The San Diego Comic-Con is many things to many people. For the business community, it’s an incredible commerce success story. For fans and collectors, it’s both a celebration and a validation. For entrepreneurs, it can be an enjoyable way to drive revenue quickly. For the entertainment community, it’s a fantastic marketing venue. For the entertainment community in Los Angeles and Hollywood, it’s also a great excuse to get outta town.
And for so many folks, professionals and fans alike, it’s an opportunity to spend time with 200,000+ of your closest friends. It’s an annual journey to a real-life Disney World, mixed with a hefty dose of your best days on a college campus and the most incredible state fair ever, where the main dish on the menu is “all the stuff you love.”
This year, as the nation and the world struggles with Covid-19, the folks behind the convention shifted gears quickly to morph the show into a virtual convention. We’ll all be analyzing that for a while, but one refrain I heard time and time again was not so much how folks missed the big events, but how they missed the little things.
I reached out to a group of fascinating folks and asked them to share some of their more personal stories and traditions from their annual pilgrimage to San Diego Comic-Con and the little things they miss this year.
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Rob Salkowitz is the author of Comic-Con and the Business of Geek Culture (I use this as a textbook for one of my college classes) a consultant and a sayer of things. He wistfully remembers one tradition he and his wife Eunice especially hold dear:
Our oldest and longest running SDCC tradition is the Tuesday night dinner we instituted with Batton Lash and Jackie Estrada back in 2000, maybe earlier. We were fans with no industry connections whatsoever. They befriended us, introduced us to pros, made us formally part of the Eisner Award staff and brought us into the circle of Comic-Con. After we lost Batton a couple of years ago we continued with Jackie. We really miss seeing her in person this year.
Continue reading “With Further Ado #105: Sharing SDCC’s Secret Traditions”
