THE world’s largest gathering of picture-story fans is teeming with adults, it has emerged.
Experts have long maintained that comics, which can be broadly defined as shiny pamphlets containing colourful drawings of flying men from space and vocabulary such as ‘BAMF!’ and ‘Aaaaarp!’, are for children.
Yet despite this, an estimated 98% of attendees at San Diego’s Comic-Con 2011 are old enough to pay income tax and go to bed at a time of their own choosing.
Professor Henry Brubaker of the Institute for Studies, who is at the event, said: “After extensive searching, I thought I finally saw a kid this afternoon. Turns out it was a middle-aged dwarf dressed as an ewok, which is a hair-covered creature from the popular children’s film Return of the Jedi.
“Yesterday I saw a middle-aged man pay $5000 for a bag of Patrick Stewart’s bum fluff, a gang of bitter divorcees sporting robot claws and a pair of railway engineers kissing with tongues while disguised as giant foxes.”
He added: “There was also a room with 500 adults in it, discussing ‘story arcs’ in Spiderman. I’ve no idea what a ‘story arc’ is but apparently it’s very grown-up and complicated.”
Cultural analyst Nikki Hollis said: “If you ask me, Watchmen is just Bash Street Kids with hovering blue penises.
“And I don’t care how ‘dark’ the new Batman film’s going to be, it’s still about a man who dresses up as a bat.
“They will no doubt claim that dressing up as a bat is a ‘metaphor’, but we know that it’s just a man in a bat suit. With pointy ears.”
Meanwhile, there was chaos at a Buffy the Vampire Slayer discussion panel when a group of men in their mid 40s had a violent argument about the correct usage of the word ‘mythos’.
