[Comic Con] The Best & Worst Of The Free Swag At Comic Con 2011

When you get to Comic-Con, you head inside to pick up your badge. The nice lady at registration gives you said badge, plus a ginormous bag with a hefty shoulder strap. You might think “what? there’s no way I’m going to need this big of a bag.”

And you’re wrong. You’re gonna need an even bigger one. Multiple bags, even. If you take everything you’re handed, you won’t be able to get it all home. You have to get picky.

For the second year, I decided to not be picky and just take everything I was handed, both inside the convention and out on the streets of San Diego. Here’s some of my favorites from around the show.

Swag So Insanely Popular That It Nearly Incited A Riot:
ABC’s Pan-Am Luggage

This fall, ABC’s got a show coming out called Pan-Am about the golden age of air travel. It’s basically hot stewardesses, from what I gathered. What better way to showcase this than a simulated plane ride?

You got one of these Pan-Am messenger bags by getting in line for a “boarding pass,” then returning to the booth at a certain time to “board your flight.” You went into the fake cabin where a stewardess had you sit down, turn off your phone and take off on a short fake flight from Heathrow to JFK — complete with rumble seats and a fake landing. During the flight, you were shown a clip of the show. After the flight, you were “given your luggage.” Neat, right? (Most people got a cloth version, while a select few got the leather one pictured above.)

With the whole fake plane thing they had limited seats, and the bag was so popular the poor women working the booth were bombarded with a crush of people that, at times, security was brought in to disperse. Nevertheless, the damn things were on everybody’s shoulder by the end of the convention.

I’ll admit — I never got my hands on this one. After several days of trying, I had to break down and ask a publicist to please let me just take a picture of it for the story. Sigh.