The largest fan convention in the United States, Comi-Con has been canceled this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. It was scheduled to be held in San Diego in late July. This is the first time the Comic-Con was canceled in its 51-year history. People who purchased  tickets for this year's event have a choice of a refund or a pass for the 2021 Comic-Con.

From Variety:

Founded in 1970, and given the moniker San Diego Comic-Con (or SDCC) in 1973, the annual convention of comic book fans, writers, and sellers ballooned in size in the 2000s with the explosion of big-budget genre entertainment in Hollywood. The four-day convention has been a critical promotional tool for feature films and TV shows for over a decade.

But given the near-total suspension of work within the entertainment industry — not to mention widespread anxiety about the safety of mass public gatherings — it was unclear how many studios and networks were even going to participate in this year’s SDCC.

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In the early 2010s, I wrote a play called True Believers that was kind of a send-up and a love letter to comic-con culture. The play had a full production in Boston in 2012 (closing on the weekend of San Diego Comic-Con, when they first announced the Guardians of the Galaxy, which totally ruined the meta-level "I Am Groot" gag in the script), as well as staged readings at fringe festivals across the country, from New York to Chicago to Valdez, Alaska.

I later tried to turn that script into a novel. It was an interesting writing experience — trying to adapt your own work across mediums, from one that's explicitly external to one that's largely internal is a weird challenge, to say the least — and ultimately, nothing really came of the manuscript.

But now that we're all quarantine, and now that comic books themselves have also been quarantined for the foreseeable future, I've decided to serialize it on Medium, broken down into digestible chunks. The first 10 chapters are out now, and they each take (by Medium's calculations) about 4-9 minutes to read. I'll be adding new chapters every day through the end of the month. If you're looking for some nerdy laughs and nostalgia, it could be a delightful way to pass the time right now.

Here's a fuller synopsis of the story, in case you're not convinced:

It's the weekend of the big annual comic book convention, and Chad Mailer is a young professional comic book writer who hit his career peak five years ago with a series that he never actually finished, and he now wishes to re-ignite his career.

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Thor is in the house.

Elan Lee (previously) is part of the team that brought us the amazing card game Exploding Kittens (previously); writing in MAKE: Magazine, Lee explains how they built an awesome Exploding Kittens vending machine for Comic-Con, to go beyond the boring, traditional ideas of what a con booth was. Read the rest

Tired: cosplaying the carpet at Dragoncon (even if you do get bonus points for attracting spurious copyright threats from the venue!); Wired: cosplaying the venue itself!. (via Neatorama) Read the rest

“My friend John Hodgman had never cosplayed before,” says Boing Boing pal Adam Savage, “So I invited him to walk the floor with me at Comic-Con as Chewbacca. (He's on the left.).”

Lordy, there are tapes. Read the rest

People flying home from San Diego Comic-Con yesterday got a rude surprise when they spotted signs at the United check-in warning them not to put comics in their checked bags -- and most assumed it was the TSA's doing, a reasonable assumption given that the agency has been repeatedly trialling programs to search passengers' literature for exploding words for some months. Read the rest

I just checked in for my o-dark-hundred flight to Denver tomorrow morning for this weekend's Denver Comic-Con, where I'm appearing for several hours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, including panels with some of my favorite writers, like John Scalzi, Richard Kadrey, Catherynne Valente and Scott Sigler: Read the rest

San Diego Comic-Con International has concluded for 2016, but these amazing photos of dedicated cosplayers at the event will live on. Read the rest

On a panel at Comic-Con last Thursday, William Shatner shared his opinion about the green shirt he had to wear as Captain Kirk on Star Trek. And it wasn't favorable. The problem was it was just too darn snug, making him feel uncomfortable. "It was a little embarrassing after lunch to have that tight green thing on." And, according to CinemaBlend, it wasn't just the lunches that made him self-conscious.

Besides the practical inconveniences, there was clearly an element of embarrassment from walking around the studio lot wearing something that one might guess to be the Easter Bunny’s karate gi. This is especially true considering that it was a time when westerns still dominated and science fiction was generally ostracized.

But Shatner was good-natured in his wardrobe dissing and complimented costume designer Bill Theiss for all of his hard work. For more details on Shatner's past and future costumes, click here. Read the rest

Every year, our friend Adam Savage of Mythbusters and Tested walks the Comic-Con floor completely disguised by his costume and makes a video about it. This year, he was joined by astronaut Chris Hadfield and they both wore spacesuits like those in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Read the rest

A lapsed nerd comes home.

The sun has set on San Diego, and we've put together the most interesting news that fans of comics -- you know, the books -- shouldn't miss.

.picture { background-color: #FFFFFF; font: 12px/1.5em Arial; color:#888888; sans-serif; } .picture img { vertical-align:middle; margin-bottom: 3px; } .right { margin: 0.5em 0pt 0.5em 0.8em; float:right; } .left { margin: 0.5em 0.8em 0.5em 0; float:left; } Left to right: Bob Burden, Daniel Clowes, Jaime Hernandez (Photo by Jackie Estrada)

Bob Burden, creator of the great Flaming Carrot comic book series of the 1980s, says:

Jackie Estrada, one of the directors of San Diego Comicon is doing a Kickstarter for a book on the photographic history of the con. She was a shutterbug from the jump, and took hundreds of pictures every year.

This book is a virtual TIME CAPSULE of all the comic con people, from Dave Stevens, to Mobius, to Kliban to Alan Moore etc. Jackie combed the floor in the day and hit all the parties at night and has preserved a treasure trove of of the comic culture's .birth, adolescence and coming of age.

It's going to be an incredible book.

I think so, too! I reserved my copy for $45.

Comic Book People: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s Read the rest

Boing Boing reader Michael Matise shot some wonderful photographs of miniatures and models at New York Comic-Con 2013, and shared them in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. A few are below. Here's the whole set. Michael tells us more about the photos below. Read the rest

Liz Ohanesian, a writer who covers fan subcultures and comics, anime, and music conventions, has a thoughtful essay about Comic-Con in this week's LA Weekly. She ran into those same street preachers Rob wrote about here on Boing Boing earlier; the nerd crowd's reaction is part of why we love, and need, events like this.

Usually I try to ignore the people with the fire-and-brimstone signs. If world history has taught us anything, it's that religious arguments don't end with a cordial handshake. On Sunday, though, I was stuck on a corner across from the San Diego Convention Center just a few feet away from a guy with a megaphone. He was going on about "darkness," which I humbly submit isn't a bad thing, but we can talk about that later. I started grumbling to myself. Some others in the crowd challenged him loudly. The guy with the megaphone turned to one and lashed out with some insults. Then, in the back of this tightly packed crowd, a man started singing "Joy to the World," the Three Dog Night song that begins with "Jeremiah was a bullfrog." By the time he reached the chorus, the bulk of the convention-goers had joined him in song.

Why Comic-Con Is Really About Community. [LA Weekly]

More of Liz's Comic-Con coverage around the web. Read the rest

Though I've never played a pen-and-paper RPG in my life, I'm completely in love with the dice. At Comic-Con, a company called Chessex had more on offer, in more shapes, sizes and geometries, than I'd ever seen in my life. Irresistable! Read the rest