Fandango My Nango: The Saddest Costumed Man at Comic-Con was Back for More

Last year at Comic-Con, I encountered Fandango, the silent movie tickets mascot whose suffering of constant abuse from fratty San Diego types gave us the immortal saying, "Fandango my nango!" This year, Fandango brought reinforcements, and our time together ended with one of us a shriveled corpse.

I first encountered my old nemesis/innamorato on Friday morning outside the San Diego convention center. True to form, he was standing by himself, saying not a word, fixing his weirdly insistent googly eyes on little children or blank white walls.

"Fandango!" exclaimed a young woman. "Can you say something?" He did not.

I edged closer. "Fandango my nango?" I asked. Fandango turned to me. Was there a flicker of recognition? His paper bag face was inscrutable.

Then he slightly turned his head, giving me a cue. I looked down the road. There was another.

This one was...I dunno. A duck? A superhero? It was hard to say. I walked over and found that unlike the original Fandango, this one had a handler.

"What's his name?" I asked, nodding at the duck.

"Surfer Dude!" the handler said brightly.

"What about that one?" I pointed back at Fandango, who gave us an ominous stare from 50 feet away. "Does he have a name, too?"

The handler squinted into the distance. "I couldn't tell you. Libre? Maybe it's Libre or something."

That wouldn't do. But there was no time to pursue this inquiry, as there was still yet another.

This one appeared to be the Smurfette of the Fandango world, a putative female with stringy blond hair and slightly more seductive lips (as seductive as they can appear to be on a paper bag face, anyway). This one had an upbeat handler, too. Did the original Fandango not need one? Was he a loner, or the boss?

"Her name's Sheila," said the handler, noticing my interest. "She's beautiful. And she doesn't speak."

"What's she like?"

"Sheila loves sashimi and long walks on the beach." I looked down at Sheila's hairy legs and large sneakers and made a mental note.

The next day, descending the escalator at the Bayfront Hilton, I noticed a handsome, goateed guy in a black wifebeater and sunglasses coming up the other escalator. He looked over at me, and that's when I saw it.

He was holding the deflated, lifeless husk of the original Fandango in his arms.

I gasped. "Is that...you? Are you...him?"

He looked over at me and nodded, but true to form, he didn't say a word. My mind wasn't just blown. It was nangoed.