Comic-Con: Where Entertainment Converges

To give you a sense of how far beyond comic books the San Diego Comic-Con has gotten, here’s a snapshot of Saturday’s schedule at the Warner Bros. booth. You can click to see it at a more legible size, but the highlights include signings by Shawn and Marlon Wayans, Gerard Butler, Darren Aronofsky, and pretty much the entire cast of Veronica Mars.

Since it didn’t really fit into my publishing industry mandate, I didn’t spend much time chasing after the Hollywood types, but there were certainly stories to be found if you were into that sort of thing. Everybody knew Samuel L. Jackson was coming to promote Snakes on a Plane, and it was pretty much an open secret that Tobey Maguire would be on the Spider-Man 3 panel, but Brandon Routh’s appearance at the DC Comics booth caught fans offguard. In other celeb news, David Arquette forgot his videotape, while Superman director Richard Donner announced that he’ll start co-writing the comic book later this year with DC A-lister Geoff Johns, who actually got his start in the entertainment-industrial complex as Donner’s assistant. But I did take a fanboy moment to hang out at the Roger Corman panel, and that’s where I ran into producer Gale Anne Hurd (left), who told me that although she did come to San Diego to announce the greenlighting of Hulk 2 and Punisher 2, she’s been going to Comic-Con for years just as a fan. (In case you’re wondering, the Hulk sequel will be directed by Louis Leterrier, the French auteur behind Jason Statham’s Transporter franchise.)

Also, if you’re a fan of Lost, you might want to see what happened when young crusader Rachel Blake confronted the show’s executive producers at their panel, insisting that they come clean about their role in the Hanso Foundation’s conspiracy:

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