Thursday morning’s drive down to San Diego on Interstate 5 provided an unknowing bit of foreshadowing to Comic-Con weekend as four lanes of freeway were slowed to a crawl. Before dawn, a very bad accident causing a tractor-trailer to roll over, its contents of meat to be strewn across the road, and a few fires to break out snarled up traffic for almost 10 hours. Trapped without an offramp, it took the Senora and I four hours to go 10 miles and we hit the backup at 8:30am.

I missed a few panels I would have liked to have seen: a bit of history as fans reminisced over 75 Years of Doc Savage, the deluded egos of movie-website nerds/publishers who are rather full of themselves considering they are free marketing tools of the studios, a listen to Stan Lee and Grant Morrison talk about comics past and future, and watching the people behind Freakazoid! promote the welcomed DVD release.

After finally arriving, we got into Hall H, the biggest room at the venue with a capacity of 6,500, where the studios promote upcoming releases. Summit Entertainment was holding court. We caught the tail end of the Q&A for Push but wasn’t clear what was going on. Knowing directed by Alex Proyas and starring Nicholas Cage had an interesting premise about a message from the past predicting disasters. The footage presented got a good response from the packed house, although dang it was brutally loud. After Proyas left, the title card for Twilight appeared on the monitors. A shrill cry of hundreds of young girls rang out in the darkness, sounding like their grandmothers when The Beatles first touched down in America, and no doubt bothering dogs within the city limits. They shrieked every chance, particularly when Robert Pattison, who plays the love interest Edward vampire, was the focus. He had to deal with questions like, “What’s it like portraying a super-hot vampire?” Most of these young girls likely had no idea what was stirring within them and where it could lead.

The DVD/Blu-ray Producers panel was moderated by the guys from The Digital Bits website. The producers talked about upcoming work like The Ghostbusters cartoons and The Mist. There was some discussion about the pros and cons about BD-Live, mostly con as many of the new features are interactive across the Internet, which would distract from watching the movie, which apparently is so twentieth century. The DB guys began to dominate the discussion, so we left.

In an effort to make sure we got into the HBO True Blood panel, we got into the room early for the Capcom Street Fighter IV panel. Who knew there was a story behind a game where your object is to beat the crap out of your opponents? Fellow snobs Musgo Del Jefe and Tío Esqueleto, who had ventured out from their respective midwestern states, joined us. When the panelists threw it to the floor to ask whom the fans would like to see in the game, I shouted out, “Boba Fett!” Licensing issues aside, it would be cool. The gamers kept going, so I yelled, “Vegeta,” which got the attention of a woman passing by who thought I was speaking to her. Turns out she was Hygenia from the show Who Wants To Be A Superhero?