They wouldn't dare show their humorless faces to be mocked again.
I used to go regularly to ComiCon in the good old days - around 1994 through 2000 - when it was pretty much run by dedicated fans and the college-aged nerd volunteers - and was only really considered a seasonal gig for most of the very small actually paid staff who would spend most of the year at their real jobs.
A friend of mine used to volunteer to help run security - especially autograph alley and I'd work a day or two so I could get in free. She was great friends with the Bab-5 and the original Battlestar Galactica group that would come to the event, and was one of the first to find out that Richard Hatch was going to be in the new Battlestar Galactica.
A lot more of the indie comic artists would spend time to interact with the visitors, and the fan art gallery was quite a bit more welcoming to some of the local artists that might not have had quite a good grasp of perspective but a lot of nerd love.
You could also pick up xeroxed slash-fic and fan-fic "zines" or hand-stapled "hot from the Kinkos presses" novellas from the occasional college-age fan in a folding chair tucked between vendor booths. Most vendors were from card and used comic book stores within a day's drive, or local artists selling music tapes/cd's, fantasy art, costume items and jewelry, or E-bay type knickknacks with a fantasy or comic-book theme.
The masquerade was definitely armature night on stage - if you could get a group together to do much more than a quick tableau before the costumes started to come apart, you were a hit.
The big comic book houses had a much smaller presence, and the studio presence was not quite as overwhelming - most of those organizations would only take up two or three booth areas, have one big display for whatever blockbuster they were promoting, and very little to sell. Vendors were still loud and it was a bit of a carnival atmosphere, but there was not a plethora of "booth babes" and vendor-sponsored pseudo-LARP productions competing for your attention. The LARP'ers (usually Klingons, Vampires, and a few hold-out D&D'ers or SCAdians) were in force, but they had their own plan for ComiCon participation, not in conjunction with some organization with something to sell.
It changed drastically from 2003 to 2009. Now it's really a big, professional production, and the armature and fan participation is really not as prevalent as before - in fact, in many ways, it seems that the armature involvement is not really encouraged - it's as if it's too much "competition" for the professional productions that are going on.
Not that ComiCon is not fun for a Comic/Fantasy/ScienceFiction/Gaming fan, it's just not the same and it seems to have lost some of the casual weekend of enthusiastic creativity factor.
Haele
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