The Best Part

So. Con again. Want to know the best part? I got to meet two writers who are among my all-time favorites; personal heroes of mine for the last few years and probably a good few more. Hell, I even liked them on a social level. I'll tell the stories in chronological order.
I met Darwyn Cooke on Saturday, early afternoon. I had tried in the morning, but the line to meet and get a signature was constantly changing direction, and I have a fervent distaste for strangers touching me, so I left, dejected. When I returned, he was coming back from a lunch break, and I made sure that the newly-forming line was going my way. I jumped through hoops for the right to meet the author/artist of New Frontier, damn it, and I was going to tell him how much I enjoyed his work. When I got to him, some random person (who hadn't been in any line) jumped in ahead of me and began accosting Mr. Cooke about something some other artist had said about commissions. When I (and by the look on his face, Mr. Cooke) had had enough, I politely elbowed the man out of my way, and got one of the things I had literally gone to New York to get.
Meeting Grant Morrison was less annoying, but took longer. I'd attended his Spotlight panel, and waited in various lines for almost two hours, but I got to him. The guy who helped change my perception of comics. He can write a story that explores Hell from the perspective of a Golden Age character gone wrong, or he can do Batman in a self-reflective style that uses things that had been retconned out. He made a joke about Britney Spears. I got a picture of him with me and my girlfriend. And his signature is across my copy of Kid Eternity's cover. And for that, all of the hassles were worth it. Everything else at con was just a bonus.

Con's Great Lesson

So. Comic Con; three days of madness, fanboyism, capitalism, and one really nasty car trip. A ride so bad that by then end people who actually liked one another were so sick of the other's presence... I'm focusing on the wrong part of the story here. The point was the bits in the middle, not the shuttling across four or five states.
Point of fact, I learned very little about upcoming comics events that I didn't already know. I attended part of the Final Crisis panel, but since I'll be buying that only when it finally comes out in trade, I can't say I much care. I was hoping for a panel on the upcoming storylines in Green Lantern, but apparently they wouldn't let Geoff Johns have a room to himself for an hour or so.
Want to know what I did learn quite a bit about? Merchandise. I now know every toy, t-shirt, and video game that Marvel, DC, or Dark Horse will be putting out related to thier comics (Marvel), movies (DC), or both (Dark Horse). I'm not looking down on these companies for this, hell, it's good business (and I can't wait for some of this stuff to come out), but it's not really promoting anything other than the merch, and you can't buy any of it, even if they have a final product packaged and priced right there under glass. It's like they're reminding the fans that the companies have us by the sensitive bits when they feel like it.