You never know what to expect with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, the duo behind cult comedy Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! At Adult Swim's Comic-Con press session, Heidecker and Wareheim arrived in Blues Brothers cosplay, carrying cans marked "Terminix."

Shannon Cottrell

Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim at Comic-Con, 2010

​ We couldn't help but wonder what they were doing with the pesticide props. In fact, that's where their latest prank begins.

More >>

Check out our complete coverage of San Diego Comic-Con and Anime Expo. Read Liz Ohanesian's story "Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Conned? The Search for Authenticity at Comic-Con 2010."

For us Southern California geeks, there is no shortage of fan conventions at our disposal. Our two biggies, though, are Anime Expo and San Diego Comic-Con International. Both draw over 100,000 attendees and feature a heavy industry presence, making them the events to hear breaking news regarding your fandom of choice.

Shannon Cottrell

​ Anime Expo takes place annually every Fourth of July weekend at the Los Angeles Convention Center and is a genre-specific event, focusing on anime and manga with some Japanese fashion and popular music added to the mix. Comic-Con is a multimedia, multi-genre extravaganza held at the San Diego Convention Center in late July. They're very different conventions, but because of both the size and the timing, they consume us every July. Here's our comparison.

More >>

Nicole Campos

Len Peralta's W00tstock 2.4 poster - drawn during the show, right on stage!

​For what is typically considered one of the lighter, less big events-heavy days of Comic-Con, this year's must-see-and-do Thursday events in and around the convention center were outrageously plentiful. You had to choose your battles both in the official panels and screenings, and the offsite awesome - and it's awfully rough to choose between the first-ever public screening of Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World with in-house DJs and cast and crew, or the Machete preview party with courtesy taco service by Robert Rodriguez himself. Of course, there was also the weapons-grade-nerd alternative: Head down to 4th & B for the triumphant California return of W00tstock.

Nicole Campos

Wil Wheaton gives Molly Lewis a lyric sheet assist.

​The traveling gathering of nerd culture icons - spearheaded by Wil Wheaton, Mythbusters' Adam Savage, and comedy-folk troubadours Paul & Storm - seemed a no-brainer for the Comic-Con weekend, though it came together relatively quickly. (As Wheaton explained to the crowd "We put a big X in July [for a possible show] thinking 'Well, we're all going to be at Comic-Con, and... wait, we're all going to be at Comic-Con!'")

More >>

Voltaire is a Renaissance man for the convention circuit. An animator, comic book creator and toy designer, he has a lot of reasons to hit up events like San Diego Comic-Con. But Voltaire's best known occupation, the one that brought the Con crowd out of the Gaslamp Quarter and into North Park venue Queen Bee's last Saturday night, is musician.

Shannon Cottrell

​

More >>

Bill Jensen

​
Street marketing is tough. You have to grab a person's attention, get something in their head or their hands, and most importantly, get them to remember what you are pitching for more than three seconds. Tough. But try getting attention when you are standing next to a Stormtrooper Elvis, the Henchmen from The Venture Bros., and more than a few geek girls sporting copious amounts of geek cleavage. Not to mention the perennial Greenpeacers, coupon slingers and 120,000 geeks who have spent their lives calling bullshit on the inauthentic.

Walking on the streets of San Diego, there they were: street teamers pitching everything from web comics to blockbusters. Most of it was immediately tossed into the trash heap of the mind as quickly as it was stuffed into the next waiting trash bin, but five stood out.

More >>

​
With Emmy-winning powerhouses Mad Men and Breaking Bad, AMC is at the forefront of cable TV drama. What fans and geeks have hoped for, this year's Comic-Con audience can attest to, and the rest of the world is about to find out is that the network is poised to break all-new ground in October with The Walking Dead. After last Friday's presentation of the first-ever footage from the initial six-part series adaptation of Robert Kirkman's acclaimed comic books, those who saw all seemed to agree that this might be the project that changes everything - a series so audacious, so damned good that Hollywood finally realizes the medium best suited to adapting long-run comics series is television, where the serial format gives the rich storylines room to breathe and develop.

Horror fans, comics nerds and straight-up TV geeks alike have been buzzing about The Walking Dead for some time now, ever since it was announced that writer-director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), partnered as a producer with Gale Anne Hurd (The Terminator, Aliens), was bringing Kirkman's epic saga of a zombie apocalypse to television. The creator had gone on record more than a few times prior to that stating that he'd refuse the rights to an adaptation if it wasn't going to be done properly. Hurd explains, however, that she and Darabont were determined: "I pursued it. Frank and I tackled Robert Kirkman at the last Comic-Con, we held him down, we plied him with food and drink! And there's a comfort level with AMC, if you look at the other programming they've got. You don't go, 'Oh, they're going to insist on this becoming something that it isn't'."

More >>

Dino Stamatopoulos has an idea for a Christmas episode of Mary Shelley's Frankenhole, his latest stop-motion animation to hit Adult Swim.

Shannon Cottrell

​
"Elizabeth gets into Christmas and it's a hassle for [Frankenstein] so he goes back in time to try and stop the Virgin Mary from getting pregnant and he actually finds out where Christianity really began," he explained to a group of journalists at his Comic-Con roundtable session last Saturday. "That will be the surprise for you kids."

More >>

Really, we didn't intend to meet one Angeleno after the next while in San Diego for Comic-Con, but it happened. It seemed like our entire hometown had picked up and moved to the Gaslamp Quarter for five days. Check out a few fashionable locals we spotted in another city on Day 2 of Comic-Con.

Allie Reimold, Los Angeles

Shannon Cottrell

​ Outfit: "A shirt and pants"
What are you looking forward to seeing at Comic-Con? "A Cheeseburger"

More >>

Nicole Campos

The Avengers, together at last! A genius ending to an insane day...

​
The largest exhibition room at the San Diego Convention Center is Hall H, a huge 6,000-plus seater situated at the complex's south end that every year during Comic-Con International hosts the biggest, baddest, and most fan-anticipated movie and TV sneak previews of all. It's gotten to be such a hot ticket that fans regularly camp outside the venue - sometimes all night - in order to secure a good seat, or even to guarantee that they'll get in at all. (The rooms are never cleared after each panel. If people leave, seats open up and more folks waiting in the long lines are allowed inside the venue.) Because we're as geeky to the core as any of them, and because we're a little bit insane, we decided to slug it out with the masses and get up in the middle of the night to brave our way through the madness, the glory, and this year the shocking drama of random violence (?!) that was Hall H on Saturday at Comic-Con. Here is our journal:

3:34 am: Packing up our gear for the excursion. Desperately trying not to wake our one roommate who has half a brain and is sleeping in today.

3:49 am: Elevator conversation: "I love being up at Ridiculous O'Clock!!"

4:22 am: Walking to the convention center down nearly-deserted Sixth Street, downtown. A man with no shirt is banging furiously on the door to a closed restaurant. C'mon, no shirt, no service, buddy.

Nicole Campos

The shanty town of diehards waiting to get in

​
4:38 am: We've arrived! And we can't get comfy and unfurl our blankets because they are already compressing the line to make more space. Dozens of slumbering fans being rudely awakened and forced to move. It's like a nerd Hooverville.

More >>

​
The big-time film and TV panels that are hosted in the San Diego Convention Center's mammoth Hall H during Comic-Con are usually epic in a number of ways, particularly on Saturday which is the con's busiest day and when all of the marquee blockbusters trot out their teasers and treats for the fans. It's generally a little frantic, with people staying up all night camping out to get a good seat, but other than a mad rush to get in and situated and some high-energy applause throughout the day, there's never too much drama. That ended this year in the late afternoon, when a scuffle between two con attendees resulted in one of them being stabbed near the eye. With a pen. Holy random act of violence, Batman!

More >>