Culture

One of the greatest joys of Comic-Con is the quest for food, as regular Beat readers know. From a filling lunch consisting of a handful of carrots to a hearty dinner of clawing at the last crumbs of chips at the Wired Cafe happy hour, Comic-Con is a food orgy for the hardworking folks at Stately Beat Manor. Luckily some people have a clearer idea of where to go to grab a bite. The folks at CCI haveput up an exhaustive list of restaurants, including many con specials where you need to just show your badge to get extra goodies or a discount. The locals love Comic-Con --it's official!

Trolling the internet while on vacation, I was chilled down to the bone (impressive given the 100+ temperatures in Texas) to see on the announcement on the Center for Cartoon Studies website that the Xeric Award would be no more. Since 1992, Peter Laird of the amazeballs black and white comic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (self-published in 1984) has granted two awards a year to a cartoonist or project for its excellence.

Everyone's wondering what Warner Brothers will do now that the end of Harry Potter is upon us. One save-the-day idea being thrown around is getting the long awaited adaptation of Vertigo's Fables off the ground.

As you were.

Hi, I’m Lauren, and I’m a Comic-Con virgin. I’m also a graduate student in Fine Art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where I’m currently preparing for advancement to MFA candidacy in the form of my first solo exhibition. I’m attending Comic-Con this year mostly to do research for said solo exhibition. Most of my work in the past year has been concerned with the idea of romantic love— Is it real? If so, how’s it work? How are our perceptions of love influenced by pop culture, or are they even, perhaps, entirely resulting from it?

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Hi, I’m Ali. And I’m a Comic-Con Virgin. That’s right, next week I’ll be flying out to San Diego for my First Time with the biggest, baddest, craziest, most epic, mother of all comic book conventions. Some how, I don’t think SDCC will be gentle.

For those of you happily staying home in NYC instead of braving nerd prom, you are being rewarded by an amazing event: The Fine Art of Comics, with Gary Panter, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware at the Whitney Museum on July 20th. Held in conjunction with a show on Lyonel Feininger, this trio of masters will talk about comics and fine art.

In conjunction with the Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, Diamond is helping launch the Fandom Advisory Network, a collecting oriented advocacy network for all kinds of collectors. The organization will launch at Comic-Con of course, with signings and a contest to be named the Ultimate Fan of 2011.

When DC released a bunch of October Bat-book covers the other day, it was quickly noticed that Starfire's costume had gotten much smaller, a natural move for the exhibitionist alien. It was also noticed that part of the Red Hood had gotten bigger.