Comic-Con

The power of Comic-Con may rest in the hands of the studios, but its beauty is certainly a gift from its people. For four days in the sweltering Southern California summer, crowds gather to create an alternate reality, a new planet perhaps.

Like any good sci-fi movie, Comic-Con 2016 had two battling monsters competing for the fancrowd's affections: DC Comics and Marvel. Both went to war - so to speak on the next-to-last day of the event, Saturday.

We’ve seen him master his comedic skills in the highly successful television show 30 Rock for which he won 3 Golden Globes and was four nominations. He’s also starred in brilliant in dramatic pieces, too many to list, collecting 11 Golden Globe nominations in various categories.

When charming Jeffrey Dean Morgan walked in to the HFPA Comic-Con lounge he acknowledged that meeting with us has become a yearly routine. Last year he visited our lounge and talked about Extant and The Good Wife, the TV shows he was working on back then – his character Jason Crouse’s romance with Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) on the last season of the CBS hit show had created a lot of buzz.

Sunny Melissa Benoist stopped by the HFPA Comic-Con lounge to talk about Supergirl’s upcoming second season. She gave a few teasers: Kara, who arrived to Earth from the planet Krypton, will be more mature and tries to find balance in her life.

Anybody who grew up at the end of the eighties has fond memories of Richard Dean Anderson, the actor who for 7 seasons,  from 1985 to 1992, portrayed the always resourceful secret agent Angus MacGyver. He was so powerful that the term created by Lee David Zlotoff as the last name of his character became part of the English language, and is still used in may other parts of the world to refer to someone who can to fix something with his bare hands.

Once again the dead are walking the earth – especially the real estate around the San Diego Covention Center. Zombies are always a mainstay at Comic-Con and even though the popular sidebars Walker Stalker Fan Fest and the Walking Dead Escape at the Petco baseball stadium were scrapped this year, hideously disfigured brain-eaters are still among the most popular cosplay costumes.

Canadian actress Tatiana Maslany was at Comic-Con to talk about the upcoming fifth season of the sci-fi cloning drama Orphan Black. That’s the BBC America series where Tatiana plays not one but a half-dozen alter egos, product of a top seceret cloning experiment.

The rites of summer: as the country boils and ocean breezes cool the shores of San Diego, fanboys and fangirls, cosplayers, trekkers and assorted enthusiasts of all things sci-fi, fantasy,horror, comix or pop/geek culture descend upon the city's Convention Center for an immersive weekend of comraderie and celebration. Gone are the days of 1970, when a small group of friends banded together to create what was, at the time, just a comic-book convention (the first in Southern California).

   Monsters, robots, vampires and werewolves mingled with fans, followers, hundreds of journalists and, of course, stars, at this year's wild and crazy Comic-Con convention in San Diego. Among the wilder stunts was the warehouse Legendary Pictures turned into a Japanese monster theme park to promote Godzilla, and Ubisoft, the video game company, firing cannons from a pirate ship docked behind the convention center to generate buzz for Assassin's Creed 1V.