Comic-Con

Tickets to Comic-Con International — the annual pop culture expo that takes over San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter — will go on sale Saturday, Feb. 16, at 9 a.m. PST, the organization announced on its website Friday. Comic-Con badge sales are open to the general public, but all registrants must set up a member ID by Feb. 11 in order to register on Feb. 16. Comic-Con’s registration system is notorious for glitches and server crashes, as well as for selling out in minutes after opening. The member ID system aims to limit registrants to one ticket apiece — an effort to curb scalping. The convention — to be held July 18-21 at the San Diego Convention Center — is a gathering of some 130,000 professionals and enthusiasts in the realms of sci-fi, fantasy, video games, comics and horror. The expo features […]

San Diego has won a skirmish in its war with Los Angeles and Anaheim to retain Comic-Con International, but the outcome of the tri-city battle over tourism dollars remains in doubt. San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, down to his final weeks in office, announced Monday that Comic-Con organizers have agreed to extend their contract to use the waterfront convention center by one year, to 2016, meaning that superheroes, villains, cyborgs and stormtroopers from around the globe will flock to the city for at least four more conventions, Sanders announced. Comic-Con turns San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter, adjacent to the convention center, “into a kind of high-tech ‘Twilight Zone,’ with some of the best people-watching you’ll ever see,” Sanders said at a triumphant news conference attended by city officials and Comic-Con organizers. Los Angeles and Anaheim, with larger convention centers than San […]

NEW YORK — There’s only one thing east of the Mississippi River that could bring together such disparate forces as the Joker, Princess Zelda and Pokémon — and that’s New York City’s Comic Con, which runs through this weekend. Once a distant second to the fanboy Goliath held in San Diego each summer, Gotham is creeping on its more mature West Coast cousin, long considered the world’s largest gathering of comic book and pop culture fans. Last summer, the 42-year-old San Diego convention drew an estimated 125,000, but this weekend’s New York event is expected to attract 115,000 — up from last year’s 105,000. The attendance figures for the New York event, which is being held at the cavernous Jacob Javits Center, are all the more impressive considering it’s only been around for six years. It’s quickly become one of […]

For comic book fans of the 1960s and 1970s, the name Neal Adams was an especially electrifying signature to see on a cover — there was no artist in the era that was more distinctive or dynamic than the man who brought an especially evocative commercial art sensibility to Batman, Green Lantern and the X-Men. For the newest episode of “Hero Complex: The Show,” we talked to Adams about some of his most memorable covers and the unpredictable art of superhero iconography. The interview, the first of two parts, was conducted on the floor of Comic-Con International in San Diego – it was on the convention’s second day in the hour before the show opened, in case you were wondering why the crowd was so thin. – Geoff Boucher RECENT AND RELATED Women in comics and the tricky art of equality Joe Kubert, the good soldier […]

Ellen Page is no stranger to the role of an outsider soul flirting with the desperate edges of life — she’s been there before in “Whip It,” “Mouth to Mouth” and “Super” — but now she’s skirting the emotional ledge for a video game. In “Beyond: Two Souls,” Page plays Jodie Holmes, a young girl with an eerie–  and deadly — imaginary friend. For players, meanwhile, the creepiness is only deepened by some truly unsettling graphics. Developed by Quantic Dream, ”Beyond” features the sort of photo-realistic facial animation that leads to a lot of double-take glances. Quantic unveiled a demo of the animation engine in February to a rapt audience at the Game Developer Conference. Rather than the plasticky pseudo-humans found in so many games, the demo showed the face of Kara, a robot with translucent skin and expressive gray eyes. Kara is designed to trick viewers into thinking she has a soul. Likewise, “Beyond” pushes […]

If you mapped the career of Mark Frost you’d see a line that veers across medium (he’s written, produced and directed in television and film, and as a bestselling author he’s published four novels and four nonfiction books) and lingers in unexpected terrain (acclaimed golf histories, historical fiction, a sitcom, writing stints on “Hill Street Blues” and “The Six-Million Dollar Man”). But the 58-year-old may be best known as the co-creator of “Twin Peaks,” the strange, hypnotic mystery dance that lasted 30 unique episodes in 1990-91. We caught up with Frost at Comic-Con International to talk about “The Paladin Prophecy” — his ninth book but his first for the young adult shelf — which arrives in September with a sci-fi mystery about a special youngster who is destined to join an ancient struggle against dark forces. HC: “The Paladin Prophecy” looks […]

In September 1982, Gilbert, Jaime and Mario Hernandez published their first Fantagraphics issue of “Love and Rockets” but it premiered first at Comic-Con International in San Diego — and if you do the math you’ll see why this year’s convention was a special one for the illustrious family brand known simply as Los Bros Hernandez. Thirty years in the independent scene have made the Oxnard brothers a signature name at Comic-Con (not to mention the Southern California publishing and art scene) but Jaime Hernandez said it didn’t get off to an auspicious start. “The first time we spotted ‘Love and Rockets’ some guy was already selling it for half-off.” There was a far more impassioned response at the 2012 convention as fans cheered the news about three upcoming Los Bros Hernandez releases (including “Love and Rockets: New Stories” No. 5) and a push into the […]

Clark Kent writes for the Daily Planet but his new biographer, Larry Tye, filed his own front-page stories for the Boston Globe and Louisville Courier-Journal. Tye, author of “Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend,” is fresh from Comic-Con International where he was promoting “Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero,” the 432-page hardcover from Random House that is being billed as the first “full-fledged biography” of the character that is called both Kal-El and Kent. We talked to Tye about the ramping interest in “Man of Steel,” the Warner Bros. film that will put a new version of the hero on the screen just in time for his 75th anniversary next summer. HC: This is an era of haunted anti-heroes like Batman, Wolverine, James Bond. We also have decadent tricksters — Jack Sparrow, Tony Stark, maybe even the new Capt. Kirk — and empowered […]

Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, Captain Hook and Jack and the Beanstalk are coming to Season 2 of “Once Upon A Time,” creators revealed during Comic-Con International. The new season will also reveal the identity of Henry’s father, what happened to Rumplestiltskin’s son Baelfire, and the fairy tale alter-ego for mysterious Dr. Whale, the series creators Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis told their panel audience of roughly 4,000 in Ballroom 20 at the San Diego Convention Center on Friday. Kitsis and Horowitz were joined on the panel by Lana Parrilla (the Evil Queen), Ginnifer Goodwin (Snow White), Jennifer Morrison (Emma Swan), Emilie de Ravin (Belle), Meghan Ory (Red Riding Hood) and Josh Dallas (Prince Charming). ABC’s “Once Upon a Time” has become a smash hit, drawing an enthusiastic audience despite its small budget and unconventional story line. The show is set in […]

You hear a lot of bizarre alien conversation at Comic-Con International, but the strangest one I heard this year was between a vintage comics dealer and a shocked collector asking about a nice copy of “Iron Man” No. 55, the February 1973 issue that features the first appearance of Thanos. “I’m asking $6,000 for it,” the dealer said Sunday afternoon without irony or wink. “I know that’s high — hey, that’s really high — but that’s next year’s price.” The issue was a nice one (a slabbed copy, a certified 9.6 grade in appraised condition), but that sounded like an example of galaxy-level overpricing to me. I walked over to an adjacent booth where I saw a familiar face, Ted VanLiew, the owner of the Hampton, Mass.-based Superworld. He seemed only mildly shocked by the Never Never Land negotiation and the number of zeros involved. A year or two after you could […]