Day two of Comic Con was on Friday, and it was also our first full day at the convention. I didn’t spend nearly as much money on Friday, but I did get a lot more pictures taken.

We only had the hotel room downtown for one night, so we got up and checked out before heading down to the convention for the second day. We grabbed breakfast and started walking down, and noticed something pretty cool in the sky: skywriting that said “HA HA HA” in random places above the downtown area. We found out later that the “HA”s were accompanied by a telephone number, which was tied to a viral marketing campaign for the next Batman film.

We hit the dealer room again, with the other guys hitting the random panel every now and again, but I stayed in the main drag for the most part on Friday. I still had a lot of ground to cover, but more importantly, there was nothing that really was interesting enough for me to line up for hours just to get into a crowded room full of the worst fanboys imaginable on Friday.

The costumes were far more prevalent today. On Thursday, I only saw a dozen or so people all day in costume, but today felt far more festive. They ranged from your usual assortment of superheroes and sexy nurses to your token 45-year old Harry Potter and the guys in homemade cardboard Transformers costumes. Even those ranged from the awesome to the ridiculous, as the guy wearing the Jetfire / Macross Valkyrie costume did a great job (you may have seen him if you watched the G4 coverage of Friday), but the guy in the yellow spray-painted boxes trying to pull off Bumblebee, well, not so much.

I also got to see an assortment of celebrities in the dealer room Friday. Sgt. Slaughter was busy signing autographs with Hasbro, and I managed to snag a picture with him before he hauled off for his lunch break. I asked, “Hey Sarge, you mind if I get a picture with you real quick?” He replied with “Yeah, I’ve heard that one before”, but was a good sport and mugged for my camera. Chad and I just happened to bump in to director Frank Darabont wandering around, although 99.9% of the people in attendance would never have recognized him. Peter “Chewbacca” Mayhew did his usual schtick at conventions, which is basically just sitting aroudn wishing someone would come talk to him.

Oh yeah, and I saw some guy you may have heard of. Stan Lee. Up close. Personal. To these people here, Stan Lee is Jesus. I just wish I could have gotten him to sign my Marvel Legends figure, but it was packed away in my bag in the car today.

For folks like me who missed Star Wars Celebration in May, the Star Wars booth had plenty of cool stuff leftover from the convention. Namely, the painted Darth Vader helmets from the art contest were on display. Pretty cool to see in person.

Today was a long day in the dealer room. We were there for a good nine hours or so, before they closed the room at 7 again. We decided to wander around downtown San Diego for a while, grab some dinner, and perhaps see a premiere of Superbad. The theater looked to already be filling to capacity an hour beforehand, so we decided to forgo the movie and just hang out instead. We passed PetCo Park, and found a bunch of people dressed like characters from Blade Runner. They were there promoting the new version of the movie for the anniversary release, but even more was going on at Petco Park. Inside, a small army of Spartan Warriors guarded the stairs, there for a DVD premiere for 300. With all the Replicants and Spartans hanging out, there was a whole lot of near-nakedness going on in downtown San Diego that night.

We opted to have a few drinks and take down a gigantic Italian dinner to round out the evening, and headed back to the hotel to call it a night, full of pasta and wine and ready to dream of yet another day in the land of nerd valhalla.

Check back tomorrow for our third and final day at the convention, the grandpappy of them all, Saturday.

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