At Comic-Con San Diego (www.comic-con.org/; July 23-36, 2009), there’s no shortage of light-saber duelists or comic super-heroes engaging in mock battle. But turns out the City of San Diego now has to engage in real battle, in order to keep interloper cities from stealing Comic-Con from under their noses.

The San Diego Convention Center is no longer sufficient to handle the humungous crowd that turns up for Comic-Con. There’s chronic overcrowding, traffic and parking problems. 

And the less said about accomodations, the better. Official bookings at San Diego hotels in the vicinity of the Convention Center made with the help of Comic-Con organizers dry up way too early.

Attendees are left searching for vacation rentals on Craigslist, or have to book into San Diego motels and just use it as a crash pad. Most people I know are planning on staying far off from the Gaslamp and having to use the trolleys, since renting a car and trying to find parking space would be downright stupid.

Bottomline is that San Diego Comic-Con is fast turning into more of something where the inconvinience needs to be tolerated, rather than a comic fest where the city helps attendees have as much fun as possible.

Apparently, other cities with bigger and better facilities - like Los Angeles and Las Vegas -  have been attempting a coup and trying to convince Comic-Con organizers to dump San Diego. And this is a high-stakes fight - Comic-Con’s 124,000 attendees pump $16 million in direct spending and $38 million in indirect spending into San Diego’s economy.

Will the attractions of San Diego overcome it’s limitations? Will San Diego be able to upgrade it’s facilities and keep Comic-Con from bolting? We’ll see next year. But at least for this year, San Diego still hosts the light saber duels, Joker-Jedi mock battles and the tattoes.

Photo by voicechasers via flickr (creative commons).

Posted on July 10th, 2009 by Thomas
Filed under: san diego