It’s 1AM on day minus one of Comic Con 09 (the real event starts tomorrow), and I’m about to go to bed. But first I have to share a picture with you:

That’s the camp of people waiting outside of the San Diego Convention Center’s Hall H to get into the Twilight: New Moon panel tomorrow. They started lining up late last night; they’ll do 30+ hours in line to make sure they get a spot in that hall, which holds about 6000 people. They brought tents and sleeping bags and mattresses; accounts of their numbers vary, but they’re in the hundreds, and it seems reasonable that a thousand of them will be in line by the break of dawn.

And the Comic Con nerds couldn’t be angrier about it. It’s funny to see ‘Your fanbase is lamer than my fanbase’ breaking out here, at the mecca for all geeks. The animosity is deep seeded; originally Twilight was scheduled for after the Avatar panel, where five minutes of 3D footage will be screened. It became obvious that Hall H would be filled with girls (gasp!) who would be there from the moment the room opened, leaving many boy geeks unable to see James Cameron’s presentation. Comic Con quickly switched things around, and not Twilight goes before Avatar. The theory: these girls (yuck) will clear out of Hall H after they see RPatz and friends.

Except maybe not. Mr. Beaks of Ain’t It Cool News talked to some of the girls in line and asked them what they would do when the Twilight panel was over. They told him that they would probably stick around. After all, they keeping hearing how awesome Avatar is going to be.

What’s funny is that this is kind of a great scenario for some of the studios, including Fox. These Twilight fans represent major crossover, and they’ll be sitting through Disney’s Alice in Wonderland presentation (already probably a draw for them) and they might be getting turned on to Avatar, a film that needs to be among the – if not the – best grossing films in history to even begin to hope to turn a profit.

I’ve heard people complain that these girls (eww) will keep ‘real’ fans from seeing Avatar footage. But these girls slept outside all night and will probably buy Avatar tickets in December… who are the ‘real’ fans anyway?

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Photo from Ryan Rotten’s Twitter feed.