Surviving Geek Heaven: Introduction

Since our last episode...

• My wife and I got married (to each other, for clarification)
• We went on our honeymoon to San Jose, Monterey Bay, and San Francisco, CA, and proceeded to spend entirely too much money and have an indecent amount of fun
• We saved a kitty from death row. Tiberius, our part Siamese, all white six month old is sniffing around the computer as we speak.
• We enjoyed our wedded bliss without outside distractions, which included writing on here.

Are we caught up? Oh yeah. Our nephew was born about nine hours after our wedding. His birthday will be easy to remember, being that it is the day after our anniversary and Halloween to boot.

This being the beginning of the year, my wife and I get to start planning our annual vacation, which has led to this here new column. Every year, we go to the San Diego Comic-con. This has become an annual tradition for us, with this being my wife's fourth year and my ninth. Nine straight! Growing up, my family used to take our annual trip to San Diego and I grew to love it there. Every Labor Day weekend, we would do Sea World, the famous zoo, and the Wild Animal Park. But, being the only comic reader in my family, they had no clue about this convention, I would read about the con and dream of somehow going to it. I vowed I would go and, eventually, I did. I have never regretted it. I would somehow scrape up enough money just to have a room with four or five other people and food with maybe fifty dollars to spend.

I ended up getting a job at Ralph's Comic Corner http://www.ralphscomiccorner.com and the con suddenly became part of what I do for a living. Ralph and I would go (separately) and just come back loaded with freebies and exclusives and the latest news. Then, lightning struck me and I hit the jackpot. My geek of a future wife dared me to ask her out. Now, I had a partner in crime for my San Diego exploits. Last year, my wife and I came up with an idea for a San Diego Comic-con survival guide, full of stuff like past adventures and where to stay and where to eat and how to either do it cheap or just throw caution into the wind and do it right. The con can be just as fun if you have little money. The main thing I realized a few years ago is that buying stuff isn't all it is about. The real joy is in taking in the whole experience. It's about being pissed that two of your favorite panels are conflicting. It's about Klingons hitting on your wife. It's about sharing an elevator with a famous professional wrestler who just happens to be staying in the same hotel. It's about being on a nodding acquaitance with vendors you have seen every year. It's about finding small press books and discovering new reads. And, yes, it is about spending money. I mean, I bought a freakin' lightsaber last year. It hangs proudly over our tv and gets more comments than anything else in our house.

So, that is the basis of the new direction of The Treehouse. I literally start planning for the next con the day I leave the current one. Hopefully, I can help you guys not have to do that. We'll be covering a lot of ground, from how to eat cheap to cool little off the beaten path things to see and do, all of which will be interspersed with stories of cons past. This will lead us up to this year's event, which, even this far away, is starting to show some fine guests: Forrest Ackerman, Murphy Anderson, Bob Bolling, Greg Evans, Pia Guerra, David Lapham, the mighty Scott McCloud, Gary Panter, George Perez, Eric Powell, J. J. Sedelmeier, who runs the studio which helped bring us Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law and The Ambiguously Gay Duo, Dexter Taylor, Michael Turner, and Brian K. Vaughn.

Egads. This should take a while. Let's enjoy it.

Oh yeah. I have always wondered: Is David Lapham's last name pronounced "laf-am" or "lap-ham"? Mmmm... Lap ham....