Oh, the Weirdness of the Con

Comic-Con is, at best, hardly a bastion of normalcy, what with the booths that attempt to recreate fantasy worlds in three dimensions, or the scantily-clad models shoving their stuff at distaff-deprived fanboys, or folks in bizarre costumes munching hot dogs and falafels. But a few experiences at this convention stood out as hallmarks of weirdness:

-- We saw the premiere of SUPERMAN:DOOMSDAY, a "PG-13" animated retelling of the "Death of Superman" storyline from the early '90's. In one scene (spoiler warning), Lex Luthor lures a clone of Superman he created into a red-sun chamber (robbing faux-Supes of his powers), then pummels the clone with kryptonite knuckles. ("Red and green," Lex rhapsodizes. "The colors of Christmas!") Shirtless, Luthor straddles the stricken clone's chest, and gloats, "Who's your daddy?" Uh-huh.

-- At the Eisner awards on Friday night, British TV personality Jonathon Ross appeared with Brit expat writer Neil Gaiman to present the final awards. Ross rendered the normally chatty Gaiman mute with his energetic monologue on how American comics had given him more pleasure than . . . well . . . see for yourself.



Then, to top things off, Ross persuaded Gaiman to join him in emulating two previous co-presenters (both female) who smooched each other onstage. Inevitably, someone video'd it and posted the video on Youtube:



-- This event was strangely echoed in the movie we saw after the con while waiting for traffic to die down -- TRANSFORMERS, a movie so dumb I could feel my brain cells dying as I watched it -- which is likely the only movie based on a toy line that features the main character's mother delivering a long speech about the boy's self-gratification habits.

-- Among the myriad of celebrities I saw at Comic-con was Danny Bonaduce, who sauntered past us in front of the convention center. I mentally juxtaposed the red-headed cherub from the PARTRIDGE FAMILY, which I watched religiously as a seven-year-old, with this hard-bitten, hard-boiled soul.

-- One of the movie previews during the Warner Brothers panel was the wan-looking Japanese horror film remake ONE WRONG NUMBER. A few souls came up to ask the two actors who appeared about their other roles on ENTOURAGE and similar shows. The actors had at their sides some mysterious black boxes. At the end of the panel, they announced that the boxes were iPhones that they were told to give away. After some confusion about the criteria for awarding the phones, they decided to give the boxes to the fans who had asked the questions. So some lucky fans walked away with $500 pieces of Apple hardware.

-- During a voice actor's panel on Saturday, one of the actors reminisced about delivering his Ed Norton imitation in front of none other than Jackie Gleason. Then I attended the Marvel Studios panel. Speaking about the upcoming Hulk movie was -- who else? -- the other Ed Norton.



More video from the Con coming soon.