It’s Comic-Con Time! It’s that magical time of year when everyone gets together, dresses in cool costume and gets treats. Well, treats in the form of commercials for upcoming movies, TV Shows, and other cool stuff. (But they’re awesome commercials.)
Comic-Con was started in 1970 when... you know what? The history stuff is why God invented Wikipedia. You can feel free to look up how it slowly started as a comic book convention and it slowly exploded to the large pop-culture event it is today. (Hmmm.. I guess that is kind of the history. You’re welcome, Wikipedia God.)
What is it about this one weekend that makes grown men and women dress in costumes and gather to worship what basically amounts to advertisements for things that will cost even more and basically abandoned it’s founding principles years ago? Because it’s awesome. It’s an awesome time.
Obviously someone like me follows Comic-Con pretty closely. I would love to go one year. I even plan it out, think of the costume I’m going to wear (Green Lantern. Ryan Reynolds movie version.) While I may throw off the silly comment like the previous paragraph, I really do enjoy the fact that men and women dress up in silly costumes. I like the fact that they show off movies that are coming up (and they’re overly analyzed.) And despite the fact that there’s always some complaint that “Comic-Con isn’t about comics anymore” it is still about comics, most of the news (because again, I don’t have tickets to go) focuses on the cool movies, but it’s about comics. Lighten up, complainers!
Mostly, I like what Comic-Con represents. It’s my nice yearly reminder that imagination exists even with grown adults that normally wouldn’t put on a Harley Quinn costume and run around a convention hall to catch the glimpiest glimpse of a superhero movie that may be coming out in a year if the release date isn’t pushed back because it’s a superhero that you’ve wanted to see on the big screen for years. It just seems like it would be an incredible experience.
At hearts, we’re all kids. Let’s face it, we all have things that we get excited about. We all have little moments of glee. (Like last week, when I was sitting on the edge of my seat during Pacific Rim with a smile so big you’d think I was winning a lottery.) Comic-Con sort of takes that and breaks down all the pretense that we don’t want to dress up in costumes and play with all the things that made us happy as kids.
It’s all imagination. It’s pretend. It’s make-believe.
So over the next four days, we’ll be seeing plenty of pictures of lawyers, bankers, “responsible adults” dressed up in brightly colored costumes. We’ll be hearing about that one superhero/zombie/action movie that we want to see and scouring every last bit of news about it. We’ll be looking at comic books and action figures and wishing we could get our hands on them. For the next four days, we all get unabashedly be kids again.
And I love it.
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