The city of San Diego has been able to hang onto one of its civic institutions, and apparently, it’s the more important one.
According to U-T San Diego, the city has signed a two-year extension to its deal to host Comic-Con, keeping the pop-culture convention there through 2018.
The eye-opening part is that people there may prefer that to the Chargers, by a pretty large margin.
In a poll on the newspapers website, a one-or-the-other choice between a comic book convention and NFL football has the guys in tights with a 17-point edge. (That’s as of the moment this was published, with 887 of the 1511 votes cast going against the Chargers, or 58 percent.)
Granted, this is far from scientific, or an apples-to-apples choice. While the convention sells out plenty of hotel rooms and pumps money into the local economy, it’s a one-shot deal compared to 10 games and storylines that fill the calendar.
But it may also signal the civic ambivalence that has kept San Diego from getting a stadium built, which has the team looking for greener pastures in Los Angeles.