The Postapocalyptic Road to Comic-Con

As I mentioned earlier, TIME's Rebecca Winters Keegan will be sending occasional updates from Comic-Con. (She promises a Lost dispatch over the weekend.) Because of her job, though—covering all of Hollywood as well as all of America west of the Mississippi—she'll have to focus a lot on the movie sessions. For supplemental TV coverage, I recommend Maureen Ryan and James Hibberd's reports. But make sure you don't miss Hibberd's hilarious dispatch on getting to Comic-Con:

I left L.A. at 8 a.m. It is now 2 p.m. I'm thumbing this into a BlackBerry and breathing fumes. I have crawled past three cars -- emergency flashers on -- that have died and been abandoned in the middle of the freeway.

This isn't just "oh boy, can you believe the traffic"-traffic. This is a story you tell your children -- about how you were right there when the Great Gasoline Wars started. When desperate marauders dressed as Frodo and Aragorn wielding collectible swords began robbing traffic-stuck Jetta owners to siphon their precious $5-per-gallon petrol and continue their quest to an annual fan convention.

The wiser among us took Amtrak, but even that has been fraught with peril.

"It took Kristy six hours to get there because somebody got killed on her train," says one studio executve, calling from his own Amtrak ride.

Dear lord. Train killings. That's what the entertainment industry is facing to get to San Diego.

Still, I bet it didn't take him half as long to drive to L.A. as it does to put on full Klingon makeup.