It happened again.
“This will be my last year at Comic Con.”
I whispered the words aloud after getting shamed by some dude in his 40s into walking to the back of the Will Call line. So I tried to sneak in front of a few hundred people. This is New York. That’s what happens here. Who has the real problem here, friend? That’s what I wanted to ask him. Turns out I didn’t even have to stand on Will Call. Could have just walked right in through the Pro gate. I digress.
For the past two years now I’ve said I was hanging it up. The rows and rows of similar vendors and booths every year are finally taking their toll on me. My favorite booth — a printing company from somewhere in Mass. that usually shows up with an old printing press and sells awesome art for dirt cheap — didn’t show up this year.
The convention is huge now. The panels are spread throughout the city. It’s never been harder to meet up with people you know. My buddy and I made at least three earnest attempts to get together, but when one awesome panel is in the Javits and the other awesome panels are in MSG there’s not much hope. What’s crazy is that a few panelists mentioned that the New York Con now feels like what the San Diego Con felt like when it was first starting out. That’s wild.
I don’t know. Reading this over these complaints sound frivolous. It might be because I’m 30 now. Maybe it was just the added hassle of having to couch surf for the weekend. This was my first Con since moving to Maryland. It was a tough adjustment.
The truth is I went to the Rotten Tomatoes panel for the first time this year and it was so much damn fun. They should make it a TV show. That’s how good it was.
Basically they host a panel of film and TV critics, invite 200 fans into a room, hand people a microphone and tell them to declare whether or not a movie or show of their choice is Rotten or Fresh. It’s a bloodbath and I couldn’t get enough.
I was part of a mob chanting the name of a guy who got up to defend Jurassic Part III as Fresh. He said it was far more enjoyable than The Lost World. He was so right. I jeered as some dude got up to throw shade at Ghostbusters (2016) and then awkwardly accuse the Rotten Tomatoes staff of giving the movie high marks because it starred women. One of the best parts of the panel is that the critics fight back and they are unafraid to get in the weeds with people.
The best highlight of the panel though had to be the kid who got up and said The Matrix was Rotten. The boos rained down like palm leaves in a hurricane. He tried to say that The Matrix was basically Dark City, a movie that had come out a year before to lesser acclaim. Three guys in front of me started chanting “Take-his-pass!” Then he said that Trinity and Neo had bad chemistry. Anything said after that was unintelligible. At that point one of the panelists tried to save the kid’s life by giving a speech about how being a critic was all about standing by your opinion even when everyone said you were wrong. It placated the crowd just enough that the kid was able to go back to his seat alive.
Other exchanges came and went, but the Jurassic Park and Matrix moments were more than enough to convince me that Rotten Tomatoes should do that panel once a week in front of a live studio audience. It also reminded me that even though I feel like I’ve seen everything that there is to see at NYCC, there’s still some great stuff out there. Might have to go back next year after all.