Mike Phillips and Sean Craig cut a wide, colorful swath through the crowds outside the convention center on the first day of San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday.
Along with the sidewalk-sweeping span of their rainbow plumage, the pair sported spandex Power Ranger suits, necklaces of Christmas lights and disco balls, glued-on facial hair, and sombrero hats on top of sombrero hats.
“We go by ‘Spandex Mariachi,’” said Phillips of San Diego. “We’re not sure who we’re supposed to be.”
For 15 years, he and Craig of Encinitas have added something to the outfits each year. The rainbow wings are this year’s addition, borrowed from someone who wore them in the San Diego Pride Parade the weekend before Comic-Con.
“We try not to go in any direction that’s too coherent,” Phillips said, laughing as one Comic-Con fan after another stopped for a photo. “The opposite of gelling is what we go for.”
That’s not a bad description of Comic-Con as a whole in 2023. Where big Hollywood studios dominated the news out of Comic-Con in years past, this year almost all of them are sitting it out. Where movie and TV stars grabbed all the headlines and filled the biggest halls, this year the actors’ and writer’s strikes have dimmed the star power of the Con.
Yet Comic-Con rolls on, its many disparate fandoms holding court in panels inside the convention center and booths on the exhibition hall floor.
Funko, the company behind all those collectible pop culture figurines, doubled the size of its booth this year. Its Funkoville set included separate spaces for different kinds of toys, including a replica of a Blockbuster video store where the figurines came packed inside VHS tape case.
Streaming video killed Blockbuster, but it was having a moment inside the exhibition hall. In addition to the Funko store, Lego built a Brickbuster store in blue-and-yellow homage to the chain, too.
Hall H, where the biggest, star-studded panels are typically held, filled with fans Thursday morning for a panel for “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” an animated film out later this year. The hall later hosted a panel on “Project K,” the first sci-fi film from India to come to Comic-Con.
The FX network didn’t have any stars of its shows at the Con this year, but it built its usual activation on the grass between the convention center and the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel. There, fans could visit the “American Horror Story: Delicate” installation which involved getting a fake shot of some blue serum on a doctor’s examination chair and then a lollipop with real ants in the candy – because that’ll make you feel better after an ouchie shot?
We wandered, we looked, we talked to people all day. Here are five things that stood out.
Nickelodeon nostalgia
Mario and Princess Peach walked up to the Nickelodeon booth on Thursday afternoon so everyone’s favorite Italian American plumber could pick up a custom-made Nickelodeon T-shirt.
An hour earlier, Mario – cosplayed by Jake Klassen of Long Beach – had designed a shirt with characters including Arnold from “Hey Arnold,” Reptar from “The Rugrats,” and SpongeBob of SquarePants fame in his rainbow “Imagination!” pose. (Princess Peach – Jayme Chew of Long Beach – got nothing, poor princess.)
This year, the Nickelodeon booth offered customizable T’s and flip-flops for purchase. On touch screens, purchasers could choose the characters and images they wanted to include, place them where they wanted them to be printed, and voila! Instant nostalgia, made to order.
Michele Ivey, who drove to Comic-Con from Detroit with her mother Claudia Ivey and sister Miki Ivey, went all-in on Nickelodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated characters.
“Ninja Turtles taught me to read, taught me to defend myself, and got me thousands of friends around the world,” said Ivey, who has one of the biggest collections of Ninja Turtle memorabilia of anyone in the world. (She was featured in the Netflix series “The Toys That Made Us” episode on TMNT, we learned.).
Roseanne’s loose meat
For the 35th anniversary of “Roseanne,” Cozi TV recreated a pop-up featuring recreations of set pieces from the series, including the Lanford Lunch Box, where Roseanne and her sister Jackie worked as waitresses, and booths from the Lanford Days town festival.
Of course, the Lunch Box was serving loose meat sandwiches, which apparently are a real thing in the Midwest. Picture a Sloppy Joe but without any of the red sauce. It’s essentially crumbly ground beef mixed with onions, served with mustard and pickle on a hamburger bun.
I ate two, and so far so good. But it’s a long drive home.
Trina Robbins, comix legend
Trina Robbins at the Hermes Press booth on Thursday singing copies of her Eisner-nominated book, “Gladys Parker: A Life in Comics, A Passion for Fashion.”
Robbins, who was one of the first women creators of underground comix, and later an artist and writer of women’s comics as well as mainstream titles such as Wonder Woman, is also a biographer of women comics creators from the first half of the 20th century. Parker was the creator of the long-running comic strip “Mopsy” as well as a designer in Hollywood in the ’30s and ’40s.
“She was so cool,” Robbins said of Parker, pictured on the cover of the book in the kind of Hollywood glamor shot typical of the ’40s. “It was remarkable how much she looked like her characters.”
Cosplay? Of course!
First of all, where were all my Barbies and Kens? I saw one measly Ken and no Barbies. Maybe we just missed them.
There were, of course, plenty of great cosplayers at Comic-Con on Thursday. Among them:
Saige Brown of Encinitas as Jester Lavorre from “Critical Role,” a long-running Dungeons & Dragons show that streams on Twitch: “It’s a very hot day, so definitely the makeup has been melting off,” she said as she sat with a battery-powered fan to cool her truly lovely blue makeup.
Brendan Andrus of Santee as Chainsaw Man from the anime of the same name: “I’m drawn to insane character design and I thought there’d be nothing more insane than having chainsaws on my head and my arms.”
Catherine Witchey of San Diego as Jaylah from “Star Trek Beyond”: “She’s very strong. She’s a warrior. And I think she looks pretty badass.”
Fancy robots
A little girl pointed wordlessly as a 19-inch tall Transformer robot named Grimlock turned into a dinosaur. She knew instinctively it was something interesting. Her dad? He looked almost as transfixed.
The Grimlock Transformer from Robosen got a lot of attention at the Hasbro booth. It’s apparently the fanciest Transformer you can get. As in, it transforms automatically, thanks to its 34 servomotors and 85 microchips.
This isn’t cheap. Grimlock goes for $1,699, which means that Daddy probably wasn’t going to let her play with it anyway.
