San Diego Comic-con; what as become of thee?

At the Game of Thrones panel at San Diego Comic-Con George RR Martian referred to the convention as the Geek Capital of the World.  I of course have already conceded that title to San Diego for that one week a year, but I am still pulling for Seattle to get it for the rest.

However despite this being true there is a sense of disappointment coming off of this year’s event. My original hope had been to make daily updates coming out of the convention, but that didn’t work because honestly there wasn’t a lot of news coming out.

And the reason goes to the heart of something bothering a lot of comic fans. San Diego Comic-con has become a media event where the comic books themselves are basically an afterthought.

So here is my post-mortem of the event.

What was the major hype this year? Twilight, True Blood, Game of Thrones, and Immortals.  Ok sure you had the Marvel Movies and Cowboys and Aliens as well, but do most people even know that Cowboys and Aliens is based on a comic?

And outside of the fanbase of the Stars, why are Castle and Burn Notice there? At least Twilight and True Blood are genre appropriate for the fanboy crowd.

As for the comic panels, Marvel seemed to be pushing their other media projects, which made sense considering the quality of the comics lately.   DC hyped the relaunch, but I don’t think I learned much that I hadn’t already learned.  In fact the DC news that interested me the most wasn’t even directly comic related, it was the upcoming Green Lantern DLC for DC Universe Online (Which I will cover in a future post.)

And the best stories coming out of the con as a whole are about bad behavior. Rhys Ifan who is playing the Lizard in the upcoming Spider-man movie showed up drunk and pushed a con security member, leading to him getting cited by the police.

Geoff Beckett of Shocker Toys was served court papers during his panel by an artist suing over an allegation of non-payment. I’m will to bet it was a boring panel up to that point.

So where does this leave San Diego Comic-con. I suppose we must resign ourselves to the fact that it is now predominately a part of the Hollywood Hype machine, and that we should feel lucky comic books are given any time at all.