From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Bob Carlson, and this is Unfictional.

Unfictional is KCRW's program of stories and Original Documentaries, part of the Independent Producer Project, and today

it's a program about that colossal beast that rears its enormous head every July menacing the sunny seaside town of San Diego

every year getting bigger and bigger spreading its tentacles in every direction

attracting movie monsters and

arch villains in testosterone-filled video game franchises and the comic book

people that started the whole thing, all of them infecting every corner of the San Diego Convention Center.

Just found out that Matt Smith, the current Doctor who will be here at 2 o'clock tomorrow, signing autographs.

Get a photo with the doctor.

Comic Con is home to the intense superfans,

the obsessives, the people who are so tired of the real world

they're eager to disappear into much more interesting worlds

of space and time travel, monsters, tragic heroes, and

sexy aliens.

One longtime fan in comic con attendee is comedian and writer Dana Gould. For him the convention was where he

first stumbled upon a mystery and where he solved it years later. From

KCRW.com, it's unfictional.

I will not go so far as to say that everything I needed to know about life I learned from comic books,

but I did learn a very important lesson by being a comic book fan.

That nothing is as it seems, and at the end of the, everything is kind of a disappointment.

But once you buy that, good golly, it's freeing.

I was a nerdy kid.

...