Saturday, April 19, 2008- “New York City?!”

Today, we went our separate ways. Julie and the girls explored Manhattan while Scott went to the New York City Comic Con.

Julie, Anna and Emma’s Day-

We left Scott at the Comic Con and headed to the American Museum of Natural History on 79th Street (about 40 blocks up). We spent about three hours there, exploring animals, skeletons and ancient stuff. We ate lunch there, but I didn’t let Emma get a $4 cupcake. Emma fell asleep halfway through the museum, but when Anna went to see the “Big Bang” movie, the big bang woke Emma up. Emma was afraid of the skeletons and the Indians. They made her cry so we couldn’t walk through those parts. Anna and Emma both liked the giant whale, and Anna got a picture of the Easter Island head like the one in the movie, Night at the Museum.

After the museum, we went to Central Park to find places where Giselle had been. We even had some ice cream. While in Central Park, we were near where the Pope was, and we saw a half dozen hovering helicopters. When we tried to walk down 5th Avenue, we were blocked because of the Pope traffic.

We then went to the Central Park Zoo. We went to the children’s zoo first. The girls got to pet animals, climbed on spider webs, and walk through caves. Then we went to the main zoo and saw the polar bear and monkeys. We especially liked the rain forest section. We were sad that there wasn’t really a lion and a zebra like in Madagascar. Mommy and Emma liked the bats. Anna liked it all. She took 192 pictures over the course of the day.

We then headed on 5th Avenue after the Pope had cleared out. We went to the Disney Store and shopped in there a little bit, and had dinner at McDonalds, and went down to 42nd street to meet Scott. We took no cabs on this trip. We walked the entire way-- or at least Julie did.

Scott’s Day-

I got to the Javitz Center at about 8:30. The doors didn’t open until 10, but there was already a crowd of hundreds of people there waiting to get in. I had hoped to be early enough in line to score tickets to some of the more popular autograph signings, like Stan Lee or more likely Alex Ross, but after twenty minutes of letting people through the doors it seemed pretty clear that it wasn’t very likely, so I went looking to orient myself to the building.

The con is smaller than the one in San Diego-- you can actually see from one end of the show floor to the other, but it still can probably bill itself as the second biggest con in the country. I’ve heard that the previous two years of this convention were disasters in terms of overcrowding. This one was crowded to the point of being packed to the gills, but was not shut down by the fire marshal the way earlier ones were. The biggest disappointment I had in terms of the crowd was that there were so few people who had come in costumes. Sure, there were a few, but there were only a fraction of the percentage of the crowd that had come dressed in San Diego. I guess New Yorkers are just too cool for that.

I attended the DC Countdown panel at 12:00 and got there early for a pretty good seat. Those are fun, but a lot of the big announcements happened on the previous night, so there wasn’t as much breaking news today. Still a lot of my favorite writers and books were talked about there.

The DC booth wasn’t as friendly as the one they set up in San Diego, but I still tended to check in a lot to see who was there signing autographs. I cruised every aisle in the show. I bought some comics-- one came with a complementary sketch by David Nakayama, which he drew while I watched. He was a really nice guy.

I ended up getting a few autographs-- Cliff Chiang, Keith Giffen, and Dan Didio, most notably. The last two I managed to get just as I was getting ready to go meet Julie. Executive editor Dan Didio signed my copy of 52 right after Keith Giffen did. He admired the number of people from the team that I had gotten to sign it, noted that Grant Morrison was missing, and looked around for him, but I was on my way to meet my wife. I’ve just missed his autograph a couple of times now.

My feet are really tired now. Except for about an hour and a half during the DC panel I think I was standing or walking all of the rest of the time, and usually just weaving slowly through the slow moving crowds.

After we joined up again at the parking garage, we tried driving back to the hotel. Apparently, they moved it since we left this morning. It only took us about 15 minutes to get into Manhattan today. It took us over an hour and a half to get back again. We could occasionally see the hotel across the 10 lanes of traffic, but we couldn’t get to it for anything. We stopped and asked directions, not once, but three times. We’re all tired and glad to be back.

We’re driving home on Sunday.