Hall H is a cavernous, airplane hanger-like room at the east end of the convention center.  Seating up to 6500 attendees, the room hosts panels dedicated to promoting Hollywood films, particularly blockbuster tentpoles and franchises.  This year, the list of star-studded sneak previews included Ender’s Game, The Amazing Spiderman 2, Godzilla, Hunger Games: Catching Fire, X-Men: Days of Future Past, the Thor and Captain America sequels, and surprise announcements from Warner Brothers and Marvel and about the immanent team up of Superman and Batman and the title (and villain) of the next Avengers film.

The process of gaining access to the massive hall is daunting.  Every year, an increasing number of attendees line up overnight.  I spent Friday and Saturday in the hall and arrived between 4:30 and 5am on both days.  I waited in line over five hours before the room was loaded (a process taking roughly an hour), and once admitted, I managed to find a seat towards the back of the room.

The line itself demonstrates the significant power and draw of industry promotion at Comic-Con as the spectacle (and labor) of attendees waiting in line produces an increased sense of value around studios’ promotional content.  Contextualized as exclusive to Comic-Con, these advertising paratexts are distinguished from the more mundane, mediated promotion we encounter in our daily lives.  The line helps to construct this distinction by providing visible evidence of attendees’ belief that this content is worth waiting for (on both days I sat in Hall H, attendees participating in Q&A sessions professed to the panelists that the wait had been well worth it).  In order to participate in these kinds of exclusive opportunities, attendees must consent not only to the significant wait, but also to the maintenance of order and regulations–first, in the line, then, within the Hall.  The process of queuing, then, transforms attendees into docile bodies, who wait patiently and compliantly for the panels in the hall.

Two co-existing rules inform Comic-Con’s Hall H (and overall) experience, both of which are printed directly on the Comic-Con badge . First, attendees must consent to being photographed or recorded at any time and to give “Comic-Con, its agents, licensees, or assignees” the right to use their likeness for “promotional purposes.”  Second, attendees must agree not to photograph or record any prohibited material and must obtain Comic-Con’s consent for the commercial use of “permitted” photographs and recordings.  I learned about both of these rules firsthand when I recorded the introduction to the Warner Brothers and Legendary Pictures panel on Saturday.

The first half of this video demonstrates the interesting phrasing of piracy warnings in Hall H.  Fans can record and disseminate everything but the studio’s footage.  This rule works to preserve the proprietary property of the studios, while suggesting that attendees should see their experiences as similarly proprietary, an exclusive reward for their own effort and commitment after a long night in line.  Optimally, attendees will “promote” their experiences in the same way that the industry promotes their products, by carefully controlling the dissemination of information.  The studios, in retaining control of their footage, also get to decide where and how it will be unveiled online, which sometimes happens simultaneously or shortly after it is screened in Hall H. Effectively, the exclusive atmosphere of Hall H, both in terms of the restrictions around filming and sharing of content, and the excitement associated with being among the first to see and the first to know, makes Comic-Con attendees into an unpaid promotional army, enthusiastically reproducing their exclusive experiences for a larger collection of consumers online and on social networks.

Though it is difficult to see in the darkened room, the second half of this video captures the moment when two large curtains drop to reveal 180 degrees of screens, a Hall H technological spectacular first introduced by Warner Brothers in 2012.  The video ends when a member of security approaches behind my seat and tells me not to record anything on the screens.  This is, of course, absurd, as the content on the screen in that moment is a widely disseminated and familiar corporate logo.  Whether this warning reflects an accurate enforcement of the regulations or an overzealous member of security, it demonstrates just how little control one has as a member of the Hall H audience.  Either comply, or be ejected.

Later, during a panel for 20th Century Fox, the moderator excitedly informed the audience that we were all going to be photographed by a company called Crowdzilla, and that the photograph would be so detailed that we would be able to locate and tag ourselves on the X-Men Facebook page.  Alongside the troubling and invasive implications of the Crowdzilla technology, this stunt invites the audience’s implicit consent to be photographed for promotional purposes (the first rule listed on the Comic-Con badge).  Framed as a fun, novel, and innocuous addition to the Hall H experience, this stunt further exploits the spectacle of the Comic-Con crowd as a vehicle for marketing purposes.  This example demonstrates a dual function of Comic-Con: on the surface, the event operates as a location for studios to market to a core audience of fans, but in the process, these same fans become part of a larger marketing paratext.

In addition to demonstrating how studios interpellate Comic-Con attendees as unpaid promotional laborers, the lines, the piracy warning, my experience with security, and the Crowdzilla stunt also suggest a deeper, ideological power imbalance in the relationship between media industries and attendees at Comic-Con.  If a corporation’s logo operates as a of signifier of its identity (however problematic that identity may be), in Hall H, these kinds of identities are protected and privileged, while individual attendees must hand those same rights over to studios and Comic-Con organizers.  The pleasures of consuming paratexts at Comic-Con are the pretense through which studios assemble a crowd that functions more usefully as a group of indistinct “fans” than as discreet individuals.  In this way, my experiences in Hall H suggest a troubling hierarchy underpinning Hollywood’s presence at Comic-Con, a hierarchy that, as the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign suggests, extends to the relationship between media industries and fans more generally.  Instead of simply playing the role of media consumers, this audience is incorporated into a hierarchy of industry production and promotion, geared towards meeting the studio’s marketing goals.  The configuration of Hall H, with studio representatives elevated and isolated on a stage before a crowd of 6500 attendees, manifests these hierarchies in real space, rendering them highly material, and by extension, visible for five days a year.

For many academics, Comic-Con provides a significant opportunity to study media audiences, as its diverse programming attracts an array of fandoms and subcultures.  But it is the massive marketing presence of the media industries (usually coded in trade and popular discourses as “Hollywood”) that makes Comic-Con a unique space in which to examine a kind of corporeal convergence culture.  In this space, many of the more troubling implications of participatory culture, fan labor, media conglomeration, and horizontal and vertical integration collide in a messy, crowded, overgrown spectacle deeply rooted in the liveness and materiality of the event itself.  Despite what seems to be an ongoing ambivalence about the viability of Comic-Con’s attendees as a demographic, Hollywood’s marketing presence defines the event for many (whether they actively seek out this promotion, or bemoan the unavoidable impact of the accompanying crowds and spectacle).

When I arrived yesterday, Comic-Con’s preview night was already underway. As I approached downtown San Diego, I saw the iconic street banners which, this year, advertised Marvel’s upcoming Captain America and Thor sequels, and, closer to the convention center, HBO’s True Blood.  In the Gaslamp Quarter, restaurants and stores were occupied by Disney, SyFy, and NBC, elaborate off-site experiences promoting Godzilla and Ender’s Game were already underway, a massive advertisement for the new SyFy show, Helix, covered the side of the Marriott Hotel, and within several minutes a masked man handed me an invitation to attend a “fan screening” of Escape Plan hosted by Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Well before I even set foot in the convention center, it was clear that even the space around it had been thoroughly colonized by industry promotion.

As Alisa Perren has pointed out, Comic-Con is so incredibly multi-faceted that one can hardly imagine a universal fan experience.  However, when it comes to Hollywood promotion at Comic-Con, a kind of controlled and universal experience is exactly the goal.  Even though Comic-Con caters to an array of fans and fandoms, this promotional presence works to reshape the event, visually and discursively, as an industry space.  But what are the implications of the media industries occupying what is coded as a space for fans as opposed to an industry trade show?  How do the particular promotional strategies employed at Comic-Con seek to mine, shape, and control fan culture, just as the industry reshapes the city of San Diego in its own image?  Finally, what can Comic-Con tell us about how media consumers, more broadly, are invited to engage with the media industries, their texts, and their paratexts?  My next post, after Comic-Con, will provide an overview of the event (as I experienced it) in an attempt to explore these questions.

Before the Super Bowl aired this past Sunday, host network NBC aired this gem of a promotional video.  (Go ahead and watch it if you haven’t already, or again.  I’ll wait.)

As Josef Adalian notes, this type of rousing “all hands on deck” campaign used to be de rigeur for networks from the 1970s to the 1990s, but its use here highlights what I see as one of NBC’s greatest strengths, and also its potential weakness.

To my mind, this number beautifully sums up what sets NBC apart from its broadcast competitors: the sense that all the folks at NBC are really just one big, happy family.  Even in the face of lagging ratings (they’re in a tie for fourth with Univision, at last count), an inability to find a hit, and faint praise for their entertainment chairman (“when you’re heading up the last-place network, the only direction to go is up”) who concedes that the network “had a really bad fall,” audiences, advertisers, and investors alike are still intrigued by the peacock network.  But why?

In part, I would argue, it’s due to NBC’s lasting image–and one they continue to bank on–evidenced in the “Brotherhood of Man” spot.  NBC still seems like the broadcast network of yore, one more closely resembling the Hollywood studio system than contemporary niche-marketed television.  The sort of place where everyone looks sort of familiar, because you’ve seen them (likely on another NBC series) before.  The sort of environment in which you can imagine the network’s stars getting together for lunch, or cracking jokes together in the hallways. This is not a new strategy, of course–one can recall with relative ease the “Must-See TV” crossover nights of the 1990s, and the fact that NBC stars of the era tended to move on to…other NBC series.  Seeing Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Will Arnett move across the weekly schedule feels like part of the NBC legacy, ultimately, and knowing that so many current NBC stars are actually friends behind the scenes works to cement this notion in audiences.

Or maybe it’s because NBC is so firmly associated with New York’s 30 Rock (the place, not the series).  From The Today Show to Brian Williams’ Rock Center to the eponymous series, Rockefeller Plaza has become the physical and emotional home of the network, with the result that it’s not difficult to imagine Kristen Wiig, Jimmy Fallon, Ann Curry, and Bob Harper dancing around outside the building.  All of this combines to delight audiences, prompting tweets like, “NBC shows singing Brotherhood of Man gave me chills! I love this so much!” and “This is what my dreams look like.”  And, perhaps my personal favorite, “Guys remember that time all the best NBC shows got together and sang Brotherhood of Man and I basically died? Me too.”

But NBC’s reliance on this image might be its albatross rather than its saving grace.  As Myles McNutt has argued here on Antenna, the network’s reluctance to move beyond its own legacy is actually holding it back.  As Jason Mittell pointed out to me when I posted the video to Facebook, the fact that “Brotherhood of Man” is centered so firmly around 30 Rock (the series, not the place) overestimates the series’ popularity.  Indeed, the poorly rated series proves the point, exemplifying NBC’s “we’re all friends here” sensibility in the form of longtime NBC-friendly personalities (Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Tracy Morgan) while overlooking the fact that the show (and the network) are in some fairly serious trouble according to traditional metrics.

Nonetheless, the video reveals what I see as the fundamental strength of the network–the fact that, as the song goes, these stars truly are “proud to be…right here on NBC.”  The song’s actual lyrics in that moment are “proud to be…in that fraternity,” which I would contend is also an apt metaphor for the insidery network.  And as thrilled as the stars are, many audience members are equally happy to see them hanging out together enjoying one another’s company.  As one Tweeter commented, “Now this is a frat I’d pledge.”  Indeed.  And the network is banking on the fact that our desire to join the party will keep us coming back as they struggle to regain a spot at the top.