Wilhite would continue to be involved in comics culture. In 1986 he opened a string of comics shops using a settlement he'd received from a car accident. These shops, too, would not live up to Wilhite's expectations and ultimately closed. Disillusioned, Wilhite started attending Lamb of God Lutheran Church in Humble in 1989 and wrote a Christian memoir looking back over his involvement in comics and gaming. In it, he warns readers about the dangers of occult activities like playing Dungeons & Dragons or watching horror movies.

"I have realized what had happened in my past," Wilhite writes in the introduction to Entertainment of Death. "First, from 1969 to 1973, it was the Lord helping me stay out of the occult. Again, in 1982 it was the Lord helping again. He knew I would have gotten back into drugs and fallen away totally if Ultimate Fantasy had succeeded. He also saw where the comic book business would have eventually taken me if it had succeeded.

"I am not saying that the Lord caused all of these failures, but I did not involve Him in them or listen to Him. I was doing it on my own accord and, of course, if you do something of your own accord or of man's, you will ultimately fail. If I had involved the Lord, I would not have done a lot of the things I did. If you fail in a venture, don't blame the Lord. The Lord doesn't make you fail, but neither can He help you if you don't listen to Him."

Divine intervention or not, the Ultimate Fantasy rendered comics convention-going in Houston all but extinct.

During the ensuing downtime, two movies came out a couple of years apart that would forever change not only the face of Houston convention-going but geek culture itself, though no one knew it at the time.

The first was Doctor Who in 1996. The long-running and wildly popular adventures of an alien called The Doctor who traveled in space and time in a blue police box that was bigger on the inside than the outside had been canceled by the BBC in 1989. In the seven years since that cancellation, a producer named Philip Segal dreamed of reviving the show in America with a new Doctor for a new audience.

Some of the biggest names in film at the time were considered for the new Doctor. British actors like Tim Curry and Eric Idle topped the list, but American names like Tom Hanks, Jim Carrey and even Harrison Ford were also bandied about. Eventually, Segal settled on a then relatively unknown British actor named Paul McGann.

"When Phil first got in touch, I turned him down," McGann said in an interview at Comicpalooza. "No interest whatsoever. But they kept coming back. Phil said, 'I know, you don't see yourself as The Doctor, but let's work on it.' I told him, 'I think he's misanthropic, melancholy and dark,' and Phil just kept nodding along and saying, 'Yep, that's my guy.'"

The TV movie was meant to serve as the pilot for a new television series at Fox, but it was a critical and commercial failure. According to McGann, it had the difficult task of trying to capture an American audience for the show that was assumed to exist at the time but which clearly didn't, a fact that he noted with some chagrin whenever he looked around the floor at this year's convention, which was absolutely stuffed with Doctor Who shirts, costumes and collectibles.

Back in 1996, though, McGann found his relationship to Doctor Who to be comparable to that of George Lazenby to James Bond. He was something of a pariah, an almost-Doctor. Many fans declared him the worst Doctor ever, while others simply pretended he had never existed in the first place. For five straight years, McGann avoided comics conventions, feeling left out and dejected.

However, though the film had been a flop in America, it was actually fairly well-­received in The Doctor's home country of Britain.

"Something happened. The BBC took an interest again," said McGann. "At least they got over their embarrassment."

McGann and other actors began producing new Doctor Who radio play adventures for Big Finish, a British production company. Not only did these well-regarded releases regrow the popularity of Doctor Who in general and Paul McGann's Doctor in particular, many of the people involved in their production, such as Nicholas Briggs and Gary Russell, would go on to work on the show when it returned to television in 2005 and became the mega-hit it is today.

Last year McGann made a surprise return to Doctor Who as part of the 50th-anniversary celebration of the show. Now his autograph line dwarfs those of most of the other guests, and there are regular calls for the actor to get his own spin-off or to return to the show itself. Doctor Who fandom is a dominating force in geek culture now, one that actually competed with Hollywood blockbusters when "The Day of the Doctor" was screened in theaters, and it has finally forgiven and embraced a man who helped bring about its regeneration.