ComicCon NY Day 1 - Comic Legends, the original TV Hulk, and more amazing Jonathon encounters

Fri, Apr 18, 2008

EDIT: Catch all of the pics at our Flickr photo stream!

Our first full day of the Con is over and what an amazing day it has been. Every day seems to get better and better! We arrived at the con at 10am sharp, swung by the press room to pick up our programs and press kits and hit the convention floor.

The show floor was wonderful to behold. The convention opened today at 10am for press, exhibitors and professionals. The public was allowed in at 3pm. That gave us 5 hours to enjoy the convention while it was relatively uncrowded. We managed to fill up several bags with interesting things given to us, meet lots of cool people and see a ton of artists, publishers, comic shop booths and much, much more.

Above is Jonathon making some new friends. After we hung out on the floor for a few hours and got some lunch, we went downstairs for one of the most amazing panels I, or ComicCon has ever seen. The Legends of Comics Panel. Who was there? Well many of the greatest of the greats. Dick Ayers, Nick Cardy, Irwin Hasen, Carmine Infantino, Joe Kubert, Stan Lee, Jerry Robinson, John Romita, Sr, Joe Simon, Joe Sinnott and Mort Walker to name a few.

How to talk intelligently about a once in a lifetime comic book chance? WOW! Here are the people who turned comics into an art form, a literary form, a magical way to escape the world. These are many of the folks who dragged this industry into the forefront from the ground up. They were great to listen to and it was a privilege for us to be in the room as they talked about their lives and careers.

Dawn, Jonathon and Jenn stayed in the room a bit after the panel to hobnob and get a few autographs while I scurried next door to get seats for us all. We were lucky enough to get an invite to a press only event which featured Stan Lee in his newest project, a brand new comic book character Ultimo, created in cooperation with the Manga great Hiroyuki Takei. As all of us ArsGeekers assembled the press conference got under way. After learning that this would be released in Japan and shortly after in the US in English, Stan and the folks took some questions from the press.

Then, the magic happened. But we’ll get to that in the next post.

After the magic, we also got to say hello to Lou Ferrigno, of the Incredible Hulk fame, although a bit less green.