Heart of Dorkness: Day Three
I woke up my third day of the 2014 Phoenix Comicon feeling less excited than I thought I would be. My second day had been a welcome change of pace from the first, in that I really had enjoyed my day so much more than the day before. But today was the event I had been initially looking forward to for months, long before I even knew I would get to come to this event for free.
Today was the day that Stan Lee was going to be there. Stan Lee. Stan “The Man” Lee. The godfather of Marvel comics. The man who created almost the entire pantheon of Marvel’s biggest names, including my absolute favorite superhero, Spider-Man.
I’d been looking forward to this for months. Knowing that Stan Lee was going was why I wanted to come to this con in the first place. Fate just happened to have stepped in and also allowed me to go to this thing for free, and allow me to write about it for you lovely people to read. For months I’d been getting hyped and looking forward to this. Often checking the con’s website just to make sure nothing had changed and that Stan would still be there. I hemmed and hawed for days trying to decide whether I was going to spend my hard earned money on an autograph, or a photo op with the man. I erred on the side of the photo op, in that I knew that if I purchased photo op time in advance, then I was guaranteed to be able to meet him, versus waiting in line all day and risking not actually getting a chance for an autograph, should the line be too long.
Weirdly though, on the day of it actually happening, I kept finding myself struggling to get excited or even nervous. I went to breakfast to charge up my batteries again, then we headed to the con. We got to the photo op to find that, of course, there was already a huge line. We’d expected this though, as my best friend and I got into the line. My best friend Brianna, who is our quite excellent P.R. director, and the person who got us our press passes in the first place, had agreed to come with me to my Stan Lee photo. I asked her to come with me for two reasons. First was that it was a memory I wanted to share with her, and secondly, I brought her so she could kick me if I fangirled too hard over Mr. Lee.
So we waited in line for almost two hours, and I was still not really excited. I can’t for the life of me tell you why. Perhaps it was the mechanical nature of the whole proceedings, with hundreds of people lining up for a ten second interaction with arguably the most famous man in the history of comic books. I knew that we wouldn’t really get a chance to talk to him, or get an autograph. I knew that once we got shuffled into the photo booth, they would have us stand next to him, take a quick picture, then shuffle us out again. It was hard to get myself worked up at the last minute, even though I’d been looking forward to this for months.