News & Notes From The San Diego Convention Floor



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* first time I remember getting a warning from AMTRAK on the occasion of Del-Mar and SDCC taking place the same day. Plus business class is sold out. This should be interesting.

* twitter news of the evening -- the Julie Doucet book is out. Second twitter news of the evening -- so is the Lutes.

* the writer Gail Simone will be doing some line-wide shaping of the superhero material published by Lion Forge. There are a lot of superhero lines, and it's a very specific sub-genre, so I don't expect anything all that different or groundbreaking from this material. People like variations on the standard formulas, though, a lot. If Mark Millar can have 27,000 TV shows made out of his riffs on the standards, there can be a workable line from as sturdily funded and confident a company as Lion Forge.

* some of the noticeable absences in terms of movie announcements at CCI are being turned into a business story. I think the show will be fine only attracting 87 of the 89 things out there. In fact, I think the show would do fine attracting 40 of those 89 things. The desire of the studios to announce efforts at the convention have been actively tenuous for about six-seven years now, and with results mixed and the context constantly shifting there is bound to be some energy in the going/not-going area.

* DC will accept returns on regular-cover versions of its recent Batman/Catwoman wedding comics that came out right after plot points were revealed in a NYT preview article. I'm all for retailers getting a hand whenever one is offered and I'm sort of generally against those preview articles that talk breathlessly about plot points in superhero comics as if they were real-world events, so I guess I'm glad to hear this. I've long believed that serial superhero comics exist as delivery system for narrative updates more than as a pleasurable experience, and this kind of thing tends to confirm that way of thinking.

* I couldn't get this to load, but it's apparently video from last night's Preview Night. Speaking of energy, there is a lot in the exclusive toys part of the field, leading to adjustments from toy-makers, leading to complaints from fans and philosophical discussions as to how the exclusives should work. That's not my world, but I think this kind of mercantile judo has been a boon for some longstanding comics-related properties just as a way to goose them a bit in terms of attention.

* finally: I don't think I've seen preview articles on individual panels before.

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photos and additional reporting by Whit Spurgeon

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posted 5:25 pm PST | Permalink
 

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