There was a time...

There was a time, probably last century, when you could grab a bite to eat, easily find a chair, and relax for a while, looking out over the entire exhibit hall.  Those days have come and gone.  Now you can still grab that bite to eat (though it costs more than it did), and if you are patient and lucky find a chair to relax in and rest your con-exhausted feet while you eat and glance out over a small fraction of the exhibit hall floor.

Comic-Con is still a Comic Book Convention, at heart, as it has always been, and likely always will be, but now, there are more panels for television shows and movies than there were twenty years ago, and more booths selling too wide a variety of things to even begin to try and list, and yet, that seems to be part of it's strength -- at Comic-Con, time and again, I've found, there's something for everyone.

Standing in line at a booth for an autographed novel, the lady behind me said the free books were not simply awesome because they fed her love of finding new authors, and her addiction to reading, but because her community had a collection of books to send on to servicemen in the war zone, and that's where her books went as soon as she was done reading them.