The Road to Comic-Con: Trying to Get There

It hasn’t been easy trying to get to San Diego Comic-Con, not with us actually only deciding in March, when 4 day passes were all sold out. If not for time just falling into place for all of us in some way or form, we wouldn’t even be considering this – so with just day 1 and day 4 passes Wai and I made our first bid to go for SDCC, and a few days later Pete caught on with the plan – except by then they only had day 4 tickets left. It seems really crazy, and I guess from then on, really, the whole trip became a story about getting tickets – or how not to.

1) Get your tickets early. There’s 2 ways of looking at this, especially if you’re from a country far far away that’s going to take a long long time to fly there. For starters, you never know if you’ll be able to go to Comic-Con next year, but once you actually know it’s kinda going to be too late to go. Hence – just buy them first, you can always let them go later. SDCC is quite nice about that, but that also means we get a lot of campers for tickets. Inasmuch you don’t want to be one of those guys, sometimes it just helps to be. The other way of looking at it is to get your plane tickets early. I know Pete and I have been nagged about it for the longest time, but when you just wish for the latest deal to come in (and when you’re used to airlines given last minute deals for tickets – in the region), you have to just bite the bullet and get the best deal you can. There won’t be extra flights in general, and seat numbers are only going to go down. Unless you really want to risk it. And what all this means is that we paid for our flight today. Right before the agent closed. Phew. If you’re from Singapore, eyoo.sg has been really helpful with tickets.

*pause*

Wait, when did this become a guide to SDCC? We haven’t even been there!

*play*

2) Find out what’s going on in the area. So we all go tickets for w00tstock the very moment they got released (or about 5 min in when I got a little sleepy but then realised the time). But on the other hand we got really lousy tickets for Barenaked Ladies because we got them the same day we got w00tstock tickets. It pays to know what events are going on in the area you might want to go for so you can book them early – so who’s up for Patton Oswalt? Given that the schedule for SDCC is not out yet it’s definitely a risk – what if they have the announcement of a new Firefly movie during w00tstock (oh nooo!!) or what if they announce the the cancellation of the other sequels of Twilight?! Wouldn’t you want to be there?! But you know, w00tstock. And yes, tickets are important. Get them early.

3) Be prepared. Read, read, read. Tons of guides are out there, and if you’re going to be travelling thousands of miles you might not want to be bringing your favourite statue of Spidey for Stan Lee to sign – but at the very least you could bring a sketchbook. And be prepared with spare memory cards…. well you know the drill possibly better than I do. We’re kinda going in blind here, but we know we want to avoid gamer funk and running out of batteries in the middle of an interview (we hope to do some)… well, it’s going to be hard to know what bases we have to cover, or if we need a proper microphone. And it seems like some events are ticketed – time to bring out the wifi and the queue machines…

4) We’re freaking out here guys! We’re going to SDCC and our minds are blown by how much we could possibly expect to see and that results in some paralysis of the mind and who knows what’s going to happen and we hope we get more tickets we might have an option that’s open to us so we’ll see how that goes.

And yeah. We’re going to Comic-Con! Booyah!