Silicon Valley Comic Con:My First Comic Con.

     I have been wanting to go to a Comic Con for many years but never really had the opportunity. That changed when Steve Wozniak bought Big Wow last year.  Then Woz teamed up with Stan Lee and they decided to put on Silicon Valley  Comic Con(SVCC)  Being that I live in San Jose and this Comic Con is right in my backyard I had to go.  I bought tickets for me, my wife Jolene and my son Augustin who is 12, for  Saturday March 19th.  I had read about how Comic Cons work and what goes on from sales booths, autographs, panels and seeing fans in costume.

     I checked out the schedule and made a tentative itinerary.   We both wanted to see Steve Wozniak's opening ceremonies and Nathan Fillion.  .  I thought about seeing Stan Lee and Jeremy Renner but I am not really a comic book guy and Jeremy's talk was butting up to Nathan's.   

      So the opening ceremonies was put on an hour after the show opened and were arrived 10 minutes early.  Luckily we did because we were allowed into the convention center to get our electronic wrist bands that would allow us into the convention hall proper.  So exactly at 10 am we were let in.

     I felt a little guilty, because we were just wandering around the convention hall going past this huge line.  We didn't know what the line for for, a common occurrence at this con, so we just wandered around the convention hall.  Then they started letting people in and as we started to make our way to get in line the volunteer noticed our wrist bands and told us to get in his line. 

      He had nobody in his line, in fact there were 5 volunteers next to some scanning machine that didn't have anybody in them.  I guess the people at the beginning of the line could not see around the mass at the first 5 machines.  So we got in without getting in line to which my son says, "Did we just cut in front of that huge line?"  I sheepishly said, "I don't think so..."

     So we go into the main convention hall which is pretty big and saw the comics book booths, artist booths, tech booths etc.  It was pretty cool for me but I have heard that they didn't have as many booths as they did when it was Big Wow Convention the previous year.  I checked out this one T-shirt booth that had my wife's favorite show's tee, a Tardis Tee.  The t-shirt had really neat art on the "ink" was raised so it had a 3-D look and feel.    

     I also saw an artist whose work really appealed to me.  And he had done an Alien piece.  I love Aliens and at a local gaming convention called KublaCon I have run an Aliens Live Action Boardgame event for the past 10 years. I haved looked at tons of art for Aliens and this one was perfect.  So I told him I would be back later.  That was a mistake because later there were tons of more people, where you moved like cattle at a very slow pace.  

     After the dealer's hall we lined up for the Woz's opening ceremony.  I don't know if anybody has seen Woz talk, but this guy is a geek's Geek.  I mean he is really into the whole culture.  And he comes from an era when being a geek wasn't cool.  He talked about how he and his friends felt different and probably were not treated in a good way by the rest of society.  I remember back in the late 70's that geek and nerds were not cool. Woz said he wanted a space where all geeks of all different interests could gather in a safe enviroment and have a good time.  My wife was really impressed by how "touchy-feely" Wozniak was.

     In between Steve and Nathan's talk,  we saw a talk put on by the President of the D&D 5th edition line.  I didn't really know what to expect but he really did a good job of talking about the new edition of D&D.  He had slides and showed some videos that tugged at my nostalgia and made those in attendance laugh numerous times.  Of course there was the mandatory asking of the questions and some were okay and some were just dumb.  I wish they would somehow vet the people asking questions but I guess that is what you sign up for at any Fan Show.

      To me and my family the convention was really fun.  My son Augustin was impressed with Nathan Fillion and thought he was pretty funny and cool.  He liked that all he did was answer questions from those in attendance mixed in with funny anecdotes.   All in all it was a very positive experience and will go again next year if they decided to do a Silicon Valley Comic Con II.