• Countdown to Comic-Con 2007!
• Just landed in San Diego
• Comic-Con sum-up ...
• Comic-Con: Wednesday

And the WizKids folks? Top-notch, every one of them. Brand Manager Mark is a machine, and Rae and Jenny (both of whom I'd known earlier only via Email) are phenomenal, and super-community and super-business minded. I made sure to introduce myself to all of the WizKids folks, who were all kind and helpful.

And (without me asking) they hooked me up with a Target exclusive two-pack of the Master Chief and Arbiter. Normally you only get this by pre-ordering Halo 3 from Target. Look for that to show up on my toy blog soon.

And a guy in full Spartan armor was there throughout the day. Just for effect.

Panels:

Just two panels for the day -- the "Hasbro Marvel" panel and the "DC Group Therapy" panel.

Hasbro:

The Hasbro panel was a bit ugly. We missed the first few minutes of it, but there were some angry folks inside for some reason. It might be due to some folks being upset about the Hasbro take on Marvel Legends (kinda understandable), but there were some (2) vehement folks in the room. It felt more like they were mad because they're completests(ists?), and things like chase variant figures make it hard to be a completest. My thought is (a) don't be a completest, and / or (b) realize that if we didn't have at least the figures as chase, we wouldn't have them at all.

I think collectors need to realize that Toy Biz version of legends catered to the collector, but Hasbro is all about the mass market. There are trade-offs there. More on that when I talk about Friday's Mattel / DC panel.

Hasbro did reveal some really cool stuff, like the Marvel Legends Wave 4, which seem to even more improve on the line, and includes first-appearance Daredevil (and red-suited variant), Black Bolt (and blue-suited variant, but I wish he was yelling), Punisher (with Crossbones variant). Wal-Mart will be getting two-pack exclusives of Cannonball & Domino and Cable & Marvel Girl, and on the Icons side we'll be seeing red suited Daredevil (with a first-appearance variant), Phoenix (with Dark Phoenix variant), Colossus, and Nightcrawler. In the case I also saw what looked like an Astonishing X-Men Cyclops Marvel Icon.

There are also going to Marvel Legends of Tigra, Nova, and Astonishing X-Men Beast, probably before December.

I also met writer / columnist Troy from Newsarama.com, who was knowledgeable and very pleasant.

DC Group Therapy:

This was a fun panel, and while I'm not a huge DC fan, per se, I really like Dan Didio, and all of the panelists -- Geoff Johns, Sean McKeever, Gail Simone, Tony Bedard, Eddie Berganza, Mike Marts, Mike Siglain, and (especially) Dwayne McDuffie.

Other Cool Stuff:

I missed the Marvel / MAXUM Games "Demons of Mercy" panel, which I really wanted to attend to check out the comic book / video game interaction. But I was in the room a couple of panels after that, and found that someone had left their Comic-Con Demons of Mercy comic. So, score!

And I got to meet a ton of cool people, and connect with folks I hadn't seen for a while. The Cartoon Network MMO folks in particular, are a great group of folks, and were very helpful in letting me try out the "alpha" version of the game answer questions, hook me up with a prelude comic, and just generally have fun. I also talked to several game and animation companies on the voice acting front, and they were much more helpful and responsive than I've experienced (sadly) in Austin.

What Sucked:

We had big plans to see the Superman Doomsday premiere that night, and the panel following that would include Bruce Timm, Gregory Noveck, Brandon Vietti, Lauren Mongomery, and Duane Capizzi.

But remember the lines I complained about? This night, we were victims. After waiting in line for an hour, we were the first people not allowed into the ballroom. We're talking they literally stopped us at the door, we could see in, and they wouldn't let the two of us inside. And then things got ugly. People who allegedly had been inside couldn't get back inside. People who had friends inside that were saving seats couldn't get inside. Then the fire marshal was doing a sweep, said there were too many people, and they were going to eject more. After about a half an hour of this ugliness, we left, bummed to have missed the premiere and the panel with one of our mutual idols.

The silver lining? The fine folks at Microsoft made the panel available for download over Xbox Live. Score again!

Pictures:

(Reverse chronology.)

Labels: acting, biz, business, comic books, Comic-Con, Comic-Con 2007, events, toys, voice acting