The Way of the Editor:

San Diego 2007

The return from Comic Con. Costumes, stories, and pictures to boot!

What can I say about Comic Con this year that hasn’t already been said? It was the biggest show ever in the history of the event, and being there at ground zero, boy did we feel it! The convention hall was packed for the duration of the five days, and preview night on Wednesday was really off the hook. (In fact, it probably beat out Saturday and Sunday for sheer quantity of people in the exhibit hall at one time.) Tickets were completely sold-out every day, and you couldn’t even walk in the door during certain hours because there was just too many people at the convention center and fire safety regulations demanded that other attendees had to leave before new attendees could be let in.

That said, we had one of our best shows ever this year, and a big thanks goes out there for everyone who dropped by and helped to make that happen.

Here’s a small glimpse of maybe about a fifth of the whole of the convention last week:

See our shiny Atomic Avenue balloon in the corner?

There were some really great costumes walking the floor, too, and not all just super-heroes, either! Pete met a very convincingly tall Darth Vader in the hall, and as you might expect from the year of Pirates 3, there quite a lot of saucy buccaneers wandering down the hall and we took the opportunity to take pictures one particularly well-coordinated group of said pirates and wenches. Whoever was hiding inside the the demon Homer was also pretty aptly dressed, probably inspired by the premier of the The Simpsons movie on Thursday. Unfortunately, Batman was too busy on his phone to talk, but we did manage to snag a shot of this guy here who had a great costume for some beastie I can’t recall the name of right now. My favorite costume at the show, however, was probably this rather badly put together Halo costume in lightish red. It was a great reference to my favorite web tv show, Red vs. Blue.

Having already produced and launched most of the major comic to movie and movie-sequel franchises, Comic Con 2007 was the year of the big TV show specials, with fans waiting for as long as three hours just to get a glimpse of the cast of Heroes and producers on-hand to promote promising new titles like Pushing Daisies. (The Heroes booth was ridiculously popular, with fans lining up and blocking traffic for the Heroes lunchbox raffles.) WB made a huge impact with their giant Smallville and Superman Doomsday animation bags, which are probably the largest that Comic Con has ever seen, and meanwhile, Kevin Smith’s Reaper got a lot of play outside the convention hall, with promoters handing out postcards at the pedestrian intersections between the San Diego Convention Center and downtown.

The other big thing that struck me was the amount of DIY painted icon projects that exhibitors had on hand. The Lucasfilm Pavilion broke out with a series of Darth Vadar helmet re-paints, from Van Gogh’s Starry Night to a very disturbing (yet very amusing) “Carmen Mirandarth”:

On the other side of the hall, a company was selling these Qee dolls—I have no idea what they were either—which filled up several shelves:

     

Apparently, you could buy and paint a blank doll. I’m not really sure about what the point was, but they were cute.

And finally, a shot of the Human Computing convention crew aping the 300 cast:

Fin.