I spent most of the NYC ComicCon lurching in circles with my mouth half-open, hunting for a copy of Detective Comics # 587 and spending way too much money on plastic bullshit that reminds me of my childhood. The experience was spectacular.

I haven’t been to a comic book convention since 1991, in Virginia Beach — the whole enterprise was dusty, pasty and pungent. Not now, baby. Now that comics, computers and sci-fi are billion dollar businesses, nerds are out of the basement and blinking in the klieg lights. Pop culture’s always been a byproduct of marketing campaigns, but we are now in a golden age of hype and shiny bullshit.

Today’s thirtysomethings were the target audience back in the ’70s and ’80s when Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and other pop mythologies did the first Triple Lindy into the collective consciousness. Now we’re just old enough to have kids who get just as pumped about Star Wars as we did, and fetishizing fictional universes is a family affair.

Whenever alien archaeologists unearth whatever temples we leave behind, they’re gonna think that Spiderman was our God and stormtroopers were some kind of high priests. Frankly, I’m thrilled. Digging through comic boxes and buckets of chipped action figures gets me all stoked and unstuck in time and I get the same sense of wow, cool wonder that I got when my dad took me to see Star Wars for the first time.

But this thing was for everybody. Really, it was just like the Mermaid Parade except indoors and marginally less sexualized. The people-watching and the costumes were spectacular and totally worth the admission price.

This is my favorite photo from this weekend’s NYC ComicCon, but there’s a lot more after the jump:

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Continuing our love-fest for extraordinarily costumed people in ordinary settings, we bring you the Land of the Free series from UK-based portrait and documentary photographer Steve Schofield:

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The cast and crew of NBC’s “30 Rock” performed live to a standing-room only audience at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre last night. According to writer/actress/nerd goddess Tina Fey in a brief pre-show monologue, every penny of the proceeds benefited the show’s PAs, who have been out of work since the beginning of the ongoing writer’s strike.

Please don’t leak any of the story or jokes to the Internet,

Fey asked,

because, y’know, this show is like ‘Heroes’ and we don’t want to ruin it for everyone else. Also, all of you who bought tickets to this show off of Craigslist for hundreds of dollars are suckers … this is going to be on TV for free in a few weeks. We hope …

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The following review of BoingBoing TV isn’t an entirely positive one. But in the interest of full disclosure, it’s only fair to mention that

1. I’m not nuts about online news shows in the first place,
2. as a commenter below pointed out, it’s the first episode — give ‘em time to develop, and
   
3. I am probably just mad that I’m not doing something similar myself.

BoingBoing TV’s not necessarily bad. Not bad like the idea for the BoingBoing reality show, as mentioned in the LA Times article about BB’s new venture. Christ, that would have sucked. A reality show about four people who, by definition, spend a lot of time staring at a glowing screen? And an “American Idol”-style show (also mentioned in the Times article) would have sucked worse. Each round would be 30 seconds long with hundreds of people auditioning. Call it what you want, but four uber-nerds approving posts is never going to make for action-packed TV.

BoingBoing TV’s not bad at all … it’s just really not that good, either. It just doesn’t do anything special for me. At least Rocketboom’s got the pretty lady with the hot hot accent, but I’m not nuts about that show, either.

I love the Web because I don’t get my news spoonfed to me in tidy, advertiser-friendly gulps. Sure, blogs are clotted with advertising and PR spin, but by clicking and jumping around, I can get a bunch of different input and make up my own mind.

I love BoingBoing for being a resource for Web weirdness in tiny, separable chunks. I don’t mind a day where only one post works for me and the rest are crap. But a TV show — even a five-minute one — with only one good story is a lame show. Rocketboom has the same problems. It’s linear. You have to sit through the boring stuff, even if it’s only 15 seconds long.

Ever try talking to a garden shrew about something that’s not edible? That’s my attention span after a career spent online. Fifteen seconds of boring is fourteen too many.

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