My Parents Spent 4 Days Dressed As Klingons And All I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt

Comic-Con 2006 is come and gone, my 6th time in 7 years (last year was the first time I hadn't gone since my first time). It's true what they say, that the first year is always the best and nothing quite matches the "magic" of that first time: staying late at the convention center top floors watching anime with Luke and Lisa's huge crowd and eating jelly beans, learning for the first time the concept of getting sketches from your favorite artists, going to your first panel and seeing stars from your favorite sci-fi shows.

Even still, this year was a total blast, possibly even more so because of the fact that I missed last year. Cherrished memories this year include driving down with Josh and Jim, my first Brazillian BBQ, dinner at Freds with Luke and Lisa, the drive back with jim and nonstop good conversation, getting my Joe Phillips sketch, and of course Josh getting pissed out of his mind, being dragged back to the hotel making enough noise to get the cops called to our room and finaly puking on the floor at the foot of my bed. On a similar note, Josh's visits are never long enough. I really need to make a trip of my own up to Utah. Select comic-con photos follow:

Sci-fi channel's new booth (well, either new this year or last, new to me either way) was a very cool sort of sculpture that had couches built in to it. Nintendo had large presence this year in the form of a very large nintend DS booth. Here swaths of people gather around the download station.

Artistic and very stylized toys seem to be a very big trend right now. I thought these ones were kind of cool. Luke and Lisa at our annual dinner at Freds, the coolest Mexican place in all the Gaslamp.

At comic-con it's very hard to make your booth stand out, but Adult Swim pulled it off with flying colors. This is great: a yoai booth was selling paddles that said "Yaoi" with both "softcore" and "hardcore" sides, as well as the ingenius shirt also seen in the photo.