I’ve been touching on a handful of different parties, observances and festivals here – mostly aligned with experimental music on some level. You’ve got BitchPork, Voices of the Valley, Burning Fleshtival, International Noise Conference, The Wheel and Babylon Bazaar in Maine and of course the Mojave Raves. Then there is Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the Mummer’s Parade in Philadelphia and celebrating New Year’s Eve in Slab City – the only one of these that blurs the line between calendar holidays and alternative music festivals.
For me and most of my friends from San Diego there was another annual observance that had almost nothing to do with underground music but played a more formative role in nearly all of our lives: The San Diego Comic Con.
It took me much longer to get into Rock and Roll, or any aggressive music, but comic books were exciting for as far back as I remember seeing them. I wasn’t interested in my older brother and his friends’ hair metal records but any comics they might have had were a different story. It must have been at least 1992 when I stumbled onto an issue of the Frank Miller reboot of Rust but I couldn’t have been older than third grade when I found a copy of Marvel’s promotional monthly Marvel Age with a picture of the mid ‘80s X-Men team.
Before this point I would pick out back issues of Power Pack and The Eternals on trips to the comic shop but once I saw the tiny picture of Nightcrawler I was obsessed. I think it was the visual style of the whole team at this point but something about his design and costume really spoke to me even if though I initially thought he was holding a whip when I saw his tail. I think I just had a thing for big, puffy shoulders but not in a football player or Rob Liefeld Cable sense – I liked his unconventional silhouette and leaner gymnast’s build.
When I did the thing in third grade that I think a lot of kids do, meeting up with the other comic nerds and designing endless costumed heroes and villains, I created a team called The Blue Dudes where everybody looked like Nightcrawler with blue skin, yellow eyes and pointed ears. This piece would probably get boring if I spent the entire time listing my favorite comics but besides older The Uncanny X-Men issues my favorite thing to get was a book called Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Update ‘89 – it was an illustrated encyclopedia with full page pictures of all the characters and background information on them in alphabetical order.
The first time I got to go to Comic Con was in 1992 when I was twelve years old. My dad took me for a single day with my best friend Jason. I remember the year because the freebie items were still really good in the early ‘90s and they were giving out tons of stuff to promote the movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula – comic books, posters, pins, trading cards and probably some other stuff I don’t remember.
The band Green Jellö also had a booth that year – it was set up like a cool punk house living room with couches and upholstered armchairs pointed at a big TV playing a loop of their music videos. It was probably the most popular thing in the convention with our demographic, eleven to fifteen year old boys, though I didn’t see many adults taking interest. They were handing out free cassettes of their songs and considering the track Shitman had the word “shit” in it and House Me Teenage Rave was full of simulated sex sounds it all seemed badass to us.
I might have paid one more year but it seems just as likely that by 1993 I was hooked up with the programming office to start volunteering. My sister found the connections for this at her Performing Arts High School – we would get a free four day pass for helping out with the different events in the upstairs conference rooms. The only thing I really remember is delivering a bunch of pencils to a figure drawing lesson that the guy who made Lady Rawhide was giving. There wasn’t a model or anything – it was a lesson on drawing unrealistic female bodies from your own imagination.
I do remember a story that my sister and some other volunteers were helping with a Steven Seagal panel and he made them all leave the room while he changed his shirt. They complained about how ridiculous this was considering how often he is shirtless onscreen but he was probably just a little out of shape between movies and didn’t want anyone to see.
The next few years were really the golden age of the San Diego Comic Con, it had gotten big enough to feel like you were living in a temporary city that was only populated by other comic book geeks but it wasn’t so big as to be overcrowded and unmanageable yet. It was also still mainly about comic books instead of television shows and movies because there wasn’t as much superhero/sci-fi/fantasy stuff being made in those years. Every year a few movies were being heavily promoted but nothing like it is now.
We were all into staying at or around the con for the entirety of all four days. On Friday and Saturday the screening rooms that showed anime and old shows and movies were open until three in the morning and there was a big room on top of the Hyatt called the Hospitality Suite where they put out free sodas, chips and candy. There was a decent amount of night time programming like the Masquerade, the Eisner Awards and a big dance party but we also just loved running around downtown San Diego.
The Gaslamp Quarter revitalization had started but there was still plenty of urban blight and the center city could be nearly deserted at night. That was how we liked it – we would explore empty buildings and sneak into parts of the Convention Center and surrounding hotels that we weren’t supposed to be in. My favorite spot was opening an access door to a section of the ventilation system from the mezzanine. If you’ve ever been in the San Diego Convention Center this was just on the other side of the big blue tubes that stick out of the wall in the main hall.
I would always dream up pranks like getting a box of bouncy balls and throwing them over the main hall from the giant tubes but never actually did any of them. At fifteen years old just sneaking into all these secret nooks and crannies felt devious enough. I would bring friends from my High School and show them around all of these little spots when the Convention wasn’t happening also. Once me and my friend Brandi from The Singles managed to get inside between events and spend a few minutes roller skating the giant empty concrete slab of the main hall before somebody kicked us out.
On top of all this the late ‘90s was just a great time for comic books. There was a little bit of a “black and white explosion” going on but it felt more creative and less formulaic than the one that had followed the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Slave Labor Graphics was booming – Evan Dorkin’s Milk and Cheese had hints of the third wave ska culture we were all into, Jhonen Vasquez was just starting his goth classic Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and I got super obsessed with this comic Hairbat that never got a second issue.
Francois was making an independent fanzine called The Comics Review and I got to tag along with him while he interviewed Paul Pope from THB and Stan Sakai from Usagi Yojimbo. Wendy and Richard Pini were reprinting all of their hard to find Elfquest books and had just started up Warp Graphics that eventually spread the franchise too thin but it started out strong. Vertigo was still putting out stuff we liked and Sam Keith’s The Maxx was a cartoon on MTV and we were teenagers and lots of cool comics were coming out – Bone, Stray Bullets, Beanworld, I could list things off all day.
I used to bring a white t-shirt and embroidery hoop to the Con and get all my favorite artists to sign and draw sketches on it. The hoop allowed me to pull the fabric taut in small sections at a time so it was almost as easy to draw on as a flat piece of paper. In the year that Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean were promoting the book Mr. Punch, Neil drew a quick portrait of the titular character that he seemed to think came out a lot better than his drawings usually did. Looking at other sketches of his online I’m inclined to agree but my mother washed the shirt behind my back and he was the only person that neglected to use a waterproof marker.
It’s possible that I made it to every single Comic Con from 1992 to 2006 but I remember 2002 as a year of big changes. I had always attended the festival as a straight edge teenage geek but this was my first time in full partying drinking and hard drugs mode. Me and all my friends had a tradition of gravitating toward the big “C” outside the Convention Center when we were looking for people to hang out with. This is where this picture would have been taken but it isn’t from 2002 – it might be 2003 or 2004.
I am holding a plastic pineapple which despite being completely obvious allowed me to constantly drink in public without attracting any negative attention.
I didn’t get into it until I moved back in 2001 but another thing that went through a “golden era” in late ‘90s San Diego was street drugs. Methamphetamine hadn’t become as ubiquitous as it is now, although there was plenty of it around, and all the Mexican heroin dealers still sold tiny bags of near pure cocaine for shooting speedballs. For those readers who haven’t tried it an intravenous shot of cocaine delivers an intense euphoric rush where time seems to stop for a moment then all sounds take on a metallic echo like they were being processed through a flange pedal.
I wouldn’t recommend it and I’ll most likely never do it again but it was a ton of fun in my early twenties. Especially coming from Chicago where the only thing available was crack and I had to cook it down with lemon juice, having constant access to cocaine so pure it would dissolve the moment it touched water and you could taste it in the back of your throat like silver was certainly an experience.
I would have either made myself a counterfeit pass or asked people that were leaving if I could have theirs – this actually was a solid method of getting one in the early aughts but the last time I tried around 2014 or so it was nearly impossible. Anyway I spent at least as much time chasing down drugs and alcohol as I did at the actual convention this year if not more.
The thing about injecting cocaine, with or without heroin, is that it makes you really want to inject more cocaine soon afterwards so I would have been spending a lot of time in the bathrooms. This is what I clearly remember: arriving early one day and riding the escalators to the upper floors to slam a speedball in a toilet stall. Still rushing I wander into a panel for the new Muppet movie Kermit’s Swamp Years and pop open a tall can of Steel Reserve. The first sip, combined with lingering nausea from the intravenous cocaine, causes me to rush over to the trash can and loudly vomit into it.
I get kicked out of the Muppet panel.
Over the years a list of “must see” panels and presentations started to grow as people from our friend group showed each other their favorite bits of scheduled programming. One of these was called Starship Smackdown and it was basically a fantasy league tournament for imaginary dogfights between space crafts from a range of sci-fi books, shows, comic books and movies. A rotating cast of moderators wrote the names on a dry erase board and presided over a group discussion of who would win each matchup until there was a single champion.
To give a very general idea it would be stuff like the Winnebago from Space Balls going head to head with the actual Millennium Falcoln from Star Wars.
Another popular one was called the Klingon Lifestyles Presentation – a group of cosplayers that created a community theater troupe around the fictional Star Trek race. The sci-fi and fantasy landscape was especially lacking in diverse characters at the turn of the millennium but Klingons offered a way for Black and mixed race fans to depict a group of characters that were faithful to the source material. They wore the costumes and forehead prosthetics of the version that started with Star Trek: The Next Generation and created a fictional ship for all these scenes to play out on called the VSS Stranglehold.
On this particular year I would have been fairly drunk and fucked up on drugs by the time this performance was happening. I noticed a couple of young teenage girls in full Klingon getup and made a crude joke:
“Check out the Klingon jailbait!”
One of the older cast members, quite likely an uncle or even father, pointed his blaster pistol at me in what seemed like genuine anger:
“Watch your tongue you Terran Dog!”
I was impressed by his ability to chastise me without ever breaking character.
I’ve mostly been writing about getting drunk and high and being an asshole but there was definitely a lot going on with comics this year that was exciting as well. A lot of the Fort Thunder artists wouldn’t be published on anything with an ISBN number for a couple more years but there was a lot more awareness of their work and screen printed mini comics, posters and calendars were starting to pop up in places like the Giant Robot booth. Highwater Books had been publishing stuff from some Fort-adjacent artists with more of a twee style: Ron Regé Jr., James Kochalka and Jordan Crane.
I’m not 100% sure but I think 2002 was the year that Paper Rad sent out the “peace envelope”. I don’t know if there is an official name for this object but it was a folio size Manila envelope that was spray painted with stencils of hearts and peace signs and probably some other things I forget. It was filled with a selection of zines and mini comics in a wide variety of sizes and colors – stuff from the members of Paper Rad, Dearraindrop and I think CF and Keith Waters, though I might be wrong on those last two.
As far as I know these weren’t available for sale anywhere but had been sent out with a friend in the underground comics scene to be passed out to mutual acquaintances. I know that I got mine when I passed by a booth like Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly and somebody recognized me and grabbed me one from under the counter – not that there would have been any popular demand for their work at this point. As always if anybody reading knows anything more about the object I’m referring to I’d love to hear it.
The most exciting new discovery for me at the 2002 Comic Con was definitely Junko Mizuno and her Cinderella paper back. Her drawing style is generally referred to as “gothic kawaii” but beyond the dark and erotic elements my favorite part was the way her work synthesized the aesthetics of vintage Sanrio, Strawberry Shortcake and the entire spectrum of consumer goods that were marketed to adolescent girls in the ‘70s and ‘80s. In a rare situation the English language release of Cinderella is actually more definitive than the original Japanese one because Mizuno got to have greater control of the colors and printing style – she went for newsprint and four color process for a vintage Western comic book feel.
I was going through a bit of an obsession with the aesthetics of cuteness myself – collecting all of the vintage Lisa Frank gear I could find and hunting for pink and purple apparel with images of unicorns. It’s been crazy watching the proliferation of unicorns and rainbows on every product imaginable in the last few years because in 2002 that kind of stuff was not easy to find.
My outfit for that year’s Comic Con was a white hospital gown layered with a reproduced unicorn tapestry, brightly colored scraps of tie dye and hand sewn prayer flags in a psychedelic style. My friend Joy had given me a single arm guard from a Rainbow Brite costume and I safety pinned on some of the plastic jewelry that came with the same Glitterator that had filled me with anti-Christmas angst as an adolescent.
The things that made Comic Con exciting in the early aughts were a little different from the things that made it exciting in the ‘90s and every year it felt a bit more commercial and mainstream. The last time I went was with LaPorsha in 2014 or so. It was a lot harder to bum passes and the Convention Center had not only been expanded but a special section was added with promotional inflatable funhouses for Adult Swim and The Smurfs movie. We had a good time and ran into Jesse Camp but a lot of the old magic seemed to be gone.
Still I was surprised to learn that things like the Klingon Lifestyles Presentation are still happening every year. It wouldn’t be this one but some year in July I just might make it down to San Diego to check it out again.
If I ever make it look for me under the big “C” where the cars pass in front of the Convention Center.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 