The San Diego Comic Con is quite unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before, be thee commoner, X-Man, vampire, mutilated zombie, Star Wars cretin or garden variety fanboy. It is the ne plus ultra Mecca for geeks worldwide — but you don’t need me to tell you that. We attended it last week and had 3 very important highlights:

1. Getting drunk with Rob Cordry at the Weinstein Company party, where we tried to get him to talk shit about Jason Jones for being Canadian. Unfortunately he was having none of it. I did, however, convince him and his friends to put on towels as capes and parade around the party as if he were the ambassador to some terry cloth nation.

2. Met the Vampire King of Mississippi. Normally this wouldn’t get me excited so much, but the Imaginary Girlfriend is a huge True Blood fan so that scored huge Imaginary Points.

3. I shook Stan Lee’s hand. Yes, Stan Lee — the Pope of Comic Con. Funny thing was, guy was as excited to meet a fan as I was to meet him. I wish he was my grampa.

As good as all those moments were, they’re not what Comic Con is really about. What it’s really about is the people — the die hards, geeks and cellar dwellers. The true believers in all things fantasy, sci-fi, anime and otherwordly. It is an adventure just walking around the place, and to see people wait 4 hours for a trailer of Tron Legacy is a testament to America’s last great export: Culture. Sure we may not manufacture or build a damn thing anymore, but the one thing we do have is an inexorable fountain of creativity. You can’t bootleg that China, so suck it. But I digress. We asked San Diego-based photographer Eric Drotter to document the people of the 41st annual Comic-Con International in San Diego, jsut because he’s got a wicked eye for the sublimely mundane. With over 125,000 attendees at the four day festival, it is one of the world’s largest conventions, and provided Drotter with a huge pallet to choose from. Below is what he came back with. “From the outside, Comic-Con has become largely a vehicle for commercial promotion,  but the soul of the event is still the individuals who whole-heartedly embrace the chance to indulge in fantasy and role-play for purely personal reasons. In the safety of this huge gathering of like-minded people, the costumes seem to bring out their true inner identity, rather than mask it,” explains Drotter. “Next weekend here in downtown San Diego, there will still be plenty of fantasy and role-playing, it will just be more subtle, less unified, and less honest.” Nice one, Taffy. Enjoy the Nerd Parade Gallery that follows…