It’s Friday at Comic-Con and, for Screenopolis, that meant more walking the floor of the main hall. Why? Because there are so many terrific booths full of creators and their work, it just didn’t feel like the day to wait in line for panel discussions. The problem with Comic-Con is you can’t be everywhere at once.

The crowds have grown significantly since Thursday, and the cosplayers are more abundant. It’s a mob in masks, a gaggle in gear, throngs in — sometimes — thongs. Attendees spill outward from the Convention Center, covering the nearby sidewalks and sectioned-off streets of San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter on a sunny but not-too-hot July 25. Well, not-too-hot for those of us not encased in multicolored armor.

I’ve largely split my explorations between talking to artists, photographing the wonderfully dressed-up, browsing comic books (brand new and three-quarters of a century old), and marveling at our absurd collective humanity.

Wandering the Massive Cavern of Creativity

The Main Exhibit Hall feels like it extends forever; a full afternoon’s browsing leaves you feeling you’ve walked a few miles, and you probably have — though slowly, through bottlenecks of other overwhelmed enthusiasts.

First stop, just through the entrance, I stopped at the booth for Heritage Auctions, a premier auction house (based out of Dallas, Texas) for high-end collectibles. I talked to their representative, Sarahjane Blum, long enough to know she’d be a good starting point if I ever decide to sell off my Nancy & Sluggo comic book collection. (Who am I kidding? I’m never selling those.)

Then I stumbled upon comic-book writer/artists Suzy Stein and Fernando Perez, whose comic, titled Inversion: Bureau of Time Enforcement, was presented alongside a severed foot. Thankfully not real. “Would you like to touch it?” asked Suzy, in case I might be a fake severed foot fetishist. Indeed, it was agreeably pliant. Stein and Perez’s comics (which also include Mark of Kings) look fun, and I admired their use of dynamic panels to capture the movement of the narrative.

I stopped by the booth for the rebooted Heavy Metal magazine, which features contemporary artists but channels the aesthetic of the 1970s issues. I marveled at an entire booth just for Dungeons & Dragons dice, including the translucent styles that I used to hold up in front of my eyes as a kid, clearly deprived of a good quality kaleidoscope. Ancientz, who design miniature giant robots (giant robots in miniature?) gave me a raffle ticket that involved several steps with QR Codes; I needed coffee before I could figure that out. I’m not sure coffee would have helped me understand another booth featuring a character called Chainsaw Tits.

It was inevitable that there’d be at least one booth with stylized paintings (by Oyari Ashito) fixated on Japanese kinky schoolgirls with amply bulbous mammalian protruberances rendered in studiously glossy airbrush. The kicker is that the booth also offered small packages of tissues, and I don’t think it was in case the niche-art’s fans have allergies. “Wow,” I said, and the seller gave a “some people like this stuff, what are ya gonna do?” shrug, adding that “In Japan, there’s something for everybody.” Fair enough.

A few perimeter walls had vendors selling stacks of “mystery boxes,” a popular concept these days — who needs certitude? The boxes are the exact size you’d want to give somebody as a present, and they contain (spoiler alert) varieties of swag related to the box’s theme (often movie IP). The mystery concept “gives you plausibile deniability,” one vendor said, half-joking, half-serious. I know I’d be mighty peeved if I bought a William Shatner Mystery Box and it was filled with nothing but tribbles.

Talking to More of the Artists

I wanted to talk to every artist/creator present, but that would take weeks rather than days, and some of the artists (such as Cutter Hays) invested some of their booth time making art — in Hays’s case, with a live model and everything — setting up a time-lapse camera to record the entire process.

I really enjoyed chatting with author Cordell Falk and artist Patricia McGee. They are co-founders of the Mint in Box Press, with titles including The Vampire Scrolls and Fractured Faith by Greg Burke. I couldn’t help but ask McGee about her down-under accent, and she said she’s from Adelaide, “the Kentucky of Australia,” which is either a tribute or a dis, I’m not sure.

Next pitstop was the booth for Dopecat Comics my Mike Boheem, a cool cat. Boheem’s laid-back demeanor suggested that he was in touch with his inner Dopecat. His Comic had a pure, home-grown, DIY quality that reminded me of the era of self-made ‘zines. The issue I browsed had a Fritz the Catt, Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers sensibility, as well as silly violence of the crudely drawn, exuberant kind ala teenagers trying to amuse their friends.

On a personal level (since I’m a Mad Magazine freak), I had no choice but to talk to Tom Richmond, a Mad cover artist and movie-satire illustrator who fully meets the high bar set by late, reat Mad caricaturists like Mort Drucker and Jack Davis. Richmond recently released a book called Claptrap: Idiotic Parodies of Iconic Films!, that I’ve gotta buy. The book (written by Desmond Devlin) fills in the gaps with satires of movies (GoodFellas, Die Hard, Blade Runner, many others) that Mad Magazine should have done but missed. Richmond is a modern Mad treasure.

An adjacent booth featured Bob Lizzarraga, who has also created recent Mad covers. He also makes some inspired pop-culture-mashup art, such as a poster of the Flintstones’ Betty (Barney’s wife) in the iconic form of 1958’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman movie poster. Another Mad-tastic booth was attended by Bill Morrison, a recent Mad Editor-in-Chief who also creates Simpsons-themed comic books (including Itchy & Scratchy and Futurama). Not too far away was Dan Parent, artist for current Archie comics, which also of course include his pal Jughead, and Archie’s eternally vexating girlfriends, Betty & Veronica. We laughed over a reprint he was selling of a 1960s-era Jughead comic called Eat Out. Those were much more innocent times (or were they?).

It was a kick to speak with Lisa Rothstein, a cartoonist whose specialty is drawing cartoons of dogs. I told her, “Your style reminds me of what you’d see in The New Yorker,” and then I noticed she had a display of the cartoons she has published in The New Yorker. I wanted to ask her more about the New Yorker submission process (which she described as a numbers game, submitting multiple cartoons at a time), but then a couple walked up and commissioned a sketch of their dog (via a pic on their phone). If you see a dog-related cartoon in the New Yorker, there’s a fair chance it’s a Lisa Rothstein.

So Much to See. Plus Comic Books.

I’ve often heard people complain that Comic-Con has drifted too far away from its comic-book roots, but I didn’t get that sense at all. I visited with a great many comic dealers, both national (big-name national dealers like Harley Yee, Metropolis, and ComicLink), and several in San Diego such as Blue Chip out of Rancho Santa Fe. The love of comics is alive and well, with fans hawking their wares just like the photos I’ve seen of the conventions in the 1970s.

I was happy to see a booth featuring Choose-Your-Path-to-Adventure books; the original publisher is making a comeback with complete sets of reprints. This sent me back down a memory lane, and then put me at a fork of two more memory lanes and made me decide between them.

And because I chose my own path to Comic-Con adventure, I didn’t make it to any of the panel discussions. But I am especially sorry to have missed the South Park one, where co-creator Trey Parker joked about being “terribly sorry” for offending America’s current, disastrous POTUS. The recent South Park episode hits him hard over the Paramount merger and the firing of Stephen Colbert, and it ends with a PSA that uses AI to show him wandering naked in the desert. The capper is the tagline: “Trump: His penis is teeny tiny, but his love for us is large.”

Before leaving, I went to the bayside to see what was happening in Adult Swim’s outdoor party zone. They were having a Rick & Morty read-through featuring the show’s producers and cast. Looked like great fun for the Rick&Mort-icians.

Two days of Comic-Con-ing had tired me out; I walked past the Hilton where they had a full-scale Comic-Con blood donation center (with a lot of generous participants donating) and took the trolley (loaded with conventiongoers, removing their helmets and masks) and got ready for the overwhelmingest day of all — Saturday.

See also: Our Thursday coverage.