rd full and a respectfully large artist alley, that was also only 2/3 rd full and had a TON of space between the rows. The saddest part was the dealer's area. It was probably only half again as big as the publisher's area but even that was not full. I am pretty sure that we had more dealers last year at the Emerald City ComicCon. The one thing that was kind of cool about how they had the dealer area was small islands instead of long rows of tables. It made it really easy to get around and made almost every booth a corner booth. I realize that they were able to do this because of the few dealers, but it was still nice. Overall i would guess that the overall attendance will be around 12,000 over the three days.

So the first thing I did was to get in the HeroClix Spectre raffle line. This was not actually raffling off of the GIANT Spectre Heroclix but was actually raffling off the right to buy one. Not to spoil the surprise but I did not end up spending any money at the Wizkids booth. Sorry Jim. The Fat Bastard in front of me and the Bad Parent behind me did but not me.

So after getting the soon to be worthless tickets, I did a quick walk through the con. I realized that I was going to need some cash if I was going to buy anything. So I searched around and found the one cash machine in the convention center. I put card in, went through the whole process only to have it tell me that it was an Invalid Transaction. After trying 4 or 5 times, I moved on. I decided to head up the street to find another cash machine. After about seven blocks, I found a Washington Mutual Cash Machine. Well I had no more luck there. So I called WaMu to find out what was going on. Apparently a business had reported that my card had been "compromised". Whatever the Fuck that means. It sure would have been nice if they had freakin' called me. So I tried to have the call center lackey find me a near by branch. Well that was worthless. So I headed back to the Con when I noticed down a side street a large Washington Mutual sign. Only 10 blocks away. Yippee!! So I get there and asked if they could help me get some cash. Well they were no longer able to find out my account number because my card had been "compromised". Whatever the Fuck that means. They were also unable to find out my account from any other means. I pretty sure this was because they were incompetent. I ended up calling my office and getting my account number from my direct deposit information. I got my cash and headed out the door. I figured that I would take the shortest path and head directly to where the convention center is. Problem was that the streets did not run parallel to each other so I ended up going in the wrong direction. Overall it took me over two hours to get cash.

When I made it back to the con I had already missed all of the panels I was interested in, so I just wandered around killing time waiting for the show to end. When it did I went with Jim and some of his workmates on an Odyssey-ish like adventure to get some food. We ended at a Bob's Big Boy. I had not been to one in over 20 years and Eric L. had never been. It was a shame that they no longer have the giant Bob outside anymore. They have him in the lobby now. No one lets there kids out any more.