Conventional

When I went to the Wizard World convention in Long Beach in LA in 2005, one of the first things that I did was to make sure that I knew where the convention was being held and what the quickest, easiest route to the convention centre was. As soon as I had that figured out, my next course of action was to find a convenient pub. There was a pub straight across the road from the Long Beach Convention Centre called “The Auld Dubliner” and given the fact that I’m a young Dubliner, I had to at least give the place a try to see what it was like. The bartender was from Donegal and as soon as I spoke to him, he new that I was from Dublin. And just like that, I found myself a home for the time that I’d be in LA, especially considering the fact that I’d be in LA on the 17th of March for Paddy’s Day. Being an Irishman in an Irish bar on Paddy’s Day in LA is pretty cool, but knowing the bar staff in that bar would be even better, so I made it my business to get to know the folk tending bar in the few days running up to Paddy’s Day.

I arrived in LA on the 12th of March and the convention didn’t start until the 18th so I had a fair bit of time between hitting LA and going to the convention. I kept myself busy by touring around, going sightseeing, going to malls, seeing whatever was in the cinema at the time, even if that meant having to sit in a cinema in Disney and watch Keanu Reeves play John Constantine. It also meant that I got to spend a lot of time in The Auld Dubliner in the run up to Paddy’s Day. By the time that the evening of the 16th of March rolled around, I had only had a pint in one other place besides The Auld Dubliner, and that was in the ESPN sports bar in Downtown Disney. Normally sports bars aren’t my favourite place to drink a pint, but I felt that reading a pile of comics in the sports bar while drinking a pint would be nerdy enough that I could be comfortable there. So on the night of the 16th, after a huge dinner and more than a couple of bottles of beer, I decided that I should see a bit more of LA, and I decided that the best possible way to do that was to go on a pub crawl up the main street leading away from the convention centre back towards Pacific Coast Highway where my hotel was located.

It really did seem like a good idea at the time.

Despite the fact that I use the term “pub crawl”, very few of the places that I visited after leaving The Auld Dubliner were actually pubs. I was in restaurants; I was in night clubs and about two hours after embarking on the pub craw… I ended up in an amusement arcade. At this point, I have to admit that there’s a period of time I just do not remember. I remember going in to the arcade because for some reason, I had to show the guy at the front door my I.D. in order to get in to the amusement arcade. It was all bright lights and loud noises and even though there was almost no chance of getting a drink in there, I couldn’t resist going in. To this day, I do not remember any of what happened in that place. After showing my I.D. to the bouncer, the next thing I remember is leaving the arcade carrying a giant stuffed panda. I don’t know if I won it, stole it or bought it but somehow I ended up leaving the arcade with a giant stuffed panda. I decided pretty much straight away that his name was Peter.

The pub crawl was based on a left-to-right pattern, wherein I’d go from one side of the street to another. This was harder than it sounds because, as a Dublin native, I’m used to just crossing the road whenever there is a chance to do so and not pay much heed to traffic lights or pedestrian crossings. In LA, crossing the road whenever and wherever you please will just get you and your panda shouted at. But both myself and Peter managed to make it across the road unscathed and we wound up in front of the next stop on the pub crawl… Hooters.

Despite whatever attraction that Hooters may or may not have had for the twenty five year old me, it was the next stop on the zig-zag pub crawl so I had to go in for at least one drink. I thought that getting some food might be a good idea too, but I still wasn’t sure if Peter the Panda was a vegetarian yet. When I went in, I got a table and put Peter in the seat opposite to me. I purposely got a smaller table with seats rather than a table with stools as at that stage of the evening the chances of either of us being able to balance on a stool were fairly slim.

After a couple of drinks, a small meal and some pretty one sided conversation, I decided that the next brilliant idea would be to buy Peter a Hooters t-shirt. There was no particular reason for this other than I was quite drunk and I thought it’d be funny. After buying the t-shirt and wrestling it on to Peter, I revelled in just how funny I was and lapped up the laughs and compliments that we were both getting from the staff. It was going pretty well until heavy set lady with a Southern accent decided that she didn’t like the idea of a panda bear wearing human clothes. It was pretty ironic though; she looked more than a little bit like a bear herself.

With no hint of amusement or even curiosity, the woman wanted to know why Peter was wearing a t-shirt. She didn’t want to know why he was sitting at a table with me, she didn’t want to know why he wasn’t drinking his beer and she didn’t want to know if Peter was a vegetarian. It actually turns out that he was, I had to eat all of the food myself. No, the only thing she wanted to know was why Peter was wearing a t-shirt and when she asked, she asked aggressively. I looked at her for a second and told her that it was part of a protest against the fur trade. “I’m a member of PETA” I told her, and Peter was Peter The PETA Panda. The reason that Peter was wearing the t-shirt, apparently, was to demonstrate how silly it was for people to wear animal fur by showing how silly an animal looked wearing human clothes.

I thought it was funny.

The bear-looking lady took huge offence to this. She started talking about freedom to wear whatever she wants and America being a land of liberty and then she started yelling at me, telling me that I should go back to whatever country I came from because the fur trade isn’t going anywhere. Now, I have no strong feelings on the fur trade one way or the other, but all of a sudden I felt passionate about it in a very loud, very vocal way. But most of all I think, I was just annoyed that the bear-looking lady didn’t think I was funny.

So I stood up and voiced my new found opinion on the fur trade. I don’t think that I ended up winning the argument, because I got kicked out of Hooters and was told never to return. To make it even worse, the bear-looking lady was allowed to stay in the restaurant and when I got outside and realised that Peter was still inside, I wasn’t allowed to go back in and get him. One thing that I’ve learned over the years is that it’s never a good idea to argue with staff in a restaurant or a bar when you’ve had a few drinks. It never works out well for anybody. So I decided to cut my losses, leave Peter to the tender mercies of the bear-looking lady and head back to The Auld Dubliner where I should probably have stayed in the first place.

When I got back to The Auld Dubliner, the seat that I was in earlier that day was still free, so I sat back down, and ordered another drink. It would have been like I never left but for the fact that the barman told me that Seth Green had just been in the pub. He arrived about ten minutes after I left and departed a few minutes before I got back.

Paddy’s Day came and went as it always does. The day was full of beer and laughter and stodgy food and more beer and introductions and new friendships. It was exactly the kind of day that I hoped it would be.

For anyone who over indulges on St. Patrick’s Day, I can fully endorse going to a comic convention in blistering heat as a hangover cure. The first day of Wizard World LA 2005 was on the 18th of March and it was an amazing day. It was the first time that I’d ever been to a full scale comic convention and I was a bit overwhelmed by it all at first but it felt good to be in the company of like minded folk. Every so often though, it was nice to be able to leave the Convention Centre and head over to the pub to get a breath of fresh air and a pint and a bite to eat.

At the end of the first day, I went back to the pub purely to get some dinner and then I was planning to head back to the hotel and collapse from tiredness. But halfway through my dinner, someone came up to the bar to book a table for himself and a group of friends. I recognised the guy from the convention floor so I was paying a bit more attention than usual to what he was saying and who he was booking for. When he said that the booking was for “Marvel Comics” and plans that I had to leave the pub early disappeared. Waiting an hour to see who was going to come in for dinner wasn’t a huge difficulty as I had bought a lot of stuff at the convention that day. I had a lot of books and comics to read, though as time went on, I tried to make sure that anything I read was a Marvel comic.

When the crew from Marvel Comics started arriving, their table wasn’t ready for them yet so Victor the barman told them that they could wait at the bar next to where I was sitting, have a few drinks and Victor would call them when the table was clear. There’s a time to be restrained and there’s a time to step up and make yourself noticed. This was one of the times when you have to step up. I introduced myself to the nearest person who turned out to be one of the Spiderman editors at the time, Axel Alonso. We chatted for a while and as more folk started to arrive, he introduced me around to his friends. Some of the names I recognised, some of them I didn’t. Somehow I became the focus of attention and I talked about how I enjoyed the convention, about how it’s so different to anything that we’d have in Ireland, how I met Kevin Smith for the first time that day, etc. But I started to run out of things to say, and when that happens, I always fall back to the same thing. I start telling stories. So I told them the story of me falling flat on my fact the day previous in the pub while trying to do my Michael Flatley impression and I told them the story of Peter the Panda. It was just then that Joe Quesada walked in to join the group and at the same time Victor came up to let them know that their table was clear for them.

Over the next two days of the convention, I saw some of the same crowd at panels and booths or just walking around the convention floor and they always made the effort to acknowledge me or say hi or stop to chat briefly. I’ve written before about how living the Nerd Life has certain advantages over living life the ordinary life of the masses and another advantage that being a nerd brings is that the people who we admire are very accessible to us. There’s any number of comic conventions in America during the course of the year where you can meet your heroes and they’re almost always friendly and courteous and willing to make time for a photo or an autograph. Being treated with respect by people you admire just makes you admire them more.

The next comic convention that I went to was the first annual Dublin City Comic Convention, being held in Temple Bar Music Centre at the end of November in 2006. The most notable guests at the convention were Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch who were riding high on the success of The Ultimates. And in a uniquely Irish twist, the convention kicked off on the Friday night with a pub quiz in which Millar and Hitch were competing. Needless to say, they won the quiz. But given the amount of beer that I drank that night, I sort of feel like I won too.

After nowhere near enough sleep, I went back into Temple Bar the next morning for the convention and the differences between the LA convention and the Dublin convention were enormous. The LA convention was a mass of stands and stalls selling everything from replica weapons to bootleg DVDs to t-shirts to videogames to comics. Comic creators were giving panels about their craft, Joss Whedon was talking about Wonder Woman and The Hulk was walking around the convention floor stopping to talk to anyone who approached him. The Dublin convention consisted of vendors crammed into the main dance hall of the Temple Bar music centre, selling their wares off tables that looked like they were about to collapse. Bryan Hitch was signing autographs on the stage in the dance hall and Mark Millar was signing autographs in an adjacent corridor. All along the queue for a Millar autograph, lesser known comic artists were sitting at tables trying to get people to buy their original art. I was very happy with the fact that I got a page of original art from the Angel: Masks one shot from IDW that was drawn by a native Dubliner named Stephen Thompson. That was looking like it was going to be the highlight of the day, until I finally got to meet Millar.

I had two books with me that I wanted Millar to sign, and even if he had signed them, handed them back to me and moved on to the next person, I would have been happy enough, but he made the effort to say hi and ask me how I was doing, was I having a good time, was I at the quiz the night before. Then he absolutely shocked me by telling me that he recognised me, and not only did he recognise me, he was able to tell me that he remembered me from Wizard World in LA the previous year. It was pretty amazing. There’s people that I interact with every day that wouldn’t recognise me if I met them on the street, but even after twenty months and probably meeting a few thousand other people, Millar still remembered me.

Being a nerd and being a comic book fan is rewarding in and of itself. Validation from others isn’t something that we need, we do what we do because we enjoy it and it makes us happy and that’s more than enough reason for doing anything. But I do think that the nerd community is pretty unique in the respect that the professionals give to the fans, partly because a lot of the professionals started out as ordinary fans themselves. And to be honest, a certain level of respect is something that I’ve come to expect when I’m lucky enough to come face to face with the people that I admire. But sometimes you get more than you hoped for. Sometimes all it takes is meeting the right person at the right time and a story about a panda named Peter.

– Simon Fitzgerald

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