Conventions

Kick off New York Comic Con in style with the Liberty bash, co-sponsored by the CBLDF, Image Comics and The Beat! It's shaping up to be THE don't miss social event of the show for reals. All are welcome but a $10 donation gets you a gift bag, and $30 gets you an OPEN BAR wristband! Details below:

While we haven't been too wild about software that delivers an ongoing RSS feed of your movements, when we were approached to look at the new location based social networking platform Maphook, we were more intrigued. Instead of just telling the world where you are and what you are doing, users collaborate to create a "story" about an event using "hooks" -- tweets, photos, posts, scores, Wikipedia entries, factoids and so on. It's sort of localized social networking combined with journaling, which is why we like it. Instead of having to go all over the place and search for info, it's archived in one spot.

While everyone we know is in a tizzy getting ready for New York Comic Con -- and the certain to be epic drinking fest surrounding NYCC -- the Wizard Big Apple Comic-Con was held this weekend, and nobody really noticed. You may recall that there was outrage and anxiety last year when Wizard announced it would hold the show the very same weekend as New York Comic Con. However, in the spring it was announced the Wizard show would move to the week ahead of NYCC, and also change venues from the huge Pier 94 facility to the much smaller Penn Plaza Pavilion, traditional site of the Big Apple Con.

As announced last evening, CCI: San Diego's board, despite intense wooing from other cities, has decided to keep Comic-Con in San Diego. The announcement has been met with generally universal relief thus far. Yes, we moan, we complain, but exchanging the city of San Diego's mild temperatures and convenient layout for the bland boulevards of Anaheim or gang-infested alleys of Los Angeles wouldn't have really been much of an improvement. It isn't much of a surprise, really -- things had been going this way for a while and it was very clear that the board wanted to stay in San Diego.

It's official, via a press release. After long, complex negotiations that involved serious offers from Los Angeles and Anaheim, Comic-Con International: San Diego has just announced they will stay in the city they are named for. With the Con's contract with the convention center expiring in 2012, and the facilities MAXED out for space, everyone has been wondering if the con would move to a different city that offered more perks, The city of San Diego has been seen as indifferent to the biggest civilian convention of the year, although that has changed in the last couple of years.

Here it is!. A ton of comics, manga, anime and TV programming. UPDATE: We've been provided with a text file so you can see who and what is on each panel. Over 300 panels, and surely the most extensive anime/manga program ever in NYC...and the comics aren't bad either. A lot to look at but we've already marked this one down:

How many conventions can one comics-crazy town hold? We're about to find out as the dates for KING CON in Brooklyn have just been announced: November 4-7 at the Brooklyn Lyceum. That's three weeks after the New York Comic-Con, and four weeks before the next Brooklyn Comics Arts Festival. And the show is expanding to four days from two this year. X-MEn writer Chris Claremont has just been announced as the Guest of Honor.

The gang is all here, and it's awesome. Old skool comics as they are made and loved. Julia Wertz reading at SPXplosion at Atomic Books....

We've just posted the info on the upcoming Jet City Comic Show, which takes place September 25th in Seattle at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. It's a new one-day show with a nice guest lineup:

Portland's Stumptown Comics Fest, an increasingly popular stop on the indie comics festival circuit, is moving to the Oregon Convention Center, a bigger venue...

Wow, shit gets very, very personal in this installment.

Sounds like CCI: San Diego isn't the only comics show having some growing pains: There were HUGE lines and crowds at this weekend's FanExpo...