San Diego Comic-Con is the place where publishers announce their biggest plans for the year. Here’s some of the developments that came out of this year’s show.

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I’m late to file this because of all the fun yesterday. Thursday, the official beginning of San Diego Comic-Con, kicked off in wild fashion, with the expected throngs of people crowding the floor. The record crowd this year has led the convention to create a shuttle bus route from Mission Valley to the convention center, and there were reports of overcrowding leading to problems on preview night. Hopefully those problems have been fixed and everyone can enjoy a great convention.
 

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San Diego Comic-Con kicked off Wednesday night with a bang. Record numbers of people are attending the show this year, but luckily, Wednesday didn't feel overcrowded. In fact, the air of excitement was there and it seemed to signify a true love for what's going on in comics today (with no real successor to Twilight or Avatar at this year's show, the "tent city" neighborhood near Hall H is a shadow of its previous year's self, for example...but excitement is thriving for ongoing and new comics properties).

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Our sister site Reading Group Guides has an excellent new blog post up by reference librarian Bonnie Brzozowski about how graphic novels are perfect picks for book clubs. We couldn't agree more! Check out the great blog here.

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She still doesn't have a movie in production (and why not? It's time), but Princess Diana, a.k.a. Wonder Woman, is getting a fashion makeover courtesy of DC Comics. For 70 years, Wonder Woman has been sporting a quite revealing costume that could double as a bathing suit...and that suit has gotten skimpier and skimpier depending on who the artist drawing her was.

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News came today that Golden Age illustrator Al Williamson had passed away. He was 79. Al was a great artist who drew iconic images of Flash Gordon in the 1960s and well beyond. He was also the artist behind the comic strip Secret Agent Corrigan, and, in the work of his that made the most profound impact on me, the Star Wars comic book that Marvel put out when I was a kid. Artists like him are rarer and rarer in comics these days, sad to say, but his work lives on brilliantly.

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You may have read this news in Publishers Weekly already today: A coalition of Japanese and American publishers has been formed to deal with the growing (and rampant) problem of online manga distribution (commonly known as "scanlation"--scanning and translating manga works for online distribution). There are 36 Japanese publishers (all members of Japan's Digital Comic Association) joined by American companies Viz, Tokyopop, Square Enix, Vertical, the Tuttle-Mori Agency, and Yen Press.

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Congratulations to Raina Telgemeier's Smile, which was just named a 2010 Boston Globe Horn Book Award Honor Book in the nonfiction category. I remember first meeting Raina back in December at the GNR holiday party, and I told her I couldn't wait to read her book. Once I did, I was in love with it and tried to share it with friends and acquaintances. I'm so glad to see she's gotten this distinction from the Boston Globe. The book really deserves it.

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I'm a little bit late in breaking this "news" (two months late, give or take), but tonight I'm going to the Children's Choice Book Awards, sponsored by the Children's Book Council, so I have to give a shout-out to the graphic-novel-related authors being honored. Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute by Jarrett J.

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How did Dynamite Entertainment begin?
You know the old saying “One door closes and another opens”? Well, it was very much so in this case. I did not have the desire to be a publisher. I had been in the business long enough (with Dynamic Forces, Inc.—our parent company) that if you look at the bodies along the comics road, you can see that there were many more failures than successes in our business. The only real way it should work is by many smaller publishers consolidating, and we didn’t see that happening. But we were thrown in the middle of the Atlantic, so to speak, and told to guess which direction to go in to swim back home. So, when we started publishing, the first thing I started hearing from long-time friends was, “I thought you would never publish” or “I guess ‘never’ is as good as death in comics,” etc.

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