Here’s the short version: I’m old, hahaha.

The long version goes as follows: I’ve been going to Comic Con for the past 12 years and have only missed one year since it was the year I got married and it was either Comic Con or our honeymoon. This year I only got in for a single day since I hadn’t planned on going and had to do 4 days of shopping and visiting all my favorite artists and writters in a single run… which can get pretty hectic in a 30k+ crowd.

I got there at 9:30 a.m. because I missed the 8:45 trolley and had to wait until 10:40 a.m. to get my badge because the computers went down and no one could register. I was at the Con for 2 hours and already wanted to get out FAST since I was carrying around about 40 pounds worth of Sketchbooks (all hardcovers now which is great for collecting but hard on your back when you have to carry them all at once), statues, games and soundtracks.

The highlights of my day were: buying a Faun statue at the Gentle Giant Booth from the movie “Pan’s Labyrinth” (if you haven’t seen it run to rent it), getting and advance copy of The Art of Darksiders signed by Joe Madureira, getting the “Grab Bag” at the Capcom Booth for only $30 and obtaining in return a great bag with excelent random content and being able to say hi to almost all the artists and writters I’ve gotten to know for 4 days at a time for the last couple of years.

I was out of the Convention Center at 4:30 p.m. Going back to the “I’m old” comment, I guess it was weird for me to have to rush to get everything I wanted in just a couple of hours instead of doing the whole week experience. I have several hardcovers with 30-40 sketches for each of the last 12 years (minus 1) and this is the first year I didn’t do that because I just didn’t had the time, I was tired (ooooooooooooold!) and pretty much broke hahaha. The sketchbooks I had paid for in 2009 and was set to only pay shipping since pretty much everyone was kind enough to help me out and ship them home but that wasn’t necessary since I was already there.

I didn’t buy any Sketchbooks for 2011 because I definitely won’t go to Comic Con next year and I just found out that my wife is pregnant which makes me very happy but also means that my spending patterns must change ASAP.