beanside | (Reply)

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I was there, but I was working. Getting anything out of the Marvel booth was an epic fight. I stood in line Thursday morning for about an hour before reccea came along and took my order and stood in line another 2 or 3 hours to make purchase.

The Winter Soldier hoodie was not only a Comic Con exclusive, but it was a limited edition (only 250 total), and you could only buy one per person. You could also only buy it one day of the con--Friday. So if you weren't one of the first 250 people in line on Friday morning in the Exhibit Hall at the Marvel media booth, you were out of luck, and even then, I have no idea how they distributed the sizes.

I was early enough to get a ticket for the Starlord hoodie that was the exclusive on Thursday, but I don't give a rat's ass about Starlord, and Thursday was a day that I thought I could get away from the booth long enough to stand in a line to get the specific list of things I was buying for people who had given me a specific list in advance. Even at that, if I hadn't lucked into seeing Reccea, I may have had to bail and go back to work because the line was taking forever.

And that was thursday, when the convention is theoretically less crowded.

I do hope someone else saw your post and also lined up well before they said they were going to let people in (that's another fun SDCC fact--the exhibit hall isn't supposed to open until 9:30, but some days they let people in early without announcing that they're going to do so in advance, which makes for extra fun times all around), and I think Friday was one of the days that they opened earlier than they said they would. I know you would love one, but if you don't get one, please know that it probably has nothing to do with your friends not wanting you to have one. The con is getting increasingly Darwinian about getting any kind of swag, including the stuff you pay for.

To get the Mockingjay pin this year, you had to go outside to the Summit Hunger Games booth (which was not in the convention center itself), stand in a three hour line, and then once inside, complete a certain number of challenges.

By the time I got to the Outlander booth, which was just across the hall (ish) from where I was working, they'd run out of swag, even though they were scanning badges and randomly drawing just one item per turn through the castle.

The first comic con that I went to was nothing like this.