Comic-Con

Gone were the days when only ultrafans and memorabilia collectors gathered to celebrate the fantastic. Comic-Con is big business, and every studio, channel and production company makes sure to bring out the best - stars! props! activations! - to entice the crowds.

Going to Comic-Con this year couldn't have been a more rewarding experience for Bob Odenkirk. It started with a reunion with the rest of the cast of Breaking Bad in front of the cameras of the Conan show on Wednesday night, and then it continued the next day with the first panel in the history of Better Call Saul in Hall H.

By her own admission, Sissy Spacek is inextricably linked to Stephen King, owing to her starring role in 1976’s Carrie, for which she was nominated for the first of her six Academy Award nods; eight nominations and three Golden Globes would eventually also stack up. “Fifteen years ago, this girl who couldn’t have been more than 17 came running up to me, pulled her sleeve down and showed me a tattoo of Carrie holding the flowers, with the crown, but no blood,” the actress told the HFPA in a special conversation at Comic-Con 2018.

Reunion gatherings are a tricky thing. Held too soon, sometimes not enough time has passed to either create or sustain a nostalgic appreciation for days gone by; held too late, they sometimes merely turn into a meandering rehash of hazy recollections.

It's a rite of Summer: if it's mid-July, fanboys and fangirls will be flocking to San Diego in a form of pilgrimage better known as Comic-Con International. The event, now a mandatory stop for stars and filmmakers of the pop/sci-fi/genre persuasion and a huge business for the city of San Diego, started out as an act of pure fan passion.

Jay Hernandez has experienced a pronounced change in his fashion sense recently. “My closet is basically all black (clothes), but when you get on an island it doesn’t feel right,” he told us with a laugh when he stopped by the HFPA Comic-Con lounge.

A new franchise made its debut at Comic-Con and it comes with the Marvel logo attached to it. For the fans of the comic named Inhumans, there's not much to explain but for the ones with less knowledge about that world, former Game of Thrones villain Iwan Rheon and the star of Hell on Wheels, Anson Mount, stopped by the HFPA lounge at Comic-Con to give us some basic tips: 'I play Black Bolt', Mount said.

He has a big smile for every fan that stops him to ask for a picture and never seems tired of the duties of fame. A trained dancer and singer who started his career in Glee playing Sebastian Smythe, Grant Gustin has achieved stardom in the world of super heroes, as Barry Allen, better known as The Flash, first in Arrow and later in his own show.

Stephen Amell must be the most relaxed TV super-hero in the stellar gathering of colleagues at Comic-Con.   He's a veteran of the event and with five seasons of Arrow behind him,  he is very familiar with the reactions of fans from all over the world: “In China, it was a little weird', he told us.

Before stepping inside the Marvel multiverse as, respectively, The Punisher/Frank Castle and Karen Page, Jon Bernthal and Deborah Ann Woll had already seared other illustrious TV characters into our minds: The Walking Dead's Shane and True Blood's Jessica. Now both are front and center in a trio of high-profile Marvel series:  Daredevil, now in its third season, and the new The Punisher and The Defenders.