Becky’s in the Back Seat, pt. 10: Day the Third, pt. 3 and Day the Fourth: This is the End…

After taking in all that information, we headed over to the Indigo Ballroom. We wanted to make sure that we could get in to see John Barrowman.

So, while we were waiting, we managed to catch the Nerdist Industries panel. Nerdist was smaller but has grown a lot from when they first started. It’s amazing how much they’ve grown. Their panel was largely a Q&A session. There was a lot of questions to be had about things happening within Nerdist Industries. I was going to post a YouTube video of this panel, but of all the things they covered at Comic Con, their own panel wasn’t one of them.

Why, yes, that is John Barrowman.

So, after that was the reason we were their in the first place, John Barrowman.
John Barrowman… what can I say?

When he was on stage, he was on. He was there ready to engage. I never realized that how much he loved his fans, but he does. He really loves his fans. His panel was entirely a question and answer session. It was pretty awesome that that’s what he does every year (he has a panel every year).

So… if there was any way to describe him while on, it would be that he reminds me of Jack from “Will and Grace”. For some reason, that was my impression of him. I kept waiting for him to say, “My one-man show, Just Jack”.

While we were there he let us know that he has a permanent part on “Arrow”. Not a show I watch per se, but it was great to hear that he once again had a stable role.

One of the best Xena cosplays I’ve ever seen. Cosplayer: Bernadette Bentley
www.BernadetteBentleyActor.com

He also called his nephew in Scotland to wish him happy birthday. He got everyone in the panel to sign happy birthday. It was sweet and kind of awesome.

It was a fun panel to be in. He was so engaging and friendly. It made me want to meet him because he sounds like he would be great to just know.

After that, there was a little time to kill between John Barrowman and Best and Worst Manga of 2013-2014 (Comic Con to Comic Con).

This is still my favorite panel at Comic Con. I love hearing the arguments for certain manga. It gives me some new titles that I wouldn’t have thought of reading. This is doubly so this year as they had to pick titles that they had never chosen in previous years. So, everything was new. There was no repeats… it also means that there were so many new titles that they hadn’t discussed before.

It was exciting and fun to listen this year. There were a lot of good suggestions this year. I’m gonna have to expand my already expansive manga reading list to incorporate some of these titles.

This group is pure awesome

I also got to talk after the panel with one of the panelists as I disagreed with his worst. He said that Seraph at the End is the worst manga period. While I agree that the main character is annoying, I think that there is a lot more going on than just the main character. I’m more interested in the political machinations that are going on as subtext.

That led us to having a discussion about Shonen Jump titles as we both actively read Shonen Jump. It was an awesome conversation that probably could have gone all night if he didn’t have a party to go to. It kinda makes me sad, because I would have loved to keep talking about it.

After best and worst manga, we decided to head out to the Gaslamp and find some dinner. This was much more difficult to do then one would think. Saturday was busy for… well, pretty much everywhere. There weren’t a lot of places that I could eat because of my special dietary needs. One we went in to we would be waiting an hour to hour and a half to eat. As it was already 8 or 9, we said no to that. We found another place with no hostess and no real way of getting food because it looked like the only people who were working were the bar, the sushi bar and the DJ.

An amazing Attack On Titan cosplay

That was obviously no good. So, we kept walking until we found a place.

We finally found an interesting restaurant, just outside of the Gaslamp that was gluten-free (and I didn’t have to worry about ordering a salad) and could seat us faster than an hour. That restaurant was Bice. They had places to sit and a quick turnaround time. As it was after 9 PM, we ate there.

And boy were we glad we did. The food was impeccable. I had never eaten in a place that I would consider to be truly a foodie joint. This place was it. I got an interesting dish it was named Rigatoni alla crema di Peperone Giallo e Mascarpone, tocco di Zafferano e Salsiccia. It was rigatoni, with a pepper, mascarpone and cream sauce. It had saffron threads and was quickly smoked. It came out under a thick glass dome. It tasted wonderfully. With each bite you could taste the smoke that had infused in to the pasta. It was really good. I would love to have it again. Craig had the rabbit ravioli. He said that the ravioli was also quite good too.

An incredibly accurate Morpheus cosplay

After the food, we split a dessert. It was a chocolate and coffee flourless cake with raspberry, peanut sauce and edible gold leaf. The dessert was to die for. The chocolate, peanut and raspberry went incredibly well together. Everything tasted so good. It was a pricey meal, but it was well worth it.

After dinner, we headed back to our hotel. We enjoyed rest of the evening in as we both felt rather full from dinner. We were also meeting a friend in the hotel bar for a drink before he had to go back home. It was fun to see him again, but it was far too brief.

After getting some sleep that night (finally), we were ready to hit the last day of Comic Con. Sunday is often the most chill day of Comic Con. It’s the last and shortest day. Most people are packing up and leaving. We were heading back to the convention center to check out the final day of panels.

I had been thinking of going to the Emily the Strange panel every year that we’ve gone, but I’ve never made it… until this year.

Emily the Strange originated in Berkeley, around the time I was a Freshman in high school. It was

I think this is supposed to be a pirate Harley Quinn. Please correct me, if I’m wrong.

something of an inside joke. My family would get me Emily the Strange shirts all through out high school. I had a few of them. Given my name, I thought it was kind of funny since it’s pretty much me.

I finally got to share my story with the creator of Emily the Strange. It was one of those completely coincidental things where I was the age, name and personality of the character that he had created. He seemed to enjoy the story immensely. Maybe it was something in the aether of the mid-nineties that just seemed to come together.

Who knows? It was great to finally get to share the story with the creator of a clothing line I’ve been wearing for years. The fact that he loved that that was something that really existed probably made him feel amused.

Emily the Strange has come a long way from when I first found it. It’s not just clothing. It’s also a comic series and there’s also music. It’s cool to see something that I picked up in a small store on Telegraph (that is no longer open, like almost all of Berkeley from my high school years) in to something that is loved by so many. It’s mind-blowing.

Silent Bob checking out the dealers’ room, sans Jay.

After that, we wandered around the dealers’ room one last time. It was as crowded on Sunday as it was every other day of the Con. We made one more round before going out for lunch then back for the final panels.

We wound up getting lunch at a restaurant called the Blind Burro. It was a fun place to go to and the food was good… as were the cocktails. I got a version of a pina colada that used coconut water instead of coconut cream. It made the drink much lighter and refreshing. It was incredibly humid that weekend, so the coconut water was amazing. I also could have street tacos as they were in gluten-free corn tortillas.

The tacos were amazing. The drinks were great. The outside bar was fun to sit at. I would love to go there again… because I enjoyed myself at that restaurant. I would go there again.

My final panel for the Con was called “Full-Time Creative Work on a Part-Time Schedule”. It was an interesting panel. It was part networking and part question and answer. It was a great idea, but I wish that I was more about the networking as that would have been more useful, in my opinion.

After the end of the con, we headed back to the hotel to decompress and relax… and sleep before the