The 30 Most Awesome Notes on WonderCon 2010

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At a panel Saturday evening at WonderCon, the immense comic book convention held this past weekend at San Franciso’s Moscone Center, a cluster of comics bloggers asserted that the most popular features on their sites, by far, are lists. So, because blog readers demanded it, here’s a list of observations from this year’s show.

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WonderCon: Into the Third Dimension!

1. WonderCon is roughly a third the size of Comic-Con International San Diego at this point: very, very large, but not mind-fryingly so. In part, that’s because it’s not the non-stop Hollywood-fest that San Diego is. That’s beginning to change, though; the largest ballroom at the Moscone Center featured movie and TV panels and previews all day Saturday, and generally came off like a more civilized version of Comic-Con’s infamous Hall H.

2. The most dedicated cosplayer on the show floor was probably the Alien alien, but I particularly appreciated the guy dressed as the Zur-En-Arrh Batman (pictured here).

(More on Techland: Photo Essay: The Secret World of Cosplay)

3. One unexpected announcement came from Detective Comics, Blackest Night: Wonder Woman and Action Comics writer Greg Rucka at a fascinating and unusually-candid-for-a-con Friday-afternoon panel: he declared that he’d just finished his final script for DC, and was planning to concentrate on his own projects from here on out. His Batwoman serial with J.H. Williams III, he noted, might not ever get finished–although he and Williams have been developing another project of their own. The split with DC seems to have been amicable enough that Rucka was still signing at their booth later in the weekend (as well as at Oni Press’s booth, where he was promoting the second issue of Stumptown).

4. The comics WonderCon focuses on are generally the periodicals-to-collections kind: DC, Dark Horse, IDW, Image, Boom! Studios and Avatar all had substantial, bustling booths, but most of the major art-comics publishers were absent.

5. At the Image booth, British TV interviewer Jonathan Ross was signing the first issue of his and Tommy Lee Edwards’ gangsters-and-aliens miniseries Turf.

6. Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan made a surprise appearance on Saturday to show a preview of his forthcoming movie Inception. It’s a dark, surreal variation on heist-movie tropes, involving a company that’s discovered a way to invade and plunder people’s dreams. It looked terrific: crisp angles, moody colors, an unnerving electronic soundtrack.

(More on Techland: Riddles and Rumors: Big Batman 3 Plot Points)

7. Speaking of Dark Knight: Jim Lee announced that the long, long, long-overdue final six issues of his and Frank Miller’s series All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder will appear beginning in February of next year, under the new title Dark Knight: Boy Wonder.

8. Resident Evil: Afterlife looks like it’s going to involve some particularly in-your-face 3-D effects, judging from the footage shown on Saturday. (So are a lot of other movies: virtually every filmmaker at the convention fielded at least one question about 3-D, whether their movies were actually made with a 3-D process or not.)

9. Jake Gyllenhaal noted that he’s very happy to have gotten to play video games as research for his starring role in Prince of Persia.

10. WonderCon is still small enough that tickets and housing aren’t a problem to find, and in fact a lot of out-of-town visitors and show guests are at a single hotel: the enormous Marriott two blocks away, whose lobby became the default late-evening mingling spot for attendees.

(More on Techland: Is Comic Con Headed to Anaheim?)

WonderCon: Zig-a-Zig Aaaah

11. Another difference between this show and San Diego is that there’s not yet a lot of videogame presence on the show floor–although there was a big booth that ran Just Dance demos all day. (The group seen here was coordinating their moves to the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe.”)

12. Splice director Vincenzo Natali made an appearance to introduce a trailer and an excerpt of his genetic-engineering/body-horror thriller. He noted that it’s “got a little of David Cronenberg’s DNA spliced into it.” (No kidding. Long live the new flesh!)

13. Oni Press, unsurprisingly, had a big display of  Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim books; they were also selling a totally sweet new O’Malley-drawn T-shirt that echoes the design of the movie poster.

(More on Techland: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World Trailer Wins, But Can the Movie K.O.?)

14. At Saturday afternoon’s “Trailer Park” program of trailers for upcoming movies, a chorus of dudes started booing loudly from the very first shot of the trailer for Twilight: Eclipse. Apparently there’s a certain kind of fanboy who doesn’t just dislike sparkly vampires but feels threatened by them.

15. Nicholas Cage on the visual transformation he underwent for his part in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: “I come from the Lon Chaney, Sr., school of acting.”

16. The Artists’ Alley area on the show floor was anchored by convention stalwarts like Colleen Doran, Frank Cho and Sergio Aragonés. The rest of its aisles were a mixture of industry veterans selling original art, aspiring fantasy artists hoping somebody would notice them, artists who thrive on interaction with their readers (Larry Marder, as usual, had a bowl of Beanworld “action figures”: dried beans with faces drawn on them), and people promoting sui generis projects like Anina Bennett and Paul Guinan’s faux-historical coffee-table book Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel.

17. There were vestigial bits of old-school convention culture hovering around the far corners of the exhibit hall, like the aisles devoted to leathery starlets and minor celebrities (e.g. the guy who played the Soup Nazi in that one episode of Seinfeld) who’d let you take your picture with them for $5 to $30.

18. Silicon-enhanced “booth babes” are, blessedly, going out of style. The first place I encountered any was at the booth promoting the Kick-Ass movie.

(More on Techland: The Addictive, Audacious Kick-Ass: A Spoiler-Free First Look)

19. James Robinson, at a sparsely attended spotlight panel, described his plans for the next year’s worth of Justice League of America, and announced that he’ll also be writing a twelve-issue Shade miniseries (about the supporting character from his old Starman series).

20. The result of five or ten years of high-volume graphic novel publication schedules from Marvel, DC and Image is that there are now vast quantities of graphic novels in circulation that nobody wants. There were half-off-all-books booths scattered all over the show floor, and by Sunday afternoon some retailers were trying to blow out $25 paperbacks for three to five dollars.

WonderCon After Hours

21. A few parties have become annual traditions at WonderCon. The biggest, as usual, was the Saturday-night bash at Isotope, the comics store/lounge whose walls, as seen here, are festooned with toilet seats featuring original drawings by dozens of famous cartoonists. (If you ask nicely, they’ll show you the Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson two-seater that’s effectively Transmetropolitan #71.)

22. Saturday night was also local comics store Comix Experience’s 21st birthday party, a benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund that featured a legendary local taco truck parked out front and serving attendees.

(More on Techland: Hive Mind: What We’re Looking Forward to in April)

23. The coolest con-only item of merchandise was Darwyn Cooke’s The Man with the Getaway Face, a magazine-sized, two-dollar, 24-page adaptation of Richard Stark’s Parker novel. (It’ll be reprinted as the prologue to the adaptation of The Outfit that IDW is publishing in October.) When Cooke announced that he’d be showing up at Isotope’s party in a Mountie outfit, people thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. He looked dashing.

24. IDW also had a couple of other nifty con exclusives, including a preview of their forthcoming G.I. Joe miniseries Hearts & Minds, written by novelist Max Brooks and drawn by Howard Chaykin.

25. Their biggest announcement, though, was that they’ll be publishing a six-issue True Blood miniseries, co-plotted by series creator Alan Ball; David Tischman is one of the comic’s writers (and previously worked on the not-entirely-dissimilar Vertigo series Bite Club). The first issue apparently involves an evil entity that starts picking off the patrons in Merlotte’s Bar, which sounds a bit like one of those early Neil Gaiman Sandman stories.

26. If you were to extrapolate the next year of nerd culture from what people were wearing on the show floor, you’d conclude that the steampunk look is about to break very, very big. Now is the time to invest in pince-nez manufacturers.

27. Since Marvel was largely absent from this show (their presence was limited to a couple of panels, including one featuring editor Axel Alonso), the big comics buzz belonged by default to DC’s forthcoming “Brightest Day” event. The “Brightest Day” panel was packed to capacity (although that might have had a lot to do with the Doctor Who screening immediately following it in the same room). And the only currently Marvel-associated creators on the “special guests” list were Frank Cho and Adam Kubert.

(More on Techland: Doctor Who, The Matt Smith Era: Younger, Darker, A Little Bit Mad)

28. The general tone of WonderCon right now is very much like what Comic-Con International was like a decade or so ago in a lot of ways; the same company runs both, and they’re doing their best to associate the two conventions. (The backdrop in the ballroom alternated the WonderCon logo with the Comic-Con logo.)

29. There was an advance screening of the first episode of Doctor Who with Matt Smith as the Doctor. Unfortunately, it was held not in the ballroom but in the largest room otherwise devoted to comics panels–and Doctor Who is very popular with this crowd. The line was cut off hours before it began.

30. The most significant line WonderCon attendees saw, though, wasn’t for any movie or TV screening: it was at the Apple store a few blocks away, where people were waiting to buy their iPads (on which the Marvel Comics app promptly became a best-seller). Everyone in the industries represented by WonderCon knows that things are about to change; the question is how much, and how quickly.

(More on Techland: Hands-on With the Apple iPad: Eight Hours Later)

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