We left the east coast this morning around 8am and showed up in San Diego around 2 pm. Quickly greeted by the cheapness of our hotel (Sheraton Suites) that charges $10 a day for high speed internet. Instead, we found an open wireless signal from another floor

Day 1: Lines, lines, lines!

My big idea was to do ALL exclusive shopping tonight and get it out of the way and just enjoy the rest of the con. Mission ALMOST accomplished! With the exception of Mattel's Catwoman (which I'm guessing will still be a pain in the butt to get tomorrow or the next day, etc). I dropped closed to $300 today, and less than $100 was spent on me. The wife quickly snagged me a X-Men Legends II shirt.

Things we saw:
Well, it was damn crowded for preview night, so I'm sure it's going to be down right scary by Saturday. I have to say, thus far the lines have moved fairly fast at the exclusives, I think the longest line I stood in was over at AFX for about 20 minutes. I got worried at Hasbro because their line was INSANELY long but a nice gentleman came and grabbed the wife and me and escorted us to the prepaid line so we only stood in line for about 3 minutes. The Leia hologram figure doesn't come with a gun, but there's a spot for one in the blister. Neca sorta had a bad line, so we avoided them until the end of the night and it wasn't as much of a big deal. Palisades looked ridiculous so I skipped them completely but yet, SOTA, right next door, NO LINE. I walked right up, bought some Cammys, checked out SF4 and Darkstalkers - NICE!!! Also, we met R Hunter at his booth - very nice guy.

Biggest surprise of the evening was JLU!!!!!!!!!!!! WHOA!!! There was a small group of us standing around and just gawking at them and commenting on our surpise, etc. Now, I'm really looking forward to what Toy Biz has out tomorrow because I'm hoping it will knock my socks off. Also, I TOTALLY forgot to check out the MS Watcher - I'll have to go see it tomorrow. I was too focused on getting exclusives tonight (so I wouldn't have to shop for them at all for the rest of the weekend) and went right past the bald head I bet.

Here's the pics of my haul, no clue how I'm getting ALL this home and hopefully (other than Catwoman) I don't find anything else to buy.

Todd

PS - Dare, if you see this, SOTA was NOT selling the Green Vega - only had Black Vega.

Day 2

With the "pressure" of the majority of the exclusives off my back, today was much more about just enjoying the show. MULTIPLE times today, I stopped by the Aeon Flux booth to get one of their free shirts. I should explain, these are blank, white Hanes t-shirts, where they put the iron on logo on the shirt right there in front of you. Yet for whatever reason, MADNESS would overcome the crowds there and it was like a feeding frenzy for the voucher to get a shirt. It wasn't until 5 pm that I was able to score a voucher, but one because I was somehow in the eye of the madness when the vouchers were starting to be passed out for that hour. Jeez - it was nuts.

About 11:30 this morning, I saw that Jesse and Damon were working on their display case and right in the front, was the giant Apocalypse - big surprise to me! And Iron Fist was there as well. Also, there was a repainted Juggernaut from the new best of assortment. Jesse said he had received test cases and the repaints he requested for Wolverine and Juggernaut were not in there. For Wolverine, he said he wanted the brown paint darkened and for Juggs, he wanted him to being in the more recent grey outfit. We spoke briefly and I needed to go for the first panel of the day.

At noon, I hit Action Figure Insider's panel on Toy Biz at noon and ran into a bunch of people from Fwoosh. If I remember correctly, I got to meet Paul, Carl, Robo, Indy, Ray, Samuron, SDComics and Superfly. After the panel, I got to meet Julius and Toy Otter. Everybody was super nice and the panel was great. I tell ya, the ToyBiz folk take a lot of crap, but are extremely nice guys who tolerated all my questions after the panel. I really can't say enough nice things about Jesse and crew!

After that, we went to the "A Scanner Darkly" panel, but only ended up watching the exclusive trailer and a new scene from the movie, plus collect a free shirt.

Downstairs, I found out I had scored a Catwoman - yep, they're still doing the raffle and I could only buy one, yet I saw people with STACKS of them. I was told there were 9 different versions of the idol Catwoman came with and they had three on display - the two we had already seen and the last one was red white and blue - it looked horrible. The version I got was brown and dark yellow, more like a traditional lion. It's decent and much better than the 4th of July design. I was ONE NUMBER OFF from winning the raffle for a Dark Phoenix Heroclix.

At 3, we went to see Bruce Campbell - it was the first panel we went to with a packed house. He was very entertaining and my wife was commenting that the more public apperances we've seen of him, the more bitter he seems to have become, but still, the guy is hilarious.

We ended up having to call the day short when I received a distressing phone call from family, so I went home instead of seeing the last two panels of the day I wanted to see, which were:
Action Figure Times' Toymaker Q&A
and the 6th Annual Kung-Fu Superhero Extravaganza

I'll end with a pic of the junk I got today, I picked up the Aqua Teen 4 pack and the silver Jango bust up. Lines were crazy for those yesterday, but no lines at all today. Odd.

Todd

Nice reports, buddy!

Mike
(Can't wait to read the rest!)