Cultural Cuisinart

I'll be discussing this some more later on in the week on my new podcast, but here's a quick round up of how comic con went this week.

First of all, from reports I heard from people who had attended previous comic cons here, this was the biggest one they've had yet. On Friday, all of Saturday's tickets had already been sold out, and I heard one volunteer mention that there were 70,000 (!) people there on Saturday. Because of this, there were endless lines and crowds of people, and Saturday was actually probably my least favorite day of the convention. I spent literally half the day just queuing up for different panels. I had to go into the 4:00pm Torchwood panel in order to secure a decent spot for the 6:45pm Venture Brothers panel. While I'm glad I got to see Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick (the show creators), ultimately, I ended up spending over 4 hours (1/3 of my day) of my time on that panel. For fans of the Venture Bros, tragically, it seems that Henchmen #24 is dead for good. Doc Hammer was fairly blunt about that. I happened to have my notebook containing my crude Brock Samson sketch, which Doc and Jackson signed for me (I'll upload a scan of that later).

The highlight of Saturday was the Robot Chicken panel, which featured Seth Green, Breckin Meyer, Geoff Johns, and 2 other writers whose names I have forgotten (sorry, guys!). Seth Green was especially charming and funny, but he also did a great job answering questions and returning a lot of the love that the fans were directing towards him. At the end of the panel we got a teaser clip from the upcoming season (including a genius retelling of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but done as an opera).

Sunday I dragged my friend Chris to the show. Chris is a prince among men for indulging my endless quest to find a Green Lantern figurine for my boyfriend, as well as the hour long Joss Whedon panel, where I'm pretty sure he only understood 20% of the stuff being discussed (not that he isn't smart, but it's that Joss Whedon talk is fairly inaccessible to people who aren't intimately familiar with Joss's previous work). I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't screen the entire first episode of Dollhouse, which was the reason we went to the panel in the first place. They only showed the first 10 minutes or so, and then the rest of the time will filled with Q&A.

I've been somewhat following the blogosphere's discussion of Dollhouse, but it's possible I missed the revelation (evident in the clip I saw) that Echo (Eliza Dushku's protagonist) is NOT a human body created by scientists and then programmed, but rather a real life person who has (for reasons unknown at the beginning of the show) reluctantly signed the rights to her body away for 5 years. That sort of changes my whole perception of what the show is going to be about, in that this new scenario brings up all kinds of ethical questions that the previous one did not. On the other hand, I'm a little disappointed, because the idea of home growing human bodies solely for the purpose of personality imprint was a really neat idea and I had been looking foward to exploring that. We'll see - from what I saw at the panel, it seems to be a toss-up to determine who is more nervous and unsure about how good this show is going to be: me, or Joss Whedon himself.

After the Joss Whedon panel (tragically I did not get one of the coveted tickets to the autograph session, which were apparently more rare than the Golden Ticket from Willy Wonka), we just sort of wandered the floor and made our way up and down Artists' Alley. I scored a couple sweet pieces of art, aquired Peter David's signature, and picked up a copy of the first Mouse Guard graphic novel. I also heard some interesting buzz about David's work on X-Factor, which further backed up some praise I'd been hearing on sites like Ain't It Cool News, so I went ahead and scored X-factor #35-38 (they were out of the highly praised and apparently shocking #39, but I'll go ahead and get that here at my local comic book store).

All in all, it was a great time, and I'm super glad I went and got the VIP pass. My only complaint is that the show hours were a touch short, given all the stuff there was to see, and they really need to come up with a better system than "Stand in line 2 hours in advance" for the more popular panels and screenings. Also, I was pretty disappointed that there weren't more full screenings of some of the upcoming films like Watchmen. Full reels, or death! Don't just give us a measly 15-20 minutes of content. Still, consider my inner nerd fat, happy and content for the time being.