Catching up on a few things around the web. David Glanzer, San Diego Comic-Con marketing guru, does the rounds and hints there may be changes next year to control crowds, including perhaps those rumored off-sites?

Yeah, that’s always a concern. You want to try to have people in one location, and there are methods that can be implemented to alleviate some of the situations that are of most concern. The facility was not closed down this year, and we recognized that potential early on. Maybe next year, we need to look at it from farther away and be a little more prepared for that.

With that said, there are other ways of dealing with crowd issues – there are things that we can do, and probably will next year that alleviate some of the stress and congestion in certain areas. One of the things we need to do now is have our annual debriefing, and that will include members from every department within the show, the convention facility, and with the city so we can address situations that need to be addressed.


Meanwhile, over at Comics Should Be Good! the Snark Free Corner explains how to make things comick-booky and we immediately make it snarky!

This is something that the cool science fiction comic writers like Arnold Drake realized, and what current writers like Grant Morrison and Joe Casey know….and now YOU can, too!!!

How to make cool comic words.

The first step is to find a normal word that you want to use. Better to use big words, but you can use small words, if you’d like.

A good example is, say, transformer.

Normal, standard word, right?

Okay, here is the trick.

You pick ANOTHER word, a word more identified with comics, and add that to the BEGINNING of the word (normally with a hyphen, but not always).

Cosmic-transformer!!

Space-transformer!!

Infinity-transformer!!

See how easy it is?


Here’s a bit of news we missed along the way: NECA, the high-end indie toy company has gotten the master license for…HARRY POTTER. That means they can make not just beautiful statues but action figures — the whole nine yards! ONe thing we noted in all the coverage is that WB and Mattel, for the former master license holder, obviously had no lvoe lost, as they blamed each other for bad quarters. ICv2 explains:

In spite of the fact that the Harry Potter films have continued to do extremely well at the box office and the Harry Potter novels remain strong sellers, Mattel was never able to make the license work, although its initial wave of Potter toys did well, Mattel has been proclaiming disappointment in sales of its Potter products in its financial reports since mid 2002.

NECA’s more collector-oriented sensibility might be just what the Potter toy franchise needs — and like the young magician himself, Potter fans are growing older so it remains for NECA to figure out a way to appeal to the segment of Potter fandom that wants three-dimensional Potter merchandise.

1 COMMENT

  1. Yeah, Mattel conveniently overlooks the face that most of their Potter toys sucked harder than a Dementor. The wife and I own a few (being both major toy geeks and major Potter geeks), but we would buy more if they didn’t suck. Thus, NECA getting the license gives me hope.