Batman at midnight

VIRGINIA BEACH

First stop, 7-Eleven for some taquitos.

If you're gonna wait in line for the midnight debut of a summer blockbuster - in this case, the IMAX version of "The Dark Knight" - it helps to steel yourself with food.

So, fried tortilla roll-ups in hand, Mike Boylan and Travis Rickman hurried up and waited.

It was 6 p.m. Thursday, six hours before Batman would lord over the six-story screen at the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center. But the friends from Green Run High School wanted to arrive early.

They were so punctual, they were alone. They couldn't even call it a line until a few others showed up two hours later.

In fact, as thousands of comic geeks and movie lovers queue up across Hampton Roads this weekend, these two will be able to argue they were the first devotees to pray at the Batman altar.

Can you blame them? They heard the aquarium had just 20 seats for sale. The rest had been bought ahead of time by more-prepared fans.

An aquarium staffer told the pair to wait at the door closest to General Booth Boulevard. So they did.

The hours passed with toys. PlayStation Portable. Game Boy. A DVD player. A MacBook laptop.

"It all died," Rickman said, wishing he had charged the batteries a bit more.

A few minutes before 10:30, the door opened. Just not the one Boylan and Rickman had stalked.

A main entrance door had also swung open. A crowd of 100 or so people surged forward like the start of a marathon.

"What the hell?" Rickman screamed.

By the time the pair got in line - again - a few dozen people were ahead of them.

They did the math. Twenty-five, 30 people in front of them. Twenty tickets. Uh-oh.

Boylan, a 19-year-old technician in the Navy, manhandled a water bottle as the line inched forward. Rickman, a 20-year-old college freshman, shook his head over and over. Both leveled evil eyes on security guards and anyone wearing the aquamarine golf shirts of the aquarium staff.

"You tricked us," Boylan chided one security officer. "You opened the other door."

Would there be any tickets left for them? Would their six-hour odyssey be in vain?

"One, please," Rickman said confidently to the cashier.

He got his ticket. His buddy did, too.

Turns out the aquarium had held on to about 40 seats.

Two and a half hours later - nine hours or so after their trek began - the pair headed home, sated with the stylized violence of Batman and The Joker and wowed by the look of an IMAX film.

"Worth it," Rickman said. "Worth sleeping for less than an hour and going to work."

Richard Quinn, (757) 222-5119, richard.quinn@pilotonline.com