Day Two delivered sexy beast art, half naked men, and more Star Wars nerd than you could shake a stick at. Also mojitos.
That choice quote is from the brain-bending comic Axe Cop written by five-year-old Malachai Nicolle and drawn by his older brother Ethan. I have read it twice now and still have no idea what the story is, but the cover has an axe-wielding cop riding a sun glasses-wearing T. Rex with machine gun arms. I kid you not. The full book comes out this December under Dark Horse.
Friday was a much less productive day than my first day at Comic Con. Much sleep was had, much caffeine consumed, and many tasty foodstuffs nommed. The reduced productivity level was mostly caused by the dramatic increase in the convention population which, in turn, was caused by the crazy amount of celebrities packed into the convention center this afternoon. Among others, today contained celebrity-choked panels on The Walking Dead, Drive Angry 3D, Caprica, Skyline, The Big Bang Theory, Super, The Cape, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, The Other Guys, The Green Hornet, Priest, Falling Skies, True Blood, Being Human, and Free Enterprise 2: The Wrath of Shatner. It was also the afternoon of Joss Whedon and everything Star Wars, so nerd fever was running high.
All that meant that my friends and I couldn’t do much of anything except stand in line, get yelled at by security guards who thought way too much of their minimum wage jobs, and admire the ABSOLUTELY ASTOUNDING costumes. We were able to get into two panels: “AMC’s The Walking Dead” (Andrew Lincoln, Jon Bernthal, Sarah Wayne Callies, Laurie Holden, Emma Bell, Frank Darabont, Gale Anne Hurd, Robert Kirkman, Greg Nicotero, Joel Stillerman, and Bear McCreary) and “Bite Me: Evolving Urban Fantasy Beyond the Vampire Phenomenon” (Tanya Huff, Mario Acevedo, Merri Destefano, Jocelynn Drake, Richard Kadrey, Lauren Kate, Marjorie M. Liu, and Diana Gill).
The Walking Dead was a fantastic panel, and the only part of Comic Con that I really, really, REALLY wanted to see. Honestly, I could go home today, the panel was that good. Very little of the story line was revealed (except that the show is both following and diverging from the graphic novel), but a lot of that had to do with the fact they are still shooting (they’re in the middle of shooting episode four). Many of the characters like the Governor and Michonne haven’t even been cast yet and aren’t slated to show up until season two…if there even is one, though the cast and crew sounded fairly certain that there would be.
They showed the trailer twice and, let me tell you, it is fraking awesome. We’re talking Mad Men and Breaking Bad awesome. Any concerns you may have had about AMC neutering out the gore and violence can be put to rest: it is a bloody, bloody show. At yesterday’s Caprica/BSG panel Bear McCreary hinted that he’d have some great secret to reveal today, but I was just as surprised as everyone else when he showed up on stage to announce that he was composing the score. I didn’t think it was possible to be even more excited about The Walking Dead, but I am apparently so full of zombie squees that I have to keep editing out exclamation marks.
“Bite Me,” on the other hand, was depressingly boring. I can’t remember who the moderator was (she was the editor for several of the authors) but all of her questions were either frustratingly vague or asked in such a way that all the authors came up with variations on the same answer. The audience questions were even worse. I was stuck in a room with 200 suethors with no way to escape.
Between panels we wandered the convention center examining the great—and evilly overpriced—steampunk wares and pretending to be interested in Artist Alley. We caught glimpses of Sean Patrick Flanery, Aaron Douglas and Magda Apanowicz, and I was manhandled by Spartans. Sexy, sexy Spartans.
We had planned to go to the “Girls Gone Genre: Movies, TV, Comics, Web” panel because Felicia Day and Marti Noxon were going to be on it until we found out Melissa Rosenberg was also going to be there. As you may have gathered I have very intense feelings toward the Twilight Saga, none of them positive. Since that one was out we tried to get into “Girls Who Kick Ass: A New Generation of Heroines” but the line was so long we couldn’t see the end. So we ditched the Con and went for a stroll through Old Town San Diego instead, then spent the night chilling out in our suffocatingly hot hotel room, one of us listening to Dan Savage’s podcast, another watching Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on cable, and one trying to concentrate on writing her blog post but getting distracted by Facebook and Twitter.
The plan for the rest of the weekend involves continuing to ogle China Miéville and hopefully succeeding in my quest to make Jayne’s cap mine. My precious. It’s ours, it is, and we wants it…
Alex Brown is an archivist in training, reference librarian by day, writer by night, and all around geek who watches entirely too much TV. She is prone to collecting out-of-print copies of books by Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen, and Douglas Adams, probably knows far too much about pop culture than is healthy, and thinks her rats Hywel and Odd are the cutest things ever to exist in the whole of eternity. You can follow her on Twitter if you dare…
