Before that moment, there had not been hordes of people living in their own private Disneylands or inserting themselves into familiar fiction and sharing their stories with the world. There were no Comic-Cons, the first of which took place in 1970 in southern California, when a few hundred people in love with comics and sci-fi met in the basement of a 1910 San Diego hotel that reeked of nostalgia—but that had also reeked of nostalgic make-believe when it opened, because it was built in a faux-old classical style popularized by the Chicago world’s fair.
