Comic-Con, Here We Come!

In a few hours, my wife and I will be taking a red-eye flight from Honolulu through San Francisco to San Diego, where we’ll be attending our third Comic-Con. Dubbed “the geek prom” by some, this massive event draws well over 120,000 people each year.

We weren’t planning on being one of them.

Previously, “LOST” was the main draw, and since the 2009 Comic-Con was described as the final appearance for the show, we figured we weren’t going to miss much by skipping this one. Or the next one. We declared the last “LOST” Comic-Con our last Comic-Con.

But the months-long build-up was impossible to resist. There was still too much we wanted to see. Too many old friends with whom we wanted to reconnect. And too many new friends we wanted to meet.

So only two weeks ago, we changed our minds, and hoped and prayed we could get our hands on a last-minute membership deal. It was a long shot, since this year’s convention sold out last year, but we got lucky. We’ll have to stay at the Hilton in Mission Valley, rather than our beloved Doubletree at Hazard Center… but we’ll survive.

While there will be no official “LOST” events, there will be a lot of unofficial “LOST” goodness. If I’m able to record any of it, I’ll post it as special reports for “The Transmission,” our soon-to-be-retired “LOST” podcast.

But this year, our focus will be on everything else. Comic-Con is a massive celebration of pop culture, with countless movie, TV, and other media properties rolling out the welcome mat. We want to catch up with what we’ve missed over the past six years… and use Comic-Con 2010 as a crash course before launching our new podcast: Popspotting.

Popspotting will pick up our long-neglected explorations of “The Pith of Pop,” which began in 2005 as part of our first forays into podcasting. Covering movies, television, music, books, the web and general geekery, this new show will give us plenty of room to play.

We’re still brainstorming about the format and structure of Popspotting, and haven’t even set a launch date. But that hasn’t stopped me from printing up some business cards, stickers, and even having some cool buttons made to give out at Comic-Con!

If you want to keep up with my various shenanigans in San Diego, you can follow me on Twitter, connect with me on Facebook, and of course subscribe to “The Transmission” and “Popspotting‘ if you haven’t already. I will probably also upload photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube. And if you’ll be at Comic-Con, we’d love to meet you!

And when advance memberships go on sale for the 2012 Comic-Con? We’re signing up for sure.

See Also:

• Hele On to Comic-Con (2008)
• Getting “LOST” at Comic-Con (2009)