On-set and behind the scenes at Reginald the Vampire (Part 6)

This finale of the series covers happenings at San Diego Comic Con, in which I moderate the Reginald the Vampire panel and embarrass myself with other celebrities

Left to right, ignoring the thirty-foot-tall bald guy: Me (at the lectern), showrunner Harley Peyton, director Jeremiah Chechik, producer Lindsay MacAdam, and cast members Jacob Batalon, Mandela Van Peebles, Em Haine, and Savannah Basley

A few months after shooting wrapped in Victoria, Reginald showrunner Harley Peyton called to give me a heads-up: “They’re talking about asking you come to Comic Con with us to moderate the panel. So that’d be cool.”

They did just that. The blitzkrieg of self-promotional media credits I’d sent the press team while trying to get interviews had made an impression. A shocked one, as it turned out. I forget who I ended up talking to about the decision; I just remember how baffled she sounded by the words coming out of her own mouth. She couldn’t believe she was actually asking the book’s author, as an untested and should-be-awkward entity, to get up on the big stage.

“You actually … seem articulate in front of a microphone,” she said, practically shaking her head in disbelief.

“Thanks?” I replied.

Of course I said yes. Anything to stay involved with the TV show as it neared completion — as it became its own thing rather than an extension of my work. It was becoming obvious that most authors happily disappear back into the Land of Introversion by the time the ink on their contracts dry. I, by contrast, actually wanted to (and had the PR chops to) stick around. For the production team, it was like discovering a strange new species.

The further I got from the day I’d signed over the rights to Fat Vampire (now a year and a half in the past), the more my continued involvement in the production seemed to be shattering the norm. They’d expected me to quickly be a non-factor, but here I still was, still clinging to Reginald the Vampire by my fingertips. I was like a low-grade infection that never quite goes away. An infection you grow to love and invite to moderate panels, apparently.

“Someone will be in touch to make travel arrangements,” she told me.

Oh, damn. I’d forgotten they saw this as work: something they’d have to pay my way for because I might not want to do it otherwise.

Suckers.

Over the next few weeks, someone made all of my travel arrangements, somehow perfectly matching my preferences despite my complete and total inability to find good flights when I book them on my own. There’s clearly a secret travel portal available to big companies, wherein they take what they want before throwing us the scraps. It’s basically Travelocity’s version of The Platform.

Pinky-out (for classiness), I boarded my first-class flight and was on my way.

Meeting up and hanging out

I’ve got this weird hangup whenever I go somewhere to do something with a group of people: I feel like I should be doing things with those people most of the time, whether there’s anything to do or not.

Nominally, I was in San Diego with exactly one item on my agenda: the panel itself, plus all the pomp and circumstance that came immediately before and after: general prep, assuring the team that I wasn’t going to go up there with no idea what was going on, and so forth. End to end, that was maybe two hours of essential time. The rest of my time was completely unspoken-for. It was, in other words, time in which I was on my own.

Enter the hangup. Because, see, the panel wasn’t until 3pm on Saturday. I’d arrived Friday afternoon and would be leaving Sunday afternoon. That meant I had a full day before and a full day after my single agenda item, and it felt wrong to just sit in my hotel room (or, counterpoint, to wander the convention alone after picking up my badge) that whole time.

And so I began scheming ways to accidentally run into the others on purpose. Having a drink somewhere felt more productive and less weird than sitting alone watching bad hotel TV.

The hotel they’d set me up in was a few blocks from the hotel the others were in (I was a late addition), so I decided to wander over.

And oh, the sights I saw along the way.

If you’ve never been to Comic Con … Well, it’s an experience. You don’t need to go inside the convention center — or pay for a badge — to get quite a show.

The streets look like this:

I actually think that Deadpool and whatever the fuck that other thing is were posing for someone else, but I’m going to take credit.

… and so I just wandered through it all for a while, understanding finally what it’s like to be on LSD. People-watching is its own sport. And, I mean … this was a really uncrowded area. Other spots had ten times the Deadpool.

Walking down a random sidewalk, I was pleasantly surprised to see this:

Because I’m lame and old, I had to Google “thirst trap.”

Encouraged, I then remembered that NBC had set up an official Reginald the Vampire display somewhere and went about finding it. It was part of a larger “NBC Corner” area that included other shows like Chucky (also a Harley Peyton joint, by the way). I took some still photos of it, but the video walk-by I recorded shows more and also has tiny bits of me commenting on things dumbly.