Please take a moment of silence for Comic-Con

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The new one is suitable dune The trailer came out this week.Not because it’s summer, huge trailers are always posted on huge the film Play in multiplexing-although this is part of it-but because International Comic Con Is this weekend, on a Coronavirus disease It has never happened before. That trailer would be packed with more than 6,000 people in Hall H of the San Diego Convention Center. easily. Fans will scream for the director Dennis Villeneuve and the stars Timothy Chalamet and Zandaya. Certainly someone will wear a self-made still life costume for cosplay. Or as a sandworm. He was a lunatic.

It will never happen. Comic-Con is dead.

Well, not literally. For the second year in a row, San Diego’s annual Nerds Conference abandoned face-to-face events and instead hosted a series of online panel discussions. From a public health point of view, this is very sensible. Even before the world found itself in a global pandemic, Comic-Con was a contagious petri dish. But from the perspective of fans and cultural influence, online activities will not have the same charm at all. It will not overwhelm Twitter or predict next year’s weekend box office numbers. There will be no IRL cosplay.There will be a few Pleasant conversation-kind of trek, A The walking dead In the group, Zach Snyder talks about zombies-but not much else. The 130,000 people who normally squeeze into San Diego will not be there; the lifeline of the incident will disappear. (Maybe many people will talk about the undead as appropriate.)

Last year, in this column, I asked “Can Comic-Con work from home?“This question is mainly rhetorical, because of course it cannot. Comic-Con is an event, not a TV show. Moreover, unlike the Olympics, the Olympics also starting from today with There will be no live audienceIn this kind of event, some of the best moments will not happen on the main stage. Comic-Con is about your queuing for group discussions, after-get off work gatherings, C-list CW star sightings, and a journey to the floor to dig collections. Of course, the Olympics also have fun outside the stadium, but this is not the reason people go. Few sports fans participate in the Summer Olympics as their favorite swimmers.

As a result, in a word, sad. In most cases, Comic-Con is a somewhat boring event, and moving it online will hardly hurt anyone in any real way. Not holding it in person can undoubtedly save many lives. But losing the cultural touchstone is an inherent sorrow.nobody need Comic-Con, or another Marvel movie, or firework show, or even the Olympics. But these events connect humans together.Lost them when a lot of things have been lost-and, in the case of Comic-Con, when the incident has already happened Lose motivation-Just reminded once again exactly how much must be rebuilt.

But maybe this hope is on the bright side, if any. There are no details yet, but Comic-Con has promised to host live events on Thanksgiving weekend. This doesn’t seem like a good time to host a comic convention, but maybe it can be a trial run-a way to test what can be done is to resume the event in person in 2022. Maybe it can even come back in a better form. Comic-Con became bulky and expensive for fans before Covid. This is a big splash, not so much substance. Maybe a new, scratch-free scam could put more attention back to comics-including Star Wars movies and (theoretically) duneThe sequel, but don’t be overcrowded so that fans can’t start accepting it. It may be different; it may be what it used to be. Comic-Con is dead. Long live the Comic Con.