Social Saturday | San Diego Comic-Con 2018

Editor Note: Gini returns from her trip to 2018 Comic-Con International: San Diego, and she has a few thoughts to share.

Do you wish you had gone to go to this “hallowed” annual event? Let’s see what Gini has to say about it!

I’m very fortunate that I’ve been able to attend San Diego Comic-Con, as a panel participant and as a signing author, since my first novel, Touched by an Alien, released in 2010.

Over the years the con has remained consistent in many ways – gigantic, fun, exhausting, surprising. It’s also changed yearly, and not just in regard to who the big media names are that are attending, but in terms of vendor makeup, panel focus, exterior fun, and all the six degrees of separation stuff that happens to most of us who attend or know those who do.

Who could forget the 2016 Hall H “let’s all go do Star Wars with John Williams” event? Um, well, me, because I missed it. But it’s still talked about as a holy grail of “I know someone who got to go” and it definitely keeps you ready to react quickly.

Things like this happen all the time, but what those things are vary from year to year. I got to see Norman Reedus from about five feet away with one person between us, and then from about twenty feet away with about a hundred people between us. The difference between the distance? Before and after “The Walking Dead”. I’ve been within kissing distance of Randy Couture (who was all prepared to speak to me when his bodyguards hustled him away, like I could possibly hurt one of MMA’s greatest). And I’ve now seen Kevin Smith live twice – pre and post heart attack.

This year, I got to tell Walter “The Black Power Ranger” Jones that he was just as handsome now as when his version of the show aired (this is categorically true and I’m still regretting not paying $40 for his autographed pic because day-um). This year, too, friends got to hang out with Joss Whedon at the bar, just chillin’. As with the Star Warsthing, not ME, but friends, and they told me all about it, which counts, just as I told them all about Walter Jones and so it counted for them, too.

On the other hand, I may not have met Joss, but I got to panel with Andy “The Martian” Weir. Don’t let his “aw shucks” demeanor fool you – he’s sharp as a tack, knows a TON about all things geek, and is a truly nice guy who’s as fun to sit with at an autograph session (which we did) as he is on this, the Geek Geek Revolution panel.

You might not have been there live, but you still get to experience it in some way. And that’s SDCC in a nutshell.

5 Stars out of 5