A World of WonderCon: The Coverage Round-Up
From the stories coming out of WonderCon, it looks like the San Francisco convention is quickly approaching the high profile of its San Diego counterpart, with similar big-name announcements, celebrity appearances and, well, masses of stormtroopers popping up during the show.
Here’s a rundown of some of the highlights:
Saturday night’s Iron Man panel featured director Jon Favreau answering questions about the film — and the potential for a sequel — before showing off new footage from the film. SuperHeroHype has a great recap of the panel and footage. SHH also sat down with Favreau for a recorded interview that they’ve made available in downloadable mp3 format.
As for your dose of convention drama, Blog@’s Graeme McMillan ignited a veritable sh*tstorm around the InterWebs when he chose not to report a portion of the Bill Willingham Spotlight due to the creator’s request. Apparently (and this is what I’m gleaning from the online chatter), Willingham revealed some spoiler-esque info regarding Fables and an upcoming Fables-related project and subsequently asked reporters not to report on any of it. McMillan obliged, and was later dragged from his hotel room by an angry mob of comics fans, savagely beaten, then tarred, feathered and dumped in the bay — or the online equivalent, at least.
McMillan’s Blog@ associate J.K. Parkin not only reports on all of this, but also makes sure to get a word-for-word recap of the information that caused all of the ruckus.
One of the biggest announcements coming out of the show was the upcoming presence of J. Michael Straczynski’s name on DC projects. Both Newsarama and CBR have fairly comprehensive coverage of this one, of course.
One of my new favorite places to peruse headlines, io9, was all over WonderCon this year. According to this report, there will be significantly less lesbian action and teen death in the DC Universe from this point forward. Aw, shucks. I was hoping that we were building to a perfect Slumber Party Massacre storm of convergence.
Dark Horse Comics continues to know what’s what in the webcomics scene with their announcement of new comics they’ll be publishing in collected print volumes. After the success of their Perry Bible Fellowship collection, who can blame them?
The Beat’s newly enagaged (congrats!) Heidi MacDonald points readers to this collection of video from WonderCon that’s, well, pretty darn impressive. Hoo-rah for YouTubers!
CBR also has a nice recap of what was intended to be a spotlight panel on Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier, but ended up being a solo event for Aragones. The Groo creator teases a potential crossover ‘tween his creation and another, sorta famous barbarian.
Aragones mentioned a number of upcoming and possible projects, including a crossover between Groo and Conan – “which I’ve been against all my life; characters crossing over – but they’ve been after us to do it for some time, since Dark Horse got the rights to Conan At first I said no.” But he was eventually convinced, “because both are barbarians,” and as the icing on the cake, he and Evanier have written themselves into the story: “I’m in it and Mark is in it; we’re both in it. I didn’t want Groo to lose to Conan and they don’t want Conan to lose to Groo, so solving the problem was the problem. And then one day I saw a movie called ‘Rashomon.’ And that’s about how people see things – from different points of view, and I saw how to write it. Tom Yeats is drawing Conan, and I’m doing the rest.
Image Comics is pairing Civil War writer Mark Millar with Ex Machina‘s Tony Harris for what looks to be a very impressive series titled War Heroes. There aren’t many details to be found online about the series, but CBR has a photo of the promotional art, which looks amazing.
As usual, Top Cow had loads of art to show off during their WonderCon panel. Honestly, the folks over at Top Cow probably don’t need to bother with discussion during their panels. From what I’ve seen, they could just show up, turn on the slideshow, then quietly pack up and exit — and no one would complain. The art is that good.
If you have a few hours to kill, there are WonderCon photo galleries to be found in every corner of the ‘Net. The crew at Blog@ has a pair of small photo galleries from the show, mostly of creators and celebrities, including a funny/scary pair of Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) shots (part one, part two). LaughingSquid has a gallery of very sharp photos from the show, too.
If coverage round-ups are more your style (which is probably the case if you’ve read this far) CBR also has a nice, comprehensive list of links to the massive amount of coverage they gave WonderCon.
(photo used in this article: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)
LMFAO, ahh the internet.