The Ride Home

–I spent the afternoon in room 1AB, as I had two panels to cover for the mothership, and I wanted to make sure I had a seat. First up, as I mentioned earlier, was the Matt Wagner panel.

Of note: “Wagner then went on to talk about Grendel: Behold the Devil, the #0 issue of which is debuting at SDCC later today, with the #1 issue debuting in September. Along with a six page tease of the story, the #0 issue, Wagner said, includes the first part of the ‘definitive’ Grendel interview, conducted by Newsarama’s Matt Brady, which will continue on Newsarama.com for several weeks, starting on Monday, July 30th.”

Matt Brady is a HUGE Grendel fan; when we were in line for the panel, he started talking about the various eras and characters who took on the role, and you could see his passion for it. So this series of interviews will be must reading for Wagner/Grendel fans.

–Next was Darwyn Cooke, which I reported on. After that was a Scott Kurtz/PvP panel … I was in the back working on the Cooke story, so I really didn’t get to listen to it. They showed a couple of episodes of the PvP web cartoon, and they announced that it would soon be available on the XBox 360. The crowd for that panel was very enthusiastic. There were a couple of cheap shots against DC’s new webcomic initiative, Zuda Comics, which I’m sorry I didn’t hear.

–After that was the Brian Wood panel, which I covered for the main site. It was a little more low key, and they showed a lot of artwork from Northlanders. Colorist Dave McCaig is the shit … this book is going to look nice. I linked to a blog post from Brian Wood earlier this week where he said he had a graphic novel that would be announced here. He referenced it in the panel, but said it wouldn’t be announced today. I asked Will Dennis, his Vertigo editor, about it, and he said it wasn’t anything Brian was doing for him. Hmmm.

Black Metal

–Cool loot: AdHouse Books scores points for two books — The Paul Pope THB: Comics from Mars book, and The Ride Home by Joey Weiser. Also got Black Metal by Rick Spears and Chuck BB. I plan to start on one of these in a few minutes after I post this. And I got to meet Tim Leong and Laura Hudson of Comic Foundry fame in person, which was cool … they gave me a copy of the preview they had.

–Apparently the big panels today were the Paramount panel and the Lost panel. And by big I mean standing room only, with lots of people in line not making it in, including our own Tom Bondurant. He’ll likely file a report on it himself, but he missed both panels because they couldn’t fit more people in the rooms they were in. Bags & Boards has a picture of the line for the Lost panel.

–The local San Diego TV station just did a story on Comic-Con … they said about 60,000 people walk through the doors each day of the con. Then out of those 60,000, guess who they chose to interview for their story? If you didn’t have a costume, you didn’t get airtime …