It used to be that Comic-Con International's Preview Night was a way for con-goers to have a leisurely few hours on the show floor before the crowds arrived, pick up an interesting book or two, and maybe get a sense of what the buzz was. This year, the hordes charged the gate. With the show completely sold out weeks before it began, the mood on the floor was full-on raging madness from the jump, with piranha-like feeding frenzies for promotional goodies like Wonder Woman tote bags.
If there was one word on everyone's lips, though, it was Watchmen—the movie doesn't even open until next March, but the huge recreation of the Owlship (a futuristic flying machine from the book/movie) on the show floor was a prime attraction. DC Comics' booth was the usual mob scene, and publicity director David Hyde said there was much more media around for Preview Night than usual, and many more advance requests to do specific coverage during Preview Night. The Marvel booth, likewise, was packed; the publisher's going beyond the usual signings-and-handouts plan to feature a steady stream of programming in the booth itself.
Over at the expanded area of indie publisher Image Comics, a small mob lined up to buy deluxe hardcover copies of the Tori Amos tribute anthology Comic Book Tattoo (the book features comics work by a variety of artists that interpret the singer's songs), and lingered to pick up works by Becky Cloonan, Fabio Moon and Gabriel Bá's Pixu. New York-based indie house NBM, meanwhile, debuted Dirk Schweiger's Moresukine, a quirky journal of the German cartoonist's experiences in Japan, which he was on hand to sign. The hot item at Virgin Comics' booth was a small sketchbook promoting star comics writer Grant Morrison's forthcoming animated retelling of the Mahabarata, MBX.
Over at the Yen Press, Hachette’s graphic novel imprint, Kurt Hassler and Ju-Youn Lee were handing out the first copies of Yen Plus, their new 460-page anthology highlighted by color pages of the forthcoming manga adaptation of James Patterson's bestseller, Maximum Ride. The magazine is meant to duplicate the way new manga is introduced in Japan, using big anthology issues that offer readers a variety of serials. Hassler said they launched the issue with 110,000 copy printing. Oni Press's table featured the debut volume of Ray Fawkes and Cameron Stewart's The Apocalypstix, as well as a host of ever-popular Scott Pilgrim merchandise—the popular indie graphic novel series also has a movie in development—including a convention-exclusive comic book featuring color stories by Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O'Malley.
Drawn & Quarterly had copies of Aya of Yop City, Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie's acclaimed series about a girl growing up in the Ivory Coast in the '70s. D&Q's Tom Devlin said writer Abouet plans to continue the series, and the house will publish a third volume next year. Their table also had advance copies of Quill Award winner Rutu Modan's Jamilti and Other Stories, a collection of the acclaimed artist's short works. Fantagraphics had a small mountain of new releases, most prominently the first volume of the the much anticipated serial trade paperback-format of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez’s Love and Rockets: New Stories. And there was a constant flurry of activity around web-comics collective Dumbrella's booth—Meredith Gran was selling her new collection of her web strip Octopus Pie, and even comics theory guru Scott McCloud has a signing planned with Dumbrella to promote his massive Zot! collection, a 576-page special edition reprint of a classic series by McCloud done during the 1980s, coming out from HarperCollins this summer with commentary from McCloud. And so the annual rite of comic book and pop culture madness known as Comic-con has begun.