Comic-Con Recap #2: Thursday

San Diego Convention Center

On Wednesday night, my brother and I picked up our badges for Thursday at our hotel and took the shuttle downtown to get a lay of the land and finalize our plans for our first day of Comic-Con. One amazing quesadilla later, we had our gameplan for the next day and, surprisingly, it went pretty smoothly. Here are the panels that we attended:

TheOneRing.net Talks The Hobbit movies - The latest news on The Hobbit was minimal, depressing, and I had already heard most of it. Still, the hosts did a good job presenting it and the first portion of the panel was entertaining. Then they brought in a speaker to discuss the documentary footage from the Extended Editions and pretty soon there was a mass exodus for the doors. We left just a few minutes early.

Caprica, Battlestar, and Beyond - This featured writers, actors, and composers from the recent Battlestar Galactica reboot and was a pretty good panel. Bear McCreary had some pretty cool stories and Aaron Douglas (Chief Tyrol), who wasn't even supposed to be there, was pretty funny and kept us laughing. The only down side was the we waited through about 30 minutes of the panel that was on beforehand--even the panelists looked bored--it was a snorefest.

Summit Entertainment: RED - We sat through this panel in the massive Hall H as we waited for the next one. The panel was actually decent even though I knew nothing about the movie or the comic book it was based on.

Entertainment Weekly: The Visionaries - This panel featured Joss Whedon AND J.J. Abrams. Need I say more? I mean these guys collectively brought us Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Alias, and LOST. It was amazing and definitely one of the highlights on my entire experience. Joss was, to little surprise, hilarious and they both told some pretty interesting stories. It could have gone on a lot longer.

Cafe Diem menu

That was it for our "day one" panels. After that we enjoyed some much-needed food at the Syfy themed Cafe Diem, got turned away from a screening of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (I still can't believe how many people show up for that), and settled on a screening of J.J. Abram's Star Trek.

Overall, it was an awesome day. There were definitely some panels that sounded awesome that we didn't make it to, but we made it into the ones we wanted to see the most. Even though it doesn't seem like we did that much now, it really was busy--we barely even had time to hit the Exhibit Hall.

Well, I'm out. Godspeed.