Conventions

Marvel's Secret Wars ECCC panel teases and pleases.

DC Comics brings its upcoming  event to Emerald City with their DC Entertainment: All Access Weeklies and Convergence panel. Among the panelists for this fan...

A lot of Dark Horse Comics were announced yesterday with opening day at Emerald City Comic Con, but probably none more anticipated than the...

Seems like everyone had the same great idea at the same time: with comic-cons proliferating, and nerdlebrities making a circuit out of it, wouldn't this be fine fodder for a realityish TV show/webisode of some kind? And wouldn't actors who had starred in TV shows that had insanely fanatic fanbases but who didn't get much airtime outside of that be the perfect people to do it? It seems both Firefly's Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion and Supernatural's Rob Benedict and Richard Speight, Jr had the same idea. And both have turned to Indiegogo to bring these ideas to fruition.

Getting a hotel room for Comic-con is a physical and mental race against the clock. You need to have Nolan Ryan's fastball, Ronda Rousey's reflexes and Edward Snowden's keyboard skills. It's the ultimate test of nerves for nerds. But some may wonder, just how short IS the window to get a room downtown?

As I write this, the hotel situation for this year's San Diego Comic-Con remains in flux. Open hotel registration—which is in effect a lottery based on hand and browser speed—took place yesterday morning, and it was a tense, tense 10 minutes with confirmation emails yet to go out. Hours of training, both physical and mental, memorizing maps and testing internet speed were all for nought for a bunch of folks—the Beat included—because the website suffered some kind of hitch. Tony Kim has a sad account, backed up by many on Twitter. As the world collectively hit the refresh button at high noon EDT, 9 am PDT, the hotel selection form froze up and then sent you to the "Congrats, wait for your email" screen. That's what happened here. I got the first screen, clicked on some hotels hit return, got kicked out and then sat there in confusion and dread and then went back in. The second time it worked but by then four minutes had passed, four precious, precious minutes, and downtown hotels are usually gone long before that to people with better autofill speeds.

The can-do spirit of Bay Area comics folks has come together for the San Francisco Comics Fest, which just launched a website and announced plans for a full week of comics-related activities kicking off on Sunday May 3 and ongoing all week with with will probably be a CAF-type event May 9-10.

Arrrgh, the most tension filled day of the year for Stately Beat Manor is tomorrow. San Diego Comic-Con hotel registration opens up at noon...

Ben Hatke, Jennifer Holm, Jeff Smith and Raina Telgemeier will be appearing on a panel at BookCon, entitled "Comics Are Awesome!"

UPDATE: I've learned that this show could have been the victim of Wizard World's own aggressive scheduling, as there is an existing SC Comicon, which will be held at the exact same venue next week. Possibly the locals wanted to support the local show. Although this sounds like a change in planning and not part of the Great Con Contraction, even Wizard has decided to postpone one of it's show by a year. Wizard World Greenville, SC was scheduled for May 29-30, 2015 but has been rescheduled for July 15-17, 2016. The reason for the move was given as a scheduling conflict. The TD Convention Center in Greenville was only available for two days, and "Wizard World feels that the fans of Greenville would be best served by a weekend, three-day show for the full Wizard World Comic Con experience."

  So, ReedPOP adds another show to their already crazy schedule, in China!  (Scroll down to the bottom to see the calendar!  Next up: Emerald...

Yesterday we learned that New Jersey is getting a comic-con...and so is China! ReedPOP is launching the Shanghai Comic Convention which will be held in just two months, May 16 and 17th at the Shanghai Convention & Exhibition Center of International Sourcing.