San Diego Comic Con is like Christmas in July for every pop culture fanatic. Panels, costumes, actors, posters, $60 parking, overcrowding and 100,000 of your favorite series’ number one fan are all packed into downtown San Diego like a largely wrapped present ready to be ripped open.
But for a college student, most likely you’re sitting on the sidelines due to hefty badge prices, absurd parking rates or the sheer impossibility of even obtaining a badge. Maybe huge crowds aren’t your thing or you would much rather have a closer interaction with some of science fiction’s greatest writers and the best artists in the business. For Mike Towry, one of the original founders of SDCC, the intimate feel is exactly what he missed most about the original conventions.
“Comic Con is huge and we’re proud of its success, but it’s different,” Towry said. He compares SDCC to a large stadium concert with lights and pyrotechnics. But some people prefer smaller acoustic sets in an intimate lounge bar, much like smaller conventions and the early days of SDCC. To achieve that personal interaction with fans, Towry started San Diego Comic Fest back in 2012.
Towry reminisces on one of the first conventions back at the U.S. Grant Hotel where only 300 people attended. But among those 300, there were some extremely influential members.
“We had Jack Kirby, who was the top comic creator of the world, if not of all time and we had Ray Bradbury as a guest who was the top science fiction author probably of all time and they both came to our little convention and would hang out with us,” Towry said. “You could go up to talk to them and ask them anything. You can’t do that when you got 100,000 people around.”
This intimate comic environment is exactly what attracted Pamela Jackson, one of San Diego State’s librarians to Comic Fest. As the librarian for TV, film, theatre, new media and comic arts, Comic Fest seemed like just the place for her to volunteer her spare time to.
“I saw it quickly as something I could be a part of,” Jackson said. “It doesn’t feel overwhelming.”
Jackson is the volunteer coordinator for Comic Fest as well as the group director for support services. She also works with SDSU faculty to integrate the ever-growing comic and science fiction collection in the library into their curriculum.
“I would say that comics cover every subject area. They are very interdisciplinary,” Jackson said. “They really talk about what it is to be human and they reflect our society and culture and political ideas. So there’s a lot of space, I think, for them in a college curriculum.”
SDSU has many classes to offer if you’re interested in studying graphic novels or comic books. In addition to our ever-growing comic collections in the library, you can take a class on ethnographic horror with Africana studies professor Ajani Brown or work on the school graphic novel, Word Balloons.
Comic Fest will be hosted at the Town & Country Hotel on Oct. 17-19. Tickets are $25 for all three days for students. Tickets are available for purchase online at www.sdcomicfest.org or at the door.
