1. Environmental Guilt. Many people are paralyzed by guilt over how much we've trashed the environment, and though they try to buy green and recycle they are overwhelmed with a sense of hopelessness. Trying to cope with this, people yearn for stories about a world where humans aren't around anymore to muck things up.

2. Future Ennui. Sometimes it seems like we do nothing but plan for the future: You have to do everything from balancing your homework load so you can get into college, to balancing your checkbook so you'll have retirement savings. Living your daily life while planning for tomorrow can be a huge drain on your mental resources. You're constantly asking yourself about what to do now to make the future work out. Which politician should we vote for to improve our neighborhoods or our nation? How can we plan for a perfect vacation, a perfect wedding, or a perfect science project? Stories about a world without people are relaxing. We don't have to worry what we would do because we're just not there.

3. Fear of Extinction. OK, this one is obvious. We may be sick of planning for the future, but we're also scared shitless that the future will smack us on the head and wipe us all out. Who could have predicted Hurricane Katrina or the Asian Tsunami? What if next time the disaster is global in scale? We imagine the world without ourselves as a coping mechanism, a way to accustom ourselves to the idea that no matter how much we plan, we still may not make it as a species.

4. Evolution Degree Zero. A world without humans is a world where we've hit the reset button. All our mistakes are undone, and we can start fresh. Maybe humans will evolve again, better this time.

The formerly comics-focused Wondercon was much more about movies and TV this year, especially with DC being tight-lipped, Marvel skipping it and Image canceling at the last minute. And many of the most popular narratives had to do with war and political upheaval.

Conspiracy theories: Anti-establishment paranoia is back, and X-Files 2 is its harbinger. We still don't have a clear sense of what the new X-Files movie will be about, but writer/director Chris Carter said the show's conspiracy-mania had gone out of fashion after 9/11, but now it was making a comeback. We already know the movie won't be about the show's overarching "mythos," but that doesn't mean it won't feature government cover-ups and conspiracies. After all, it'll be competing with the new Indiana Jones movie, which apparently is about Area 51 and Roswell. Cover-ups are cool!
And then there was the Jericho panel, where producer Carol Barbee said the show's writers "don't talk politics" — and then proceeded to talk about politics for an hour. Besides the way Jericho's evil government contractor Ravenwood was a direct metaphor for Halliburton and Blackwater in Iraq, Barbee also talked about the ripped-from-the-headlines terrorism plots and Homeland Security paranoia on her show.
The war machine: And meanwhile, the direct-to-DVD Starship Troopers 3 turned out to be a satirical war movie, in which weird government propaganda for super-bombs jostled with Fleet recruiting ads, in a war that's gone on too long and lost public support. (Sound like anything in real life to you?) And speaking of war movies, the new Iron Man film keeps the comics' backstory about Tony Stark being a high-tech weapons merchant who has a crisis of conscience after he's taken prisoner. And Iron Man is serving as a metaphor for the military-industrial complex in the comics as well, according to Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics. Wolk dropped some science about how World War Hulk and Civil War are metaphors for the backlash against the government crackdown after 9/11.

So where were the right-wing narratives, about evil terrorists, weak left-wing governments and cultural elites repressing everybody else? We didn't run across them as much. My guess is, wait until year two or three of an Obama or Clinton presidency, and suddenly you'll have all the conservative space fantasies that you could ever want, from the likes of Frank Miller. We can't wait!

The film is a Matrix-meets-cyborgs story featuring incredible animation, tons of bullets, lots of John Woo signature slow-motion, and even some cyborg doves. It's arguably, in this blogger's opinion, superior to the original Appleseed, and is at its best when things devolve into pure bullets and octane action. Thankfully, the multi-layered story is cerebral fodder as well as eye candy, so you won't get bored while you watch another clip of armor-piercing bullets get emptied into mindless robo-slaves.

Sadly nobody captured the moment when I was a little tanked up, walked up to Brian Posehn from the Sarah Silverman Program (he's also done a postapocalyptic comic book called The Last Christmas), and yelled, "Sarah Silverman Program ROCKS!!!" Bless his heart, Posehn just rolled his eyes instead of punching me.

You can see more photos here, by Alexis Barrera from Brain Eater Books.

The story starts out in the 1950s, and heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman are fighting in Korea and Indochina, but she takes a mucher harsher stand than he does, letting victimized women deal out there own brand of murderous justice. He warns her that's the reason Batman is now a fugitive and the Justice Society is disbanded.

We're also introduced to both The Martian Manhunter and Hal "Green Lantern" Jordan in short order, long before they become the heroes we've come to know. We find out how the Manhunter comes to Earth, and how Hal loses his nerve during the Korean war and spends time in a psych hospital. While the Manhunter is trapped on Earth and spends his time watching television (there's an amusing scene where he emulates Groucho Marx and Bugs Bunny), Jordan tries to get into the space program, and eventually gets hired by the Ferris company, run by the boss' wife Carol Ferris.

Over the course of the film, while Jordan develops into a stand-up test pilot and gets drafted into a mission to Mars (sans ring), and the Manhunter fights crime as detective John Jones, different heroes begin unraveling a plot by something called The Center. At first it's not clear if it's a cult, some form of mind-control, or an alien invasion. Additionally, certain heroes like The Flash are being sought by the government, who want to unmask them and expose them and have them register, just like in the recent Civil War series from Marvel. The trouble is, it feels tacked on and cheesy, even though it's the most interesting idea in the film.

In the climactic ending, a whole slew of heroes including Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Martian Manhunter, Adam Strange, the Blackhawks, and a ton of others do battle with the Cthulhu-like Center. When things are at their bleakest, Hal Jordan finally accepts the role of Green Lantern, and the ring he was given by the dying alien Abin Sur comes to his aid and gives him a little instruction manual brain-video lesson. They triumph over the dinosaur-spewing baddie, and thus the Justice League is formed. Montages of many more heroes (including the Teen Titans) and villains scroll by as portions of John F. Kennedy's 1960 Democratic National Convention speech play in the background.

Darwyn's art-style is retro-vintage hipster cool, and the heroes are extremely well voice acted (by a pretty impressive list of stars including everyone from Kyle MacLachlan to Lucy Lawless to Neil Patrick Harris... who aren't distracting), but the plot feels mish-mashed together, and needed to be either a miniseries, or a two-part movie. The Flash's "the government is oppressing us!" speech on television could have been the start of a terrific storyline about the persecution of heroes, but it ends up feeling like it was excised far too early.

Also, there are a lot of heroes tossed into the mix who aren't given any lines at all, like Green Arrow and Ted "Wildcat" Grant, and fleeting scenes of folks like Adam Strange. There's a lot of DC comics history being presented in only an hour and a half, and as a result it feels lacking. Some of the animated scenes feel a bit like afternoon cartoons, but other sequences (especially those in space or with planes in flight) are extremely well-done, which add to the feeling that the whole project is uneven.

It'll be interesting to see this when it comes out on DVD, seeing as how they excised certain scenes and changed the story from the graphic novel. There are a slew of extra materials and interviews on the disc, which will hopefully fill some holes. While it's not perfect, it's much preferable to the nothing, which is all we've had in the form of original animated films based on DC Comics properties. If they could spend some more time hammering out the stories and improving the animation, this could be a series that lasts for years. Just give us some Kingdom Come pretty darn soon.

We didn't see much more of Iron Man than you did if you watched the Superbowl commercial a few weeks ago, but director Jon Favreau did let it slip that he had to do some very creative editing to make this flick kid-friendly. No wonder, given that Iron Man as a character is about as dark as you can get: in recent series Civil War, he led the government crackdown on the superhero community, rounding up his cohorts and forcing them to be placed under surveillance under the Superhero Registration Act.

Starship Troopers III writer and director Ed Neumeier, who worked on the first film, said the new film will be a lot more darkly satirical. The soldiers are sick of the war, and just want to go home. It's based much more faithfully on the original Heinlein novel, and from what we could see from the hefty clips they showed us the action scenes will be fun and exciting to watch. A new generation of bugs have cool robo-suits that make them look like a cross between bug and Tripod from War of the Worlds.

And of course the biggest draw of the weekend was the new X-Files movie, which is being shot even as I write. The packed crowd of thousands was going crazy for every little word dropped by director Chris Carter, and the teeny taste of the movie we got to see was exciting. X-Files protagonists Scully and Mulder have always been morally ambiguous — even, at times, obviously insane. And the new flick has 9/11 looming over it like a dark cloud. The fans couldn't stop talking about conspiracy theories about how the original series was destroyed by the 9/11 disaster, and even Carter admitted the movie had to wait until the mood in the country was lighter again. Just to prove how light their moods were, stars Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny spent a while joking about how XF3 should be about Mulder's experiments with autoerotic asphyxiation. (And we got it on tape — you can see it if you click through.)

For the first major convention of the year, Wondercon was surprisingly light on any real news, with the biggest player, DC Comics first suggesting that they were going to tell us something big the next day, and then telling us that they'd rather wait until April after all. The lack of any major surprises to take away from the con (Both of the stories that actually did break, J. Michael Straczynski working for DC Comics and Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan working on new issues of Demo for Vertigo, seemed to be common knowledge on the con floor before their official announcements) seemed to affect the regular con-goers with an unusual feeling of malaise hitting even the 501st Legion as they performed con security. This wasn't helped by the no-shows from creators - not only was the Image Comics panel cancelled, but both Boom! Studios' Mark Waid and Aspen Studio's Michael Turner failed to make it to the show.

That isn't to say that the entire show was a disaster, mind you; the pros who did make it there were entertaining and available - Particular shout-outs should be given to Oni Press's James Lucas Jones (Expect me to tell you all about Wonton Soup very soon) as well as DC's Jann Jones and Dan DiDio, whose late-Sunday panel "For The Love of Comics" turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable conversation not about upcoming DC Comics but what is awesome about comics in general (Goofiness and obsessive collecting being two of the answers), entirely free of the kind of hucksterism that you might expect from a DC panel.Bill Willingham proved to be a fine gentleman able to keep people's attention throughout the various panels he dominated (and I'm not just saying that because of his apology to me about this), and even if some DC panels may have been half-empty, the two showings of the animated version of Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier were packed with enthusiastic fans (With good reason; it's a better movie than I expected).

That's not even talking about Saturday's CBLDF party that we co-sponsored, populated by the creme de la creme of comics folk, from retailers to creators (Hi, Cecil!) to fans, with we journalist types mingling and posing for photos that I feel like I should be apologizing for; I didn't mean for my head to be that shiny. Overall, it may not have been the most exciting weekend in terms of comic conventions - that'll be San Diego Comic-Con in July - but it was definitely a fine, exhausting, one nonetheless.

For those of you who haven't read the Planet Hulk and World War Hulk series, here's the quickie back story: Iron Man and his gang called the Illuminati blast Hulk into space for the "safety" of the human race. (Because, you know, the Hulk is always smashing and stuff.) Hulk crash-lands on a planet where he can at last be the hero he never was on Earth — he fights with a bunch of oppressed aliens against evil humanoid overlords, wins, gets crowned king, and marries an ultra-awesome, super-strong alien who becomes his queen.

Everything goes bad when the ship Iron Man and Co. sent him to space in suddenly blows up. Queen is killed, and Hulk's new home is ravaged. He and his alien buddies (his "warbound") go back to Earth to get their revenge on Iron Man. Hulk is so mad, and so righteous, that he's gotten bigger and greener than I've ever seen him. I mean, he is so strong he can withstand space vacuum and smash up the moon.

His showdown with Iron Man stretched across several comic book crossovers. I highly recommend the series, especially Planet Hulk. And for the record, Wolk is totally right in this clip. You won't be able to deny it after reading.

Another famous recent example of comic book allegory that Wolk discussed is in Mark Millar's Civil War series, all about the Superhero Registration Act. Apparently, however, Millar denies the importance of allegory in the series, calling it "just gravy." Wolk also talked about Grant Morrison's 7 Soldiers of Victory ("It's about meshing together different forms of enlightenment.") and Green Lantern vs. Sinestro ("Green Lantern is thoughtful about how power can affect the world, while Sinestro uses fear to gain power.").

Want more Wolk? Check out his book Reading Comics.

• The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the story of Sarah Connor trying to protect her future-leader son and avert the end of the world, is "funnier than i thought it would be," Friedman said. "I think it's hysterical." Dekker clowns around, like, all the time on the set, Glau said. (This was easy to believe, judging from Dekker's antics on stage.)
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• Friedman wanted to bring back Kyle Reese, the time traveler who fathered John Connor and then died in the first Terminator movie. But his fellow producers convinced him this would never fly with the fans. So instead he finally agreed to introduce Reese's brother, Derek, played by 90210's Brian Austin Green.
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• Austin Green has a sense of humor about the fact that he's an unlikely (and unpopular, in some quarters) action hero. "When I think action, I think Brian Austin Green," he joked. "He DJs, he shoots guns, it'll be awesome." He takes comfort in the fact that even the most hostile fans have started referring to him in online forums by his character's name instead of the actor's, which means they're starting to accept him. "I'm going to come away from this show really honestly feeling like science fiction kicks ass," he added. "It's the first chance I've had to do it, and really, fucking praise the Terminator, it's been a great experience."
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• The producers of the Terminator TV show haven't given next year's big-screen Terminator 4, starring Christian Bale, a second thought. The existence of multiple contradictory Terminator narratives is fine, because even without the TV show you couldn't make everything hold together as one canon, insisted Executive Producer John Wirth.
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• The show's first season was shortened due to the writers' strike, but luckily next week's two-hour finale ends with a decent cliffhanger. And Friedman is lumping together his plans for the original end of season one with the planned second season to create a new second season.
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• Several people asked Glau why she always plays somewhat robotic killing machines, and she didn't really have much of an answer. She said her Terminator was similar to River, her character on Firefly, because both are "isolated in the way they relate to the world." But a key difference is that River uses martial arts, whereas her Terminator just uses brute force. So she's having to un-learn some stuff.
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• We'll see more of Teresa Dyson, the widow of potential Skynet creator Miles Dyson, again on the show. But not this season.
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• Glau is still hoping to create a ballet with composer/writer Joss Whedon, but she's not sure when it'll happen. "It was going to work out better when we were on strike. We wanted to do the ballet for years because Joss writes his own music and I do my own dancing, so i thought it was an amazing idea. But now he's been thrown into an amazing project [the Dollhouse TV show] and i have to go back to work. But we're hoping to do it this season. We're nailing down concepts," Glau said.

Jericho seems to have gone from being a pretty conservative narrative to a much more radical one. The first season revolved around a vision of the American heartland pulling together after the cities vanished — plus a "clash of the patriarchs" among mayor Johnston Green, his rival Gray Anderson, and Phil Constantino, the sheriff of neighboring town New Bern. And now, in the second season, the rival patriarchs have vanished and the show is much more about the younger characters and their distrust of all authority. And the over-arching plot arc seems to revolve around an arch-conservative government that's lying about the reasons for the nuclear explosions, to cover its own involvement.

So I asked Barbee whether there had been a conscious shift in the show's politics between the first and second seasons.

Barbee responded that "We don't talk politics in the writers' room. We talk characters." The main reason there's less focus on rival patriarchs this season is because Johnston Green, the main characters' father, died in the first season finale. "Johnston Green was always meant to die," Barbee said, calling the show a remake of The Lion King. "Johnston Green had to die so that Jake could step up," and his generation could be faced with having to live up to Johnston's legacy. But there was no intention to change the show's politics, she insisted.

Still, it's no coincidence that the show is alluding to the Iraq war during an election war. "We read the papers," said Barbee. "We are influenced by what goes on."

Because the season is only seven episodes instead of the 22 Barbee and her fellow producers had planned, things move at a much more breakneck pace and "there's no time for treading water." She gave a bit more detail about what a 22-episode second season would have looked like, with storylines taking place in Cheyenne, WY (the capital of the new government, which controls the Western U.S.) and New York City. One character would have left New York to travel across the country to Jericho, and we would have seen more of the country through that character's eyes. The three storylines would have come together at the season's end in Cheyenne. But now there won't be any New York stuff.

Barbee also repeated what she'd said before, that the first season was about saving the town, the second season was about saving the country, and the third season (if any) would be about saving the world.

Oh, and Lennie James, who plays badass CIA agent Robert Hawkins, said his character could kick Jack Bauer's ass

In addition to Batman: Death Mask, an original manga by Yoshimori (Togari - The Sword of Justice) Natsume that will be published in authentic back-to-front format, the main DC/Wildstorm project will be DC/Wildstorm: Dreamwar that crosses over characters from both lines. Editor Scott Peterson described the project simply:

Basically, it's the DC Comics heroes versus the Wildstorm heroes, punching.

When asked about the status of the very late Wildcats series by Grant Morrison that disappeared after a mid-2007 first issue, series artist Jim Lee embarrassedly called it "the dreaded question," before admitting that "there's no way to make amends [for the delay]" but both Morrison and Lee are committed to finish the series at some point, although that may be five or ten years from now. Here's hoping that he was sarcastic on that last point. Peterson said that Morrison's other delayed title, The Authority, has had some "serious forward motion" and will be returning at some point.

In response to questions about Warren Ellis's missing titles Desolation Jones and Planetary, Peterson said that, like any publisher, they're very happy to publish work from Warren Ellis when they get it. He has written the final issue of Planetary, but they're waiting for artist John Cassaday to have time in his schedule to draw it.

Jim Lee also talked about his All-Star Batman series with Frank Miller, saying that he enjoys working on the book, and that he's surprised that Miller continues to work on the series considering his movie schedule. The book is slated to run for twenty issues, and they have around ten still to work on.

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• There's a lot of improv between Tony and the fire-safety robot who keeps dousing him with foam. He has a somewhat more stable flight around his garage (although he nearly cooks his cars). Then with a little fast forward action we see him in the full-fledged Mark II suit, testing the systems. Jarvis (now an A.I. robot instead of a proper English butler, although he retains the prim English accent). Tony decides to take an early flight around the city with his first test flight, and we want one of those suits. Flaps extend, thrusters fire, and it's pretty swanky.
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• Someone asked him what his inspiration to make the movie was, and he said "I was inspired by the box office returns on Zathura." Hey, dammit. I liked that movie!
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• When asked about the rumors on the internet about a scene with Nick Fury as Samuel L. Jackson appearing in both this movie and The Incredible Hulk, Jon said "Yes, it's true. There are rumors on the internet." He said the rumors are partially true, but not which part.
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• Stan Winston Studios designed the physical Iron Man suit, but ILM provided a CGI version of the suit. Sometimes the two are married together, but they use the physical suit whenever possible.
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• He talked about the flying scenes in-depth, and used Stealth as an example of how bad flying scenes can be. They tried to emulate the look of the flying scenes in both Top Gun and Battlestar Galactica that have more of a documentary feel.
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• If Iron Man does well, Favreau may be directing the Avengers movie.
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• There will be a new 90-second trailer shown during Lost this week. He showed us a 2 1/2 minute version of the trailer that will be in front of 10,000 B.C., and it has a lot of new stuff in it. New shots of Obadiah Stane, a brief glimpse of the Iron Monger, Tony's first test flight, Pepper catching him changing into his Iron Man suit, to which his says "Let's face it, this is not the worst thing you've caught me doing."
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• He hadn't wanted to reveal that Iron Monger would be in the movie, but Hasbro released images of the toy, so they included some very brief shots of him in the new trailer.
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• They haven't yet figured out how Iron Man will sound when he's wearing the suit. Jon was literally leaving WonderCon to spend a few weeks at Skywalker Ranch to work on the sound mix, and to try and work out what Tony's broadcast voice will be.
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• There was a concerted effort to have a teenaged Tony Stark play Iron Man, much like Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man. Thank god that didn't happen.
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• He's stayed in touch with Doug Liman, who directed Favreau's Swingers script in 1996, although he hasn't gotten any action film directing tips from him.
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• We asked Jon about the sexy shot of Tony Stark with two scantily clad women that recently surfaced, and how hard would they be pushing the envelope of sexiness: "Well, this is rated PG-13, so not too hard, as a matter of fact that shot is not in the movie right now. It was mostly for time, but we'll include that scene on the DVD. I've made a movie that I would feel comfortable bringing my kids to. It's not a hard PG-13, but it's intense. I wouldn't say that there were any compromises made, but it definitely was informed by what the personality of the film should be."
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Iron Man armors image courtesy of ScreenRant.

The book will be an ongoing mystery about the kidnapped people in the kidnapped house, as well as anthology-style one-off tales by guest creators each issue. But this won't be a series of frustrating non-endings:

The difference between this series and something like Lost or The X-Files is that we know what the answers to each of these mysteries are, and in our time and your time, they will be revealed.

Every now and again, there's a battle between [DC Universe] and Vertigo about who gets to publish the character. DCU guys go up to the Vertigo offices with the issue of Batman where Swamp Thing appears and say "Clearly this is a Batman character!" and suddenly there are pitchforks and they're forced back to the elevators.

Van Dien is back, after skipping Troopers II, as Johnny Rico. And Blalock plays Capt. Lola Beck, a pilot. Here's how Blalock describes her character: "She's a no-nonsense staraight shooter, who shoots from the hip but also has a heart of gold." Neumeier, who also wrote the script for Troopers II, says Sony realized it skimped on the budget for the (fairly successful) second movie, so there's more money this time around.
Starship Troopers III is much truer to the original Heinlein book than the first two movies, Van Dien and Neumeier both stressed. We might actually get to see the power suits that Heinlein talks about in the book. "I feel a great debt to the fans of the novel," said Neumeier. "I adore the novel. I read it when i was 13."

Neumeier sees the Troopers trilogy as a sort of history of war movies. The first Starship Troopers is sort of a riff on World War II movies, partly motivated by Verhoeven's desire to deal with the experience of Germans in the mid-1930s, when the Nazis were rising to power. The second Troopers is more of a Korean war movie. And the third one is much more of a Vietnam war film, dealing with issues of religion and politics. It's also about "how the state can use religion both badly, and for good."
This time around, it's eleven years later and the war is not going so well. There's much less public support for the war effort than there was in the first movie, said Van Dien.

Also, there are three new types of bugs, two of which appeared in the clips we saw at Wondercon. One new bug is called a Bombadier, and it's a sort of ball that lands among a group of human soldiers and then explodes (one human throws himself onto it and sacrifices himself for the others), then grows into a big eyestalk that shoots white fire.

Another clip showcased Neumeier's trademark zany fake TV coverage, with a fake news segment about the new Q-bomb, which can destroy an entire planet. Some religious fanatics say humans shouldn't have the right to choose which planets live and which ones die, but others say the Q-bomb may finally help destroy the bugs once and for all. And then there's a recruiting segment for the Fleet, which parodies all those "Army of One" spots for the U.S. Army and emphasizes that 16-year-olds can join. It ends with someone saying, "See you in the Cockpit!"

Both Van Dien and Neumeier said they would like to make a Troopers TV series.

Neumeier said he got lots of advice from Verhoeven, who read the script and told him, "You look frightened, and you should be." He talks often to "Uncle Paul."

Someone asked Blalock why she gravitates toward so many science fiction roles. She said:

The reason I've done a lot of science fiction is because my first big job was Star Trek, [so] a lot of the offers i get are science fiction. The universe shines down on me, in a psychobabble way. That's what's inside me, and so that's what the universe offers me.

Carter kicked things off by saying the film was worth the wait,"Because it will scare the pants off you. You'll see Mulder and Scully again in a whole new way."

Suddenly a bunch of adolescent girls behind us started yelling at Duchovny, "Can you give us your pants?" Sadly he did not oblige. A fan asked asked about the X-Files and 9/11 controversy. (For those who don't know, the pilot episode of X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen is about a plot to crash a hijacked plane into the WTC.) Carter passed the question to Spotnitz, who said:

We were really upset, and worried that somehow we had inspired the plot. But we were relieved to discover that the plot pre-dated The Lone Gunmen, and that 9/11 had nothing to do with our work. And then once we realized that, my next thought was how the government hadn't known about this plot. There have been a lot of conspiracy theories about the connection between 9/11 and The Lone Gunman, but none of them are true.

There was lots more we could have done but we ended at the right time. Things had changed after 9/11... and now the mood is right once more.

Anderson said it was hard to get back into character. "I had a really bad couple of days. I thought it would be really easy to step into it and I actually sucked for 48 hours."

Carter said, "I've always thought the series was a search for God."

Anderson said:

One of my favorite episodes is Bad Blood. Probably because it's one of the only episodes I remember. It was each of our ideas of what took place in an event, and we both got to play the other person's perception of ourselves. So I was moody and bitchy and David was going on and on and on [with the talking].

In response to rumors about DC instituting a new zero-tolerance policy for creators who break deadlines, DiDio dropped his usual huckster persona to talk about the problems that the company faces with late books. Admitting that the "reality is, a lot of people can't meet the monthly schedule," he said that DC's aim was to make sure that books shipped in a timely manner:

We had a month where we didn't put any Superman books out because they were all late... In our minds, that was inexcusable.

Asked to "cut back on killing and maiming young heroes" in their comics, VP of Sales responded that "Sidekicks die!" should be the ad copy for upcoming comics. DiDio admitted that it was a concern, and said that they'd try to cease with the teenage torture. On a related topic, the panel all agreed that they didn't want to pull back on teenage suffering of the emotional type, with writer Judd Winick pointing out that "they can't all be happy, who the hell's gonna buy that?"

The amount of potential deaths was also a topic for discussion when it came down to DC's big summer series, Final Crisis. When asked if there would be a limit to the amount of deaths happening in that series, DiDio said that he couldn't promise anything, and announced the official tagline for the series for the first time: "It's the day evil wins." We also found out that "The Great Disaster" that's been the plot McGuffin of Countdown to Final Crisis will happen within the pages of Countdown (and may include a giant turtle version of Jimmy Olsen fighting New God Darkseid), and that the Final Crisis is something altogether different that may spell doom for the multiverse: "It's called Final Crisis for a reason," DiDio said.

Before that happens, fans can expect to see Power Girl go home to Earth-2 in the pages of Justice Society of America in a way that may lead to a future solo series for Superman's parallel-universe cousin. One of the reasons that the multiverse may be about to end again is that even the creators can't keep the various earths straight; when someone asked about Earth-13, no-one on the panel knew exactly what Earth that was. "I have a big white board - " DiDio started to explain, before Countdown editor Mike Carlin cut him off by saying "This is why we have charts."

New titles teased, besides the Batgirl series, were a new Lex Luthor miniseries focusing on his evil genius and technology, as well as a return of the 1990s Milestone characters (better known to most from the WB's Static Shock cartoon); asked about a possible return of those characters, everyone on the panel got very nervous as DiDio chose his words very carefully: "I think the Milestone characters are great," he said, "I think it'd be very exciting to see that creative strength in the DC Universe." Bob Wayne broke in, adding "It's a subject that takes more lawyers than fans to make happen."

The panel closed with DiDio telling everyone that the upcoming The Dark Knight and The New Frontier movies were projects that everyone at DC were very excited about, and inviting everyone to tonight's world premiere of the latter at the convention.

Annalee: "If you guys had to get out of those costumes really, really fast, how would you do it?"
Spidey: "You mean like, if the building was on fire? I always build secret escape hatches in here, so you can just pull and they're gone."
Spider-Woman: "Yeah, they come off in about five seconds." (We think she winked after that, but it's hard to tell behind those huge white eyecovers)
Spidey: "I mean, when you gotta to to the bathroom, you gotta go."

• Clip #1: Wall-E at work. Our little herobot works away in his role as the last working robot on the planet. It's 700 years after the human race was supposed to leave the planet so the disposal bots could clean the place up over the next five years. However, something has gone wrong, and we never returned. Over the intervening centuries, Wall-E keeps at his job, and he's developed a personality. While compacting trash, he keeps the more interesting finds in his lunchbox: a bra, a squeaky toy, an old boot, and so on. Plus, he has his little cockraoch buddy to keep him company.
• Clip #2: Eventually a spaceship lands on the planet and drops off a probe droid named EVE. Wall•E courts her for awhile, and eventually brings her back to his pimped out truck where he keeps all of his Earth junk. She nearly laser-zaps his singing Bigmouth Billy Bass on the wall, enjoys his bubble-wrap, breaks his egg-beater, and nearly brings down the house when she tries to emulate the dancing she sees in an old video Wall•E presents to her on VHS.
• Clip #3: The ship returns and EVE is tucked away onboard, ready to return to wherever she came from. Wall•E is terrified at the thought of losing his new friend, and tries to stow away on her ship but only makes it halfway up the ladder. He hangs on for dear life while they rocket into outer space, and he tags along for the ride all the way back to the megaship they dock in. Along the way, it's a touching tribute to our own space program (although the moon has been turned into an outlet mall), and previous space films like 2001.
• Clip #4: Wall-E creates some work-related problems for EVE, and she tries sending him home in an escape pod. However, she soon regrets her decision and goes off after him, although things are a bit more complicated since his pod is set to auto-destruct. Wall-E narrowly escapes, and with the use of a fire extinguisher as a thruster, he navigates his way back to her. Although Stanton promises that their relationship will become a lot more complicated.
• In response to being told that all the Pixar movies keep looking better and better, Andrew Stanton ask a fan, "Are you saying Toy Story is the ugliest film we've made? Well... it is!" Hey, we love a director with humility.

We thought that if a city had been hit by a megaton bomb, it would be kind of dark and grey, but the fans wanted color and games should be pretty, so here you go.

The preview animations showed a game that mixed Terminator-esque destruction with Spider-Man-style dynamics, but Capcom reps want you to know that the game will be much better than any old webslinging:

We've been compared to Spider-Man, which is great, but the 3D swing mechanic on this game works really well, it takes swing mechanics to the next level.

While they couldn't announce a release date at the con, the platforms for the game were announced as Playstation 3, XBox 360 and high-end PCs.

Is it true you have a cameo in the new movie?

I have a great part in the movie but I can't talk about it, it's confidential.

Have you already filmed it?

Yeah, it comes out June 13th.

So the wig you wore as the Hulk, is it true that it was some fancy $5,000 wig?

Yeah, it was hair from a Chinese mule. I might have it, I have a lot of memorabilia. I'll have to check my boxes to see what I have.

How long did it take to paint your body green?

Three hours.

Do you wish that you were the governor of California instead of Arnie?

Someday if I get the opportunity, I'm interested in running for a congressional seat.

Annalee: "So, if you had to get out of that Stormtrooper outfit really, really fast what would you start with?"
Stormtrooper: "My helmet!"
Annalee: "Okay, then... what next?"
Stormtrooper: "Uh... my chestpiece!"
Annalee: "Okay, but what if you had to go to the bathroom? Is there any way to get out of there?"
Stormtrooper: "No!"

We left him to his Nerds and heard him whimpering for mommy. Did the Stormtroopers use catheters or something?

• Brendan hadn't read the original Journey book and went out to find a copy at his local Borders. He found the last copy in a Jules Verne anthology.
• He found out that during World War I, soldiers on all sides of the conflict it was being read by soldiers in the trenches in multiple translations.
• He compared the first version of the script he saw to a three-day old smorgasborg, "It would give you indigestion because so many people had already been going through it." So he pitched a new version to director Eric Brevig, and they made extensive changes to the script, returning it closer to Verne's original version.
• Fraser remembered being wowed by the computer-generated knight coming out of the stained glass window in Young Sherlock Holmes, and we now take amazing effects for granted.
• They were able to view "morninglies" and "nightlies" since they were shooting with digital cameras, instead of viewing them once at the end of the day, or the next day, which is traditionally how it happens.
• 60% of the film has digital enhancements and CGI elements of some kind.
• Brendan's favorite films from his own career are: Gods and Monsters, The Quiet American, The Mummy, and George of the Jungle.
• He went on to say "I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly apologize for Monkeybone," and he called it an "$80 million dollar arthouse film."
• When a fan asked Brendan what advice he'd give to an up and coming actress, he said "I'll give you the same three words I was given when I was in training in Seattle, 'Have courage.'" When asked what the third word was, he said "I'm not very good at math."
• Brendan wants all of us to "take a leap of faith" with this "beta" version of where we're heading with 3D filmmaking, and he says the movie is as important as when sound first came to the movies in The Jazz Singer. Based on the trailer we've seen, we're not sure if we'll be leaping into that hole. However, the 3D footage they showed late sure looked tactile and tasy.

Journey sucks you deep into its zooming roller-coaster sequences (3D allows depth as well as making things stick out at you), throws glowing birds out into the theater to float around your head, and in one memorable moment snaps your face off with a toothy fish that jumps right off screen and into the audience. After about a minute of adjustment, it's easy to forget you've got those dorky-cool 3D glasses on your face (thankfully they fit easily over real glasses) and just get into the film.

You don't get that grody stomach-clenching feeling of old-school 3D like It Came From Outer Space because this stuff is all shot on digital. In past 3D flicks, people reported getting nauseated because their perspective changed so dramatically from shot to shot. But Cameron's digital 3D system lets editors can manipulate the film directly and change the vertical or horizontal slightly to make it easier for your eyes to adjust from shot to shot. So when we went from looking deep into a cave, to having stuff jump out at us, it just felt like looking at the real world, where sometimes things are far away and sometimes things run at you quickly.

But back to the crucial point: This movie is not only fun to look at, but it does not scrimp on the monsters. You've got human-eating 3D venus fly traps the size of your torso, full of scary throbbing vadge stuff, zooming at your head. You've got a HUGE albino dinosaur (duh, center of the Earth, no sun) drooling into your face (this is an effect borrowed from Beowulf, which certainly did not scrimp on the 3D drool). In my favorite scene there were SEA MONSTERS. Yes, an entire stormy sea full of flying, fanged fish being eaten by really, really big sea monsters with long necks, toothy mouths (coming out into the theater), and full chomping action.

I can't tell you how great it was to see a movie whose creators and fans had no illusions about what it was: a super fun eyeful of spectacle. Nobody pretended Journey was great art, or even brilliantly-plotted. As star Brendan Fraser said, "People fall into hole, and try to get out. That's the movie." If you want a stab at human drama with your giant monster, go see Cloverfield. If you want monsters with a political message, go see 28 Days Later. But if you just want to see big huge stuff come flying at your head in a way that makes you jump and laugh out loud, Journey is the flick for you.

The front lobby offered up even more Star Wars items, like full-sized Vader and Boba Fett costumes, Han's Blaster, and more. Next to the reception desk were two huge framed posted for The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Dracula. However, towering over everything in the center is a large monument built to honor Willis Harold O'Brien, the man who pioneered stop-motion in animation with the visual effects in King Kong, and later animated dinosaurs in The Lost World, co-wrote King Kong vs. Godzilla, and had Ray Harryhausen as an assistant. A surprisingly touching tribute to man who needs a lot more recognition.

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• Fracture: In the far future, the effects of global warming have created terrain-deforming weaponry and split the United States in two. The Atlantic Alliance on the East, and the Republic of Pacifica on the West. You play a partially cybernetic human who has access to things like grenades they raise and lower the terrain, open swirling vortexes, send enormous molten rock formations into the air, and burrow through the Earth. If you want to beat up on the terrain of future San Francisco, this is right up your alley.
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• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: Play as Darth Vader's secret apprentice as you hunt down the rest of the remaining Jedi, and use your amped-up Force powers to literally rip TIE-Fighters out of the air and hurl them at opponents. Set between Episodes 3 and 4, you'll encounter characters and settings from both sets of movies, mess people up with the Force, and use your lightsaber like it's going out of style. Hopefully we'll also find out why we never found out Vader had a secret apprentice before as well.
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• Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures: We'll be the first to admit that Indiana Jones has a tenuous scifi connection, at best. The guy is a swashbuckling archaeologist who hunts down supernatural artifacts and doodads, but hey... at the end of the day he's a scientist and a professor. Plus he's pretty kickass and might be encountering aliens in Indy IV. This game continues the idea of encasing Indiana in Lego, like the Lego Star Wars: The Complete Trilogy.

The scene takes place early in the film, before James McAvoy's character Wesley joins a secret cadre of super-powered assassins who are trying to alter the fate of the world by killing off people who might interfere their plans to dominate the world. He's a working stiff in a supermarket when suddenly a grim, tattooed, leggy Fox (Jolie) comes in and starts having the world's coolest gunfight with some random dude. There's intense bullet-eye view stuff (watch the bullet as it zooms through an entire supermarket shelf of cereal!) and lots of very loud firepower. Eventually she rescues Wesley from the fight, pulls him into her ultra-slick sports car, and we're treated to a zoomy truck vs. car chase — the bad guy (or is it the good guy?) has stolen a truck full of bobbleheads and is trying to run Fox and Wesley down.

Fox uses a forcefield power, and we see Wesley developing his superpower of perfect aim when he manages to shoot a bullet that curves around her head to get at the bad guy. But the best part is when Fox wants to shoot at the bad guy while still driving. She knocks out the windshield, sits on the dashboard, and lets Wesley upskirt her while she shoots with both hands upsidown. Imagine this: grumbling car noises, flashes of Jolie's thigh, pouding bullet sounds, shot of Jolie's lovely feet in high-heeled shoes on the steering wheel — yes she's DRIVING while smashing Wesley's head between her thighs and giving us crotch shots and shooting.

Did I mention that I'm excited about this movie?

After the clip, McAvoy came out and blushed and Scottish-talked his way through a bunch of questions.

On what the writer of the original comic book thinks:

"Mark Millar has seen the film and likes it."

On whether there will be heroes and villains in the movie:

"There are no supervillains. We are all questionable figures. All the good guys are doing things that are really questionable. They're assassins. They're killing people and we don't know if it's for good reasons or not. It's all to do with fate."

On acting in big-budget American flicks after doing small UK films:

"Acting in a picture like this is so physical, lots of physical work. Plus acting. I think to myself, wow I'm going to have to climb that and then I have to cry. Which do I focus on more?"

Opening the panel, DC Executive Editor Dan DiDio told fans "We have nothing to talk about, so we're turning it over to you." Inviting questions from the audience, a line-up consisting of editors DiDio, Mike Carlin, Jann Jones, VP of Sales Bob Wayne and creators Sergio Aragones and James Robinson (announced as "writer of Superman and a book to be named later," with a later tease when DiDio asked him "Do you like writing Green Arrow?") were in full-on tease form when avoiding giving straight answers to straight questions. Some highlights:

* Following Steve Gerber's death, four writers will be writing the final issue of Gerber's Countdown To Mystery series, with each writer providing a four-page sketch of how they think that Gerber would have ended the story. The writers involved will be Mark Waid, Wonder Woman's Gail Simone, Countdown's Adam Beechen and Gerber's close friend, Mark Evanier (DNAgents).

* Fan-favorite book Manhunter will return, but not until there are enough finished scripts to make sure the book will ship on a monthly schedule.

* Birds of Prey, the book that stars former Batgirl Barbara Gordon, will be moving to a new fictional city in the future, just in time for Gordon to meet the villain that crippled her, the Joker, in a move in no way related to that whole Dark Knight movie coming out this summer. Not at all.

* Superstar artist George Perez may be going into the future for his next project. The artist, best known for his work on 1980s universe-ending saga Crisis On Infinite Earths provided the cover for May's DC Universe: Zero, which DiDio said "may lead into what he's doing next". The stars of that particular cover? Futuristic teen super-heroes, the Legion of Super-Heroes.

* Swamp Thing won't be returning to any DC superhero books anytime soon... officially. When asked if the character would be appearing in the DC Universe, DiDio replied that, while the executive editor of the mature-readers Vertigo imprint wasn't giving permission for them to use the character any time soon, "we would never put him in a comedic book without their knowledge. Nooooo." (My guess for that comedic book? The revival of 1980s self-referential comedy Ambush Bug, due in July).

* James Robinson will be returning to characters from his popular Starman series, writing a spin-off series starring the Shade anti-hero. But don't expect it anytime soon - He doesn't plan to finish writing it for at least a year.

* DC's much-hyped, rarely-seen new Batwoman character will be getting her own series... but we won't officially find out about that until tomorrow.

When asked about DC characters getting their own movies, the panel played coy. "We like movies," Jann Jones commented. A fan pointed out that Marvel Comics have two movies coming out this summer (Iron Man and Incredible Hulk) to DC's one (The Dark Knight), leading Bob Wayne to respond "Well, in that case, it's quantity versus quality," to an almost-Oprah audience-worthy "Ooooooooh".

Tomorrow's panels - including a 90-minute DC-centric presentation that will undoubtedly feature their big 2008 plans - will, hopefully, manage to put out something crunchier than cheap shots at the opposition, but who can tell...?

Cooke talked about Henry's reduced role as plot catalyst:

When he sees what happens to John Henry, [J'Onn] thinks "What kind of world is this?" ...[John Henry] is still an important person in the story.

Something happened in the third book... It occured to me that none of these characters were bad, it's just where they draw the line... The minute I stopped thinking of them as 'This guy's the Republican' and 'This guy's the Democrat,' then they became much more interesting characters. Partisan thinking is nonsense. It's ridiculous. There are good people on every side of every argument.

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• Day Glo Assassin (on the far right): "This isn't too dissimilar from how I normally dress, so I'd probably just take off my wig and book it. But, if I had to get naked, I'd probably start with the boots first, because it's hard to take anything off over them."
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• Agent Orange (second from the right): "The gloves! Because they make everything more difficult to maneuver around, especially zippers."
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• Random Hot Friend In Leopard Dress (second from left): "I think the tights, those are the hardest things to get off. I'd have to start there and move upwards."
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• Obsidian Blackbird McKnight — The Arch Nemesis (on the far left): "I'm wearing seven layers, there is no fast way for me to get naked. I guess I'd start with the corset I guess. That would make things easier."
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Astro City is a town packed with superheroes, but we often see the action from the perspective of ordinary people, or criminals, or sidekicks. Busiek sees his book as responding to the wave of "deconstruction" comics such as Alan Moore's Watchmen, which took superheroes apart. Busiek sees his mission not to put superheroes back together, so much as to use the lessons from taking them apart to make them work better.

Want to know the secret, overarching meta-story behind Astro City? There isn't one, Busiek revealed at today's Astro City panel at Wondercon. He has no "roadmap," and no ending for all the comic's characters in mind. Instead, he plans to keep telling stories set in the superhero-filled city until he runs out of ideas and writes an issue about super-pets playing poker. Find out what's in store for Astro City, after the jump.

Astro City is in the middle of a 16-issue mega-story called "The Dark Age," set in the bleak 1970s when everybody experiences a crisis of conscience due to the Vietnam War, Watergate and a wave of distrust in society's institutions. A collection of the first eight issues of "The Dark Age" is coming soon, and it'll also include the prologue that was published as one half of a flipbook with Arrowsmith, plus some sketches and stuff.

Also coming soon: two "character specials" featuring Astra (daughter of superteam the First Family) and the Silver Agent.

Busiek said he has lots of story ideas he hasn't gotten around to writing, including:

• the guy who used to be The Enforcer, who's now promoting a book about being the country's most famous hired super-muscle
• four teen sidekicks who turn 18 the same year, renovate an old crime-fighting vehicle and travel across America to figure out what their adult identities will be
• why two heroes, Crackerjack and Quarrel, are a couple

I asked Busiek if Astro City has changed its focus from how ordinary people viewed superheroes (which took up a lot of the first batch of issues) to a broader focus on superheroes interacting with society. He said his earlier award-winning series, Marvels, was much more about how an ordinary guy viewed superheroes. But that wasn't ever meant to be the focus of Astro City, per se. The first six issues of the comic were individual stories showing the superhero world from different perspectives, including a superhero's, but also that of a reporter, a petty criminal, an innocent bystander and an alien spy. "This series is not about any one person's perspectives," Busiek added. "The focus has never been simply about how ordinary people see the superheroes but about different perspectives on how people view the world."

He'd originally planned, after those first six issues, to go straight into the longer story arc about the Confessor, a Batman-like figure who turns out to be a vampire. But instead Astro City went on a six-month hiatus and then returned with a new publisher, so Busiek did some more single-issue stories, with different perspectives, to relaunch the series.

Don't give up on the massive The Dark Age storyline, Busiek said: it may feel as though it's not going anywhere, but it'll look different when you read the whole thing. The current second "volume" of four issues consists of the two protagonists, the brothers Charles (a cop) and Royal (a criminal) flailing around and getting nowhere. But the end of volume two contains a development that sets up everything that happens in volumes three and four, when the two brothers begin to change their circumstances.

He said:

I'd have to have you do it for me, because it's really hard to get in and out of this thing. There's a zipper in the back, so I guess I'd have to just rip everything off and destroy my expensive suit here that I've spent a lot of time and effort on.

Want to know more? Here are some of our picks for the coolest stuff at WonderCon. And here are some great pictures of last year's WonderCon taken by master of the cyber-indie underworld Scott Beale. See you at WonderCon!

• The first official (American, anyhow) "World Science Fiction Convention" (now known as Worldcon) was held in 1939, and followed by conventions in Chicago and Denver in the following years. check out the photo above of some fans posing at Coney Island during that first convention, on the top row on the far left is Ray Bradbury.
• The first British convention in 1937 attracted 20 fans, including Eric Frank Russell and Arthur C. Clarke.
• The WorldCon conventions were suspended after 1941 due to World War II, but resumed in 1946.
• WonderCon was started by John Barrett in the San Francisco Bay area in 1987, but has since been adopted and is now part of the Comic-Con International family of Cons. Sort of like the Shazam family.
• Comic-Con itself began in San Diego as the Golden State Comic Book Convention in 1970, and attracted around 500 fans. Last year the Con (now the San Diego Comic-Con or just Comic-Con) had over 125,000 visitors.
• There are now regional cons including everything from Eurocon to DeepSouthCon to Westercon.
• There are even specific cons that cover one range of subjects, like BotCon (Transformers), Costume-Con (costumes, duh), and FilkOntario (filk music, folks music with a scifi/fantasy twist).
• That's not even mentioning all of the cons for specific shows and movies that have sprung up, like Star Trek, Farscape, Star Wars, and plenty of others. In fact, the movie GalaxyQuest is completely con-centric.
• Our favorite title? The Wrath of Con in North Florida. Either that or the Comic Book Guy's Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con. It's a toss up.