Having eschewed attempts to park or hotels nearby, we took a taxi to downtown this morning. We had our now-traditional non-traditional Thursday-morning Irish breakfast at Hennessey's (no traditional Irish food has ranchero sauce). m and kwc both did the black and black, with Guiness and coffee. Afterward, we hit the convention center proper, where I started my full exhibit hall coverage with littlestar. littlestar and I ended up completing our floor coverage (which apparently involves walking three miles) today, so we've at least walked by every exhibitor in the convention.
One such exhibitor was Daniel Davis, of Caught Creatures fame. We have a copy of his fine book, and littlestar has one of his posters. He's recently updated his webshop -- you can now buy Caught Creatures and other work by Davis at www.magicskull.com.
Other fun today in the extended.
Comics Editors on Comics Editing -- Danny Fingeroth hosted a panel featuring Diana Schutz (Dark Horse), Bob Schreck (DC), Jim Salicrup (Papercutz, formerly of Marvel) and Lee Nordling (Platinum). They spoke about editor as listening buddy and as bad cop, including a time when Bob Schreck had to call Paul Pope's mom to get him back on deadline.
The Tripper Movie Preview -- The movie preview that wasn't. David Arquette came intending to show off his new horror flick, but along the way he lost his clip tape. So instead of a screening, we had an hour of David Arquette and fellow panelists Steve Niles, Joe Harris and one other person talking about the movie, answering questions, and so on. Arquette generally did a good job and was entertaining, though some fans tried too hard to be funny with questions. I enjoyed the earnest Q&A the best (e.g. "What was it like to receive direction from someone who previously worked on the direction-receiving side of the camera?"). We were mainly sitting through this, however, to get in on...
Guillermo del Toro: Pan's Labyrinth After a screening of the very-American-style trailer for this movie, writer-director Guillermo del Toro came on with actor Doug Jones to speak about this and other topics. PL is set during postwar Fascist Spain, and is apparently a follow-on to a movie set in an earlier time in Spain. del Toro spoke about the value of fantasy and horror -- genre movies -- as places to discuss topics like fascism, lack of personal choice and many other weighty topics. All in all, I hope someone has a transcript of the talk, because it was great, and I don't think I can do it justice here. From the difference between his Spanish films and pure Hollywood movies (on the topic of Blade II -- "I knew I was making Blade II -- I wanted a movie you'd watch with a six pack and a pizza") to making it in the movie business ("When people in this business complain about how hard it is, I ask them if they've tried fucking real life. I have, and this is better.").
