Las Vegan has seen Comic-con ‘snowball’

Las Vegan Gilbert Hernandez has been coming to Comic-con since 1982.

He isn’t a superfan. That’s just the year “Love and Rockets,” the comic book he created with his brothers, Mario and Jaime, came out. And, yeah, that’s where the band behind the song “So Alive” got its name.

“We’ve seen it grow from a small room, an intimate room with just comic book collectors,” he said of the convention. “Once the movies started being adapted from mainstream comics, superhero comics, it just snowballed from there.” And, he said, it’s only getting bigger. “For some reason, I don’t know if I’m just imagining things, but this seems to be the most intense San Diego Convention I’ve ever been to,” he said on its final day. “It just seems like there’s more people, more things to do, just exhaustion.”

Hernandez, who has called Las Vegas home for the past 16 years, has mixed feelings about the convention’s growing emphasis on movies and television. On the whole, he’s OK with it. But, he admits, “I just wish more of it would trickle over to our side. You know, the comics.”