SDCC 2026: Preview Night and Day 1 Recap

It’s that fateful time of year again: cosplayers and comic nerds, Trekkies and Star Wars savants…nerds of all kinds descend upon San Diego for 5 days of exclusive hunting, panels, exciting announcements and so much more. Comic-Con is always a fun time, but in a lot of ways it can be a war of attrition, and this year San Diego decided to fight dirty in the form of unrelenting heat. More on the later.

Preview Night

I got to the convention center around 3 PM and settled into the Sails Pavilion for the long wait. If you have never done Preview Night, this is the part nobody puts in the highlight reels: a couple of hours of standing in a slowly thickening crowd, everybody comparing notes on what they are chasing and quietly recalculating their route. The line started moving around 5:40, and I was on the floor by roughly 5:50.

First stop was Image Comics. I was gunning for the Chainkata ashcan and struck out, which stung a little, but I walked away with the DAPB exclusive and the Karman Blade ashcan. Two out of three on the opening bell is a win, and I’m particularly excited to dig into Bertram’s Karman Blade!

From there I tried Felix and DC, both of which were already capped. That is Preview Night in a nutshell: you lose ten minutes finding out a booth is closed and you either panic…or you pivot. In my case I pivoted to Trinity Comics, who were out of blind bags but still had Momoko variants of the recent Superman Spider Man issue and some Muju Something Is Killing the Children covers left. Grabbed those, plus the Gist and Granov books, and was out by about 6:30 feeling pretty good about the night so far.

Then I made the call that ate my evening: Mondo.

One of my top-priority items this year was the limited Mega Man poster by Ardhira Putra. The vibrancy and design encapsulates what I love about the franchise - like my nostalgia manifested in art-form. I got into what I will generously describe as a standby line at 6:45 and did not clear it until around 8:15. Ninety minutes. The trouble was that three separate standby lines had formed, and staff were trying to pull five people at a time from each to keep it equitable. Points for effort, but in practice it was chaos, with nobody entirely sure which line they were in or how close they were. I have been through worse Mondo situations and I have been through smoother ones. In the end, I got what I came for, which is the only metric that matters.

While I was stuck in that mess, my buddy was over at Yesterday’s and grabbed me the limited One Piece and Zelda pins. I picked him up a Mondo shirt in exchange. Con buddies are a force multiplier, and if you are coming to SDCC solo and trying to hit multiple exclusive drops in the same window, you are going to lose races you could have won. In short: find a buddy!

I closed the night in Artist Alley, which is genuinely the best part of the show and the part most people skip on Preview Night because they are still chasing product. Said hi to Ryan Barry and picked up one of his custom PS2 game art pieces. The concept is simple and clever: original art built around that PS2 case format we all had stacked on a shelf next to the TV. I spent a good chunk of my late teens and early twenties with those blue-spined cases, so this one hit a specific nerve. Great execution on an idea I had not seen anybody else doing.

Day 1

Out the door at 7:15 AM for the Mission Valley trolley station. Locals and visitors alike are familiar with the value the trolley brings in shuttling folks to Comic-Con. Met up with my friend, rode in, and got to the convention center around 8:15. We entered near Hall F and went straight up to the Sails Pavilion to queue. Line started moving around 8:45, and we were on the floor by 9:20.

First stop was Dark Horse for a wristband for the Hickman and Spencer signing on Saturday afternoon. If you have not done their system before, it is a dice roll. You hit the target number or better and you pick a wristband from whatever signings still have stock. When I approached I thought the target was 15 or higher, turns out it was actually just 10. I rolled a 16. The whole thing took maybe 10 to 15 minutes including the wait, which is nothing for a Hickman signing, and I will take a lucky roll over standing in a two hour line any day of the week.

From there it was UDON for the Mega Man variant exclusive, secured without any drama, which is a sentence I do not get to type often at this show. I also handed off some Batman issues for Dragotta and Snyder signatures through my friend, who was already in the Dragotta line and had a Snyder ticket for later. Again: con buddies.

The middle of the day was a run of booth appointments and pickups. I did an interview and walkthrough at the Jazwares booth, then swung by IDW for a hardcover of Patrick Horvath’s Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees: Rite of Spring, since I had an interview with him later and wanted a signature on the book. Also secured another one of my most sought-after goodies from the con: UCC’s Space Godzilla pop. Limited to 1,000, I arranged a trade with another con-goer to make sure I could add it to my collection.

Then it was time for an extremely exciting activity for this 41 year old: sitting down! Half an hour in the media room charging my phone and drinking coffee, doing nothing. Your legs and your phone battery are both finite resources, and the people who crash at 4 PM are usually the ones who never stopped moving.

Back to the action, I had a Mattel booth tour and exclusives walkthrough at 12:15, where I checked out the awesome Top Gun and Jurassic Park exclusives, then over to the Paramount lodge for a 1 PM slot.

Honest assessment on The Lodge: not worth a long wait. The drinks were tasty, the sliders were gone almost immediately, and outside of a couple of photo ops the activities are thin. I did get a custom luggage tag, which is a genuinely nice piece of swag. Also, the Star Trek bar was a vibe. Full transparency, I had this booked as a media appointment and waited about ten minutes to get in. If I had spent 90 minutes in a line outside in this weather for that experience, this experience would read very differently.

At 1:45 I headed to the Magic: The Gathering Marvel Super Heroes activation at Petco. Thanks to my contact, I was able to check out the learn to play area, grab a promo deck and card, and take a look at the mini golf setup without waiting in line. It is a well built activation and I would have happily spent another hour there, but I had a signing to make.

That signing was Sanford Greene at Felix Comic Art from 2:20 to 2:50. I picked up the published version of his early webtoon 1,000 and got it signed, and I finally got my Felix blind bag after getting shut out on Preview Night. Then a quick interview with a D&D rep at the Hasbro booth at 3 (more on that to come later!)

The one that got away: the Boldly Built activation at the Marriott Marquis, where they were handing out the Kirk MTG promo card. It took me twenty minutes just to find the thing, the line was enormous, and I had a 4:30 interview I was not going to miss. Passed. Protip for anyone chasing it: it is near the arcade in the Marquis, close to Salon 17. Learn from my wandering.

Walked to the Hilton, prepped with Lance from Comic Book Keepers, and sat down with Patrick Horvath at 4:15 to talk about Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees: Rite of Spring. Great conversation, and one of the highlights of my day. Full interview will be up via Comic Book Keepers soon.

Wrapped with a last loop of the floor. I looked hard at ThreeZero’s exclusive Mega Man figure and walked away, at least for now. We will see how that resolves by Sunday. Called it an early night with a heavy Day 2 ahead.

About that heat

This is one of the warmer Comic-Cons I can remember, and it changes the math on the whole show in ways that are easy to underestimate until you are standing in it.

Inside the hall you can notice it’s a few degrees warmer than usual too, but it’s the offsites that suffer most. Every activation outside the convention center is asking you to stand on unshaded pavement in downtown San Diego in July, and when it is this warm, a 90 minute wait stops being an inconvenience and starts being a genuinely bad idea.

If you are heading down for the rest of the weekend, be honest with yourself about what an outdoor line actually costs you this year. Drink more water than you think you need. Bring a hat. Build in the boring half hour to sit down somewhere with air conditioning. The people who finish Sunday still enjoying themselves are the ones who treated their own stamina as part of the plan.

Day 2 is ahead, with plenty of awesome panels including a TMNT panel, the Next Level panel and Hickman and Spencer discussing their latest property: Three Worlds, Three Moons. Stay tuned!