This year due to being a bit of an "on-call" girl (in the non prostitute sense), I spent more time than usual haunting the convention floor. I keep joking that I'm one of the few con attendees who was "old school" and spent more time shopping for comic books than haunting Hall H for film footage. (By the way, if you go and spend your time shopping, take my advice and just ship your stuff back via Fed Ex. Cheap trades stop being a good idea when you have to carry a sack of them through the airport. Ugh.)

But the culture of ComicCon is something else. I found myself snapping just a lot of random, weird photos just to try and give Cinematical readers a sense of it all. Sure, there's the ever present cosplayers and the loudness of the booth displays, but there's just something about walking down a hallway and finding sleeping Jedis, or realizing what kind of crappy food a Spartan eats in hell. I find that even when I'm in a bad mood (and I was basically in a crappy mood for five blister-filled days) the site of a Jayne hat never fails to make me smile, and even when I'm trying to get past some noisy, crowd-filled area I do stop and marvel at the sheer hugeness of it all. This year it expanded outside the con like never before, with a Heroes carnival and Flynn's Arcade set up outside of the convention center for geeks to have some free fun at.

Hopefully, the photos below give you some idea of what was there -- from the crowds (that's as close as I got to Stark Industries all week!) to the displays. Maybe they'll tempt you to give it a go some year. As I look at my torn up feet and bruised legs, I think you might just have my place in line come 2010 ... !