Comic-Con preview night

Comic-Con opens its doors the night before programming starts to give eager geeks a taste of what’s in store. But before this preview night, there’s the day before when the area around the San Diego Convention Centre starts to look like a strange anomaly in space, and time has brought various sci-fi universes together in one place.

If you didn’t already know that The Gaslamp belongs to the geeks, you should be able to spot the clues: Klingon signs on the convention centre transit station, Green Hornet’s car parked nearby, Ecto 1 cruising the streets and Eureka’s Cafe Diem set up for business.

The queue to collect tickets for preview night started at 10am, about five hours before the schedule said you could collect them. There were a few hundred people already in the queue by the time I arrived with my sister. And yes, we queued for about five hours to get in.

Anyone will tell you that preview night is all about the swag. That’s why everyone gets a huge bag when they check in. This is the kind of bag you could carry a small child in, and this year Warner Bros has teamed up with Comic-Con to produce bags themed around their most popular shows like Chuck, Fringe, Supernatural and Vampire Diaries.  

I wanted a Chuck bag, but didn’t get lucky when I checked in. A nice guy in the queue next to me offered to swap, so I got what I wanted after all and avoided a preview night tantrum. With my Chuck swag bag I felt ready to take on the world, or at least the exhibition hall.

I dashed from stand to stand, joined queues without knowing what they were for and came away with plenty of random stuff. Including a spare Wonder Woman iPhone case, if anyone wants it.

My plan is to get into Hall H tomorrow, so I hope to have some sneaky peaks at Tron, Battle: Los Angeles and Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. And when I’ve done that, I’ll be back here to let you know all about it…