Well, I've finally gotten back home from my family adventure in Cleveland. I've been spending some time trying to catch up on the world of comic news, which I was completely isolated from during Comic-Con International. To date, I have not attended a comic convention in San Diego. In fact, the only con I've attended outside Ohio was the Chicago Con a few years ago, and that was only for a couple of hours. So, as usual, most of my convention information comes third-hand, mostly the Internet. This year, however, G4 was able to host a special edition of Attack of the Show live from within the convention itself. I was excited and set up the DVD-R to record it.
Now, they only had two hours devoted to the show. And considering the convention lasts five days, they're obviously going to gloss over quite a lot. Also, this is television coverage of what has become more a celebration of pop culture than just a comic book convention, so it seemed obvious to me that they'd also spend a great deal of time NOT on comic books. So, those were my expectations going into things.
First, I went through the recording and editted out the commercials. The show was cut down to one hour and twenty-one minutes. As expected, there was a lot of talk about Superman Returns, Spider-Man 3, Who Wants to be a Superhero, Snakes on a Plane, Heroes, Transformers, Hound of Hell and some other TV/movie properties I can't recall offhand. There was a feature on various toys coming out from Hasbro. There was a brief chat with Joe Quesada, who spoke about upcoming Marvel movies and Spider-Man's unmasking in the "Civil War" storyline. And then there were several bits about dressing up in costumes during the con.
In short, they largely didn't have anything worthwhile to speak of. Their "exclusive" with Sam Jackson revealed that he would've loved to have seen something like Snakes on a Plane when he was a kid. Stan Lee, Jeph Loeb, and Snoop-Dog didn't mention anything about their respective properties that hasn't been on the Internet for at least a month already. Blair Butler's in-depth report on Stormtroopers revealed that wearing the PVC armor is warm.
The only bit that I think was original was that Optimus Prime will be voiced by Peter Cullen in the upcoming Transformers movie.
Additionally, there was a huge focus on convention-goers who dress up in costume. The G4 staging area was surrounded by them -- no surprise there, since they make for a colorful backdrop -- but there were reports on a man who regularly dresses up as Wolverine and another about a group who were working on a musical version of X-Men: The Last Stand. Plus some short interviews with a Spider-Man, Black Cat, Mystique, and Stormtrooper Elvis. Which is fine, but that was something like 20% of the show's time devoted to less than half of one percent of the attendees.
I'm certainly glad that G4 was providing coverage of the event. But I think their coverage was summed up when co-host Olivia Munn mistook a Black Cat costume for Storm. They seem to have a vague idea of what's going on, but they don't seem to entirely get it.
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