I promise not to go overboard with the San Diego Comic-Con news, especially since I wasn't there to witness it all firsthand this year, but I couldn't resist sharing a pirated video of a trailer for Iron Man prepared exclusively for the convention...at least until the suits swooped in and took the video off the 'net. But trust me, it was pretty damn cool.

The superhero flick, starring Robert Downey Jr. and scheduled for a May 2008 release, was just one example of what NYT reporter Michael Cieply described as the convention's role as a "particle accelrator for popular culture," with television and film productions playing as big a part in the weekend's festivities as the comic books...and the action figures, and the costumes, and the Japanese monster toys, and so on and so forth. Among the highlights: DC Comics revealed that its current weekly comic, Countdown, is building up to a mini-series in 2008 called Final Crisis and scripted by fan favorite Grant Morrison; the entire cast of NBC's Heroes showed up for a preview of this fall's episodes, and Marvel will be using four writers and four artists to pump out Amazing Spider-Man three times a month starting this fall.