Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been dying to go to San Diego Comic Con. THE Comic Con. The largest gathering anywhere of uber-nerd-geek-fanpeople. My People.

I was a geeky adolescent scamming Warren Ellis comics off of my friends, writing some very dark Batman fanfiction, devouring Star Wars novels, and memorizing poems in the Black Tongue from Lord of the Rings. I loitered around comic stores with my friends, where the potbellied guy behind the counter must’ve wondered why 14-year-old girls were paging through the extremely-age-inappropriate graphic novels.

This was back in the ‘90s, back when “geek chic” was not yet a thing, the Internet-driven solidarity of niche communities had not yet come into its own, and getting trash-canned by the cool kids was not an idle threat.

Now, we’re not marginalized anymore, really. Sure, there are still some goofy co-optations of the genre by people who don’t understand it (Man of Steel sucked—also, for fun, watch drunk Max Landis explain why No One Gives a Fuck About Superman). But they put a terrifying psychopath onto the screen in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Night, and Deadpool’s got his own movie in the works, so it’s getting pretty easy to shut up the “but comics are for kids” crowd.

Even as the van was painted and the bags were packed, I didn’t know what to expect of Comic Con, really. Promotion teams from insipid network TV shows, sniffing out potential audiences and swarming like flies? Rabid packs of OMG-I-Love-Vampires tweenyboppers? Carbon copies of That One Guy who can somehow keep all of Marvel’s timelines straight, stalking around with his nose in the air and mocking everyone who can’t remember what happened in issue #374? Bored salespeople and long lines to nowhere?

And, well, sure. There were pieces of all of those things. There were, for someone not a huge fan of crowds, a lot of damn people. There was the complete debacle of waiting about 15 hours in the infamous Hall H line (with its own twitter account accurately declaring it the “longest, nerdiest, most demoralizing line at any convention ever”) to not even get in, due entirely to the convention letting two thousand people line cut and generally running things like a pack of lobotomized chihuahuas. There was a lot of waiting around and a lot of product being hawked.

But, even with all of that:

1. Seventies Star Wars made an appearance.

2. I met the most adorable of Spider Families.

3. Pink Darth Vader passed displeasure onto the Hall H line cockup.

4. Halo came to life (imagine the time that went into this cosplay).

5. I got to see my brother crushed by a brilliantly cosplaying buddy of ours.

6. Some people just were the cosplay (the Hulk and Kaylee from Firefly).

7. Apparently people can get free weed and a lighter (with a medical cannabis card) delivered to them by bicycle messenger through the promotion of American Ultra.

  (photo from Twitter)

8. I narrowly escaped both Doctor Doom and Thanos.

9. Two friends had such awesome cosplay that they got into the official DC picture.

10. Game of Thrones converged.

11. Lego pulled off some wizardry.

12. I saw a page of the original mockup of Watchmen (LOOK at that!! You can see where they glued it together. The original! Madness!).

…And it was awesome. I got to spend five days surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people who can also get into impassioned debates about the behind the scenes reel for Star Wars Episode VII, people willing to sleep overnight on concrete in order to get into panels, people who get full back tattoos of their favorite fan-verse,

a place where someone else’s fandom might not be your thing, but you’re more likely to get a fist bump than a side eye for geeking out hard.

 So, yup, back into hibernation, but hell yeah I’ll be there again next year. With my cape and boots on.