We made it San Diego Comic-Con 2016! We stood in a really long line to get into the Convention Center at 9:30 AM. Turned out once we got to the front of the building, we could go in any door. Note to self for next year: Come right at 9:30 AM (if we’re not trying to get popular exclusives) and walk right in from the other side of the Convention Center without waiting in line!

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We took the trolley into downtown. Usually, we don’t have San Diego Comic-Con badges so we have no reason to be in the areas that are in the pictures above.

Our first stop inside the Con was to pick up our lanyards, San Diego Comic-Con guides, and the humongous bags they hand out for the free stuff we pick up and the stuff we buy.

After picking those up, we stopped at a few booths down below and learned that there is a San Diego Whocon here in September! Are we going to try to go? I think we might!

Then we unsuccessfully tried to find the line for tickets to the LEGO booth. It turned out that we had just missed the end of it and it was hard to find anyway, so we abandoned that idea. I should explain that some of the booths in the Exhibit Hall are so popular that you have to be in the convention center early enough to get in a line to get wristbands just to ENTER the booths. Examples: Funko, Hasbro, and LEGO.

After some milling around in the relative quiet of the Sails Pavilion area, we headed down where the real craziness is: the Exhibit Halls.

This is the Small Press area of the Exhibit Hall. I don’t think we made it into this area, but we had a good view from the Sails Pavilion area, so we took some pictures.

Once you are down in the Exhibit area, it is so crowded that it is difficult to get good pictures! There were people everywhere! This is the LEGO demo area where you could help build LEGO Batman and look at some of the LEGO sets on display.

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I only got a picture of the LEGO exclusive set for Thursday: Batman and the Joker BrickHeadz.

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I did snap this quick picture of a Rogue One Lego build. I’ve purposely not read too much about Rogue One, so that I can enjoy the movie when it comes out.

A Tardis Crystal that isn’t even out yet, and a full-size Tardis that we could get pictures with!

Josh and Lynn with the Tardis

Our Doctor Who swag! A San Diego Comic-Con exclusive Dalek popsicle T-shirt, a materializing Tardis figure, and two keychains: an adipose and the tenth doctor.

We tend to wander when at cons, just so we can see as much as possible, and we ended up at the kidrobot booth. These figures are called Dunnys. Our first time here, we bought a sketracha dunny. I think we just wanted to see how crazy it was at the Funko booth and the kidrobot booth was right next door.

We ended up coming back later in the day and buying another one from the Warhol collection: the Brillo Dunny.

This happened a LOT yesterday. We would stop by a booth, see something we liked, not buy it at that time, and then come back later and buy it. I guess that is a good thing. It gave us time to think about it. We did run the risk of their being sold out of what we were thinking of buying.

Down the way was another booth that completely sucked me in. In the Events Guide, it is listed as the Bombastic Fantastic booth. But when you walk up to it, it’s a super-sweet girly booth with some cute products called Lolligag.

I went a little crazy here.

Two Lolligag tote bags (free with purchase), two cute t-shirts for Gwen (drama queen suits her to a “t”) and an aloha t-shirt for me ($25 for all 3!), an art print that was free with the vinyl doll ($30), stickers, and some of their handouts about their products. And I got to meet Lolligag’s awesome creators. Really nice people!

A quick story about the vinyl doll. I was originally going to take a look at the tokidoki booth (which had a line) because they had Hello Kitty merch (the Sanrio booth was sold out of their Hello Kitty items), but I looked at their stuff on display and realized that I didn’t really like any of them. So that’s when I went BACK to the Lolligag booth and bought the strawberry pink vinyl doll instead.  Which is how I ended up with a second tote bag.

Later, when we were picking up my daughter from my in-laws’ house, I showed them both the Lolligag doll. My MIL mentioned that it looks like my Gwennan! So maybe that’s why I liked their merchandise so much!

We stopped by the Del Rey booth to look at their Star Wars books and saw this! Genius move by Timothy Zahn because Thrawn is one of the most memorable villains (for Josh and me anyway!) in the now-named Star Wars Legends formerly Star Wars Expanded Universe. Oh wait… does this mean Thrawn will be in the NEW Star Wars universe? Because that would make the new Star Wars even better than it already is! Am really excited about this!

This is what we picked up that was Star Wars. Two Star Wars lanyards and two free books from the Del Rey booth, a Topps oversized trading card of General Grievous from the Lucasfilm booth, and in the brown envelope are 8 propaganda-themed Star Wars posters that I’ve been waiting a year to buy! The Vader’s Fist poster is pretty much the only poster I really wanted, but it’s part of the set, so I bought the whole set. The other posters are pretty good too though. These are at Russell Walks’ booth. In the lower right hand corner, you can see a little bit of the Pokemon Go poster that was also for sale. Yes, I almost bought that also!

There is also a second set available now. I’ll save that for another time!

Since we are big Star Wars fans, we stopped by the Lucasfilm booth even though we weren’t interested in any of their merchandise for sale.

There was a costume display for Rogue One, which was pretty neat!

We also stopped by the ABC booth but it was focused on a new show we didn’t know anything about: Designated Survivor.

Were we hoping to see something about Battlebots at Comic-Con? Yes, we were. Battlebots airs on ABC on Thursday nights at 8 PM.

Half of the Hasbro booth was inaccessible to those without wristbands, so we were able to go into the other half, just to look around. I gravitated toward the My Little Pony section. There, we were able to get two free posters and a free My Little Pony necklace. Later, we happened across the booth of the cartoonists who draw for My Little Pony and I was able to buy a print signed by Tony Fleecs.

I guess it was a girly year for Comic-Con for us!

We went to only one panel yesterday: The Last Ship at 3 PM. That was quite an experience so I will post about that separately. The Last Ship sometimes films here in San Diego so it is kind of a local interest for us.

After The Last Ship, there was an art show going on in the Sails Pavilion, so we headed in just to look. I ended up getting 3 pieces of jewelry – mostly steampunk-themed. We also saw some really interesting robots that we loved. All the robots that we liked that would have been in our possible price range were already sold! And of course, their main part was a vintage coffee can! We also met a really great volunteer named Dan, who has been working at the con as a volunteer for 25 years!

We stopped at one more booth, Jason Palmer Studios, before determining we were done for the day. We had been interested in some of the T-shirts there, but they were all out of Josh’s sizes, so we didn’t get anything from there.

Yes, our feet hurt afterwards, but our first time at the San Diego Comic-Con was a blast! It is crazy and crowded and crazy, but it was very much worth it! I am really, really, really hoping we can go again next year!

I have gotten a pic of the Once Upon a Time ad on Petco Park every year for the past 2 or 3 years, so of course, I had to get it this year!

-Lynn

P.S. For a few more pics from the San Diego Comic-Con that aren’t in this post, please visit our Facebook page!