Comic-Con’s soaring popularity brings halt to ticket sales at fire mashal’s request

I thought it only felt like Jenn and I were the only ones not going to Comic-Con in beautiful San Diego. I may have been more right than I thought: Record numbers of people on the convention floor Saturday morning led to the fire marshal shutting down ticket sales at noon.

“Today [Saturday] at about noon we made the decision to stop selling memberships on site, because the fire marshal had concerns we would reach capacity in the building, but we didn’t actually reach capacity,” Comic-Con International’s Director of Marketing David Glanzer told CBR News Saturday night. “We were able to honor people who had pre-registered.

“We work very closely with the fire marshal. It didn’t get to a situation where we had to close sections of the building. We were able to control the flow by stopping on site sales.”

On Friday afternoon, CCI closed down online ticket sales through their Web site.

“It used to be years ago that Saturday was just a huge day, but now the difference between any given day is not that noticeable,” continued Glanzer. “I know people think that one day seems to be far busier than another, but we haven’t noticed that to be true. On Friday, we knew that our sales were doing well online and we had a lot of people in the building, adding that to who would be buying memberships on-site on Friday, so we decided to take our online sales off on Friday.”

Read the full story at CBR News.

CBR News: Comic-Con International Coverage Index

At Jonah’s request, I put together an index of all of CBR’s Comic-Con stories.

I’ll be adding to it throughout the weekend, so reload it early and often. While you’re there, click on the ad links, too, just to make everyone happy.

“Hey, is that a camera?”

I got 22/30 on this Mensa quiz

Despite my chosen profession, I just can’t do word scrambles, as much as I might wish otherwise. Number sequences also trip me up at times. I outright left #7, 15, 19 and 25 blank as a result. The other four errors are just me being naturally dumb.

Try the Mensa Fun Test for yourself.

Rock Star: More Storm Large

This week, when Tommy Lee did his inevitable flirting/harassment of the female contestants on Rock Star: Supernova, the older women took it in stride. (Presumably they’ve both dealt with a lot of this sort of thing over the years.)

Particularly amusing to Jenn was when Tommy Lee leered that he’d like to see more of Storm, she told him to check Google, which seemed to take the wind out of his sails.

In point of fact, Storm may have meant he should check Flickr. Warning: The pictures are Not Safe For Work, unless you work in a nipple-friendly workplace. (Posted from home, and not the workplace.)

• Oh, what did we think of this week’s show? Still lots of chaff to separate from the wheat. You could probably fast forward to the final four and see Storm, Dilana, Toby and Lukas there. I think Jenny Galt was good, but as was said, in a Lilith Fair sense, not an Ozzfest sense. Hopefully her Canadian record label will get on the stick and put her previously released stuff onto iTunes ASAP.