Alright. So you’re probably thinking, “What is this? It’s been forever since San Diego Comic Con 2013. Heck, the opportunity to grab passes for THIS years SDCC has already come and gone! Why are you living in the past, man?”

Well, I sort of blew it last year with RtR’s intended “epic coverage” of SDCC 2013, I feel bad about it so I wanted to write a little on the topic. “Awww, I’m sorry to hear that, little buddy. What happened?” you, my imaginary friend, asks.

If you sit a spell then I’ll tell ya.. or if you could care less and just want to see the goods.. skip to the end of this article to portal you directly to our Flickr page and you’ll be rewarded by hundreds of newly uploaded SDCC 2013 Cosplay photos.

Day one in San Diego, I hit the conference floor with a brand new camera, a couple of new lenses and a plethora of large, empty memory cards. My goal last year was to not just do MORE coverage of SDCC 2013 than I did in 2012 but to obliterate it with the most picture heavy, video oozing coverage anyone’s ever seen in.. ever.

Well, as it happens when you’re filled with spit and vinegar, shooting from the hip as it were, I found that I overestimated my abilities and overstepped personal physical bounds. Upon returning to my humble abode here in Hawaii, I loaded up the memory cards and their ga-millions of images and videos onto my computer, looked upon it’s grandeur..  and just froze.

In front of me was literally days worth of video footage along with far more images than I can count. All of which would have to be gone through, organized and edited before usable.  I didn’t know what to do with it all. WHAT to do with it all.  For the first few weeks following the con, I ended up doing what I’ve done before when faced with overwhelmingly impossibly odds…

nothing.

“Tomorrow.. yes, tomorrow I’ll knock this stuff out.” That tomorrow never came.

Like the year before, it was such a joyful buzz to roam the conference floor, snapping pics of everything and everyone, chatting it up with superheroes and cartoon characters to my hearts content. There’s always something going on or someone walking by that seems worth the flick of a shutter.  But now with it all in front of me, squeezed onto my computer, I realized putting this thing together was going to require my full-time and attention to actually get it out in any reasonable time frame… and that’s with only a very sub-standard level of spit-shine.. like with just the spit and none of the shine.

Like a lot you out there, I have a full-time job as well as freelance work that eats up the larger portion of my day. So I started to stress out because I had so much content and had planned to do so much with it. Instead of being able to do that, I was suddenly handed the sickening reality that it simply wasn’t feasible for me to do.  I’d bitten off more than I could chew and captured more content than I had the hours to do anything with. After struggling to work through it on and off over some passing months, I finally decided I needed to shelf it and move on.

Fast forward to now when SDCC 2013 is old news and everyone’s steeling themselves for SDCC 2014 and it almost seems pointless to bring it up again. But, even with my free time more askew than ever before, I’d put a lot of time and work in.. and it’s grated on me to know that all this content is just sitting on my computer growing old and moldy. Rad Toy Review’s epic SDCC 2013 coverage may be a bygone promise well past it’s prime, but by golly, in the hash-tagged spirit of throw back Thursday, I’m going to give you whatever I have to give anyway!

While my epic SDCC video project sits in limbo, I did manage to edit  and pair down a fair amount of the photos. You guys deserve to see something and there’s no time like the present! This first part of our SDCC 2013 Photo coverage is all the Cosplay stuff I could get through . There’s more hidden away on my drive, but I think the ones on our Flickr page are the best of the lot. I’ll get the toy pics finished up in a follow up post, which will go up soonly… maybe next Thursday if the spirit moves me.

For this coming year’s SDCC, I’ll make no grand promises of epic coverage. No pie-in-the-sky boasts of videos streaming into your retina’s just days after the footage is captured. Yes, we will be there and yes, we will probably take an obnoxious amount of photos and video. You WILL get your coverage. Exactly what form that coverage takes, remains to be seen. Maybe video will work out this year, maybe not.. either way, I can promise there will be lots of things worth checking out here on Rad Toy Review. We’ll make no promises other than doing the best we can.

Think of these photos of SDCC 2013 as the precursor, a beginning of our SDCC 2014 coverage.

NOT an end.

Alright, without further ado.. please check out RtR’s photos from last years San Diego Comic Con!