Comic-Con - visible at a distance on San Diego Skyline

For years as I have attempted to explain the San Diego Comic-Con to would be attendees I've used phrases like "over 100,000 people in one building at one time," or "the size of several football fields side by side, all under one roof" yet I could tell from their expressions the full weight of what I was trying to explain, the sheer size of San Diego Comic-Con, aka Comic-Con International, was not truly sinking in. Then again, if you have never experienced that large crowd of people, the huge displays for movies, tv show, and, of course, comic books, how can you truly grasp what is going on without someone telling/showing you?

This year we arrived early in San Diego and decided to visit a favorite old spot for viewing the San Diego skyline, Cabrillo National Monument. When I lived in San Diego it was a favorite place to taking visiting guests so they could see the harbor and skyline and get a grasp for how large and spread out a city San Diego is. While they day we chose was foggier than I would have liked for taking pictures, I almost immediately realized I had found a place that shows better that I can say, just how big Comic-Con, and its accompanying advertising is.

As the crow flies, Cabrillo National Monument, which sits out on the end of a peninsula at the edge of the San Diego harbor, and basically overlooks the mouth to the harbor and greets ships as they sail in, is (my best guess) 5 miles from the San Diego Convention Center where Comic-Con is held.

Look towards the far right of the photo (click on the photo to see it larger) and you can see the logo for the NBC tv show Revolution which is on a HUGE banner taking up most of the side of a hotel next to the convention center. (Looking for the sails on the roof of the San Diego convention center may help you find it faster.

In this second view we zoomed in closer, overlooking the harbor, Coronado Island is still in the foreground, but the photo is now dominated by the San Diego convention center to the left, and the Revolution banner from the NBC show on the hotel to your right.

As we drove down Harbor Blvd. checking out the convention center area, we of course saw other banners, and realized that when we looked closely at our photos we could make out the red one for INJUSTICE that hung on one end of the Marriot. But the one for Revolution, perhaps in part because it was a single very large and simple logo, was easy to make out in the distance from Cabrillo.

Looking Over Convention Center & Revolution

And, for good measure, we had the lucky opportunity to take the "opposite" photograph, with the San Diego Convention Center in the foreground, the Revolution logo now on our left on the Bayfront Hilton, with the Coronado Bay Bridge just barely visible behind the hotel, and Cabrillo National Monument, and it's peninsula, off in the distance beyond Coronado Island.