Comic-Con International 2009, Minority Journalists & The Barack Obama Era
And to be fair this was our first time covering Comic-Con as press, so we were greatly impressed by the size and scope of the event. Looking back I would have actually preferred to have arrived on Thursday and had more time to plan out what we would be doing. When one covers a large event like Cannes, Sundance or CE3 once than it is much easier to cover it again as press the second time. But we still managed to film over 7 hours covering other minority comic book artists and other general Comic-Con panels, booths, costumed dressed attendees and artists.
And we also covered events outside Comic-Con 2008 like an outside preview screening of Fringe and a special Comic-Con 2008 screening of Tropic Thunder. I just wore my Comic-Con 2008 Fringe t-shirt I got at the Comic-Con preview at a Pomona College Hip-Hop concert we were promoting. And many of the students told me that Fringe was their favorite show. When we left Comic-Con 2008 we were dead tired from the whole experience. And we look forward to coming back in 2009. Our MySpace link to http://tinyurl.com/ldsljv has all the photos we took in 2008. And I should add that for almost every photo there is corresponding video footage. I wish we posted all seven hours of footage we covered at Comic-Con International 2008.
One must also understand that Comic-Con does not have any requirement of returning journalists to submit their past articles, photo galleries or video links. They asked for nothing from me as a journalist, so I was not overly worried about my chances of getting in again. So I sent a note to the Comic-Con press office inquiring on the status of my letter. I get an e-mail back from Comic-Con press not answering my question, but offering me a general, but valid ID and password to login to the Comic-Con 2009 media section on their Web site. But I knew just being able to login to the media section did not mean I was approved to cover Comic-Con 2009.
So I hit the press office again for clarification of my status. A few hours later I get an e-mail back from the Comic-Con publicist and says flat out that due to internal capacity issues” at this year at Comic-Con 2009 we would not be able to accommodate FuTurXTV.com and Hiphopbattle.com a press pass again. It was kinda weird at Comic-Con 2008 seeing some of the world’s biggest game publishers like THQ, Konami and Xbox crammed into small booths on the far wall of the Comic-Con Exhibition Hall. There really is not enough space at the San Diego Convention Center for any type of real expansion of Comic-Con. When I was there last summer I heard some small talk among attendees about Comic-Con moving to Las Vegas. I seriously doubt that would ever happen. But now that E3 Expo is fully back the top video game brands might feel less of a need to be at Comic-Con like in the past.