All I had to do was mention that many fanboys at the Comic Con were disgustingly sweaty from the extreme heat and that a lot of people showed up in steampunk costumes. That was all I had to do to induce dozens of people to send me emails with a link to Goths in Hot Weather. GothsInHotWeather is one of those ironic sites where they obsess about something while claiming not to really like it or care about it. Sort of like Perez Hilton. In case this was not painfully apparently already, the site addresses the issue of some gothic attire being a poor fit for overly warm weather. Humorous concept and domain, but it sort of states the obvious.

The LA Weekly has a gallery of forty of their best photos from the Comic Con. I think my favorite was the steampunk animatronic girl costume and the Wonder Woman costume in the same frame. Sums up some of the factionalization at the Comic Con this year. The most extreme example of warring factions was the huge turnout for the Twilight programming coupled with the protesters carrying picket-style signs and heckling the lines for the Twilight panel discussions. Wonder Woman and steampunk girl represent different sorts of costuming, but they both look happy in their photo which is nice. According to the LA Weekly, the steampunk presence at the Comic Con was so large that the Guinness Book of World Records came out to take the record-setting largest steampunk gathering photo on the steps of the convention center.

I am back from the 40th anniversary Comic Con. It feels like every year the show sells out earlier, the best panels get harder to gain entry to, the temperatures get hotter, certain fanboys smell stronger (you know who you are), and I make more deals for more money. This year saw the addition of some fans protesting that Twilight ruined Comic Con. Because, before Twilight, there were no over-sized movie studio booths taking over the place and no script writers like me going to the show just to get work. /sarcasm. A really nice aspect to this year’s show was the emphasis on the history of the show. The special 40th Anniversary Guests page on the site for the convention has really nice bios of a lot of the Secret Masters of Fandom who made the Comic Con possible. For bonus sexiness, my favorite bio on the page is the one for the most famous scream queen ever, who apparently was knocking them dead at the Comic Con as a teen: “Brinke Stevens (aka Charlene Brinkman) wowed audiences at the Masquerade in the 1970s with her choreographed dances. She served as Masquerade coordinator in 1976–1978. She is best known as a scream queen and has appeared in more than 100 films. “

In honor of Comic Con, Comic Book Fonts is offering, not only new fonts with names like Battly Damaged and Speeding Bullet, but most of their catalog at 50% off. The sale goes through Friday, so head on over there if you’ve been thinking about creating your own comic book on the computer.

IGN, now, just like MySpace, owned by the very savvy folks at FOX has its Comic Con galleries posted now. They have them broken down into convenient categories like The Babes of Tokyopop and Final Fantasy Figures.

Galleries of pictures taken at the record-smashing Comic Con 2006 are already starting to post. ComingSoon.net has more than a hundred photos although most are not of people, but more importantly the booth babe galleries are starting to post, such as this Flickr gallery by Greg O’Connell, as reported by Comic Book Conventions.

According to their site: We were the kids that lived down the street that at the age of 8 were putting on haunted houses for our friends. We were the ones that started setting up stuff in our yards in August for Halloween, and the ones that spent more time thinking up how to make realistic eyeballs in the candy bowl than doing our home work (by the way, peeled grapes work really well). We were also the ones who were so sad we could almost cry when November 1st rolled around and all of the pumpkins came down, and we had to put everything away until next year.

Well, it’s 20 years later, and we are still doing the same thing. On just a slightly different scale.

The original name of the group was “The Brotherhood of the Forbidden Grape.” That was before we were of legal age, and the single largest goals we had were acquiring booze and meeting girls. Usually the beer was much easier to find than the girls, thus we pursued the attainable goal instead of what we figured was a quest that would bear no fruit.

Sometime around 1990, the first ever Brotherhood party took place. We decided that costume parties were where it’s at, and our likelihood of getting girls to show up was much greater if we did something really cool. So we built Dante’s Inferno Room, the whorehouse from Beetlejuice. Much to our surprise we really did get some girls to show up, and we even have some photographic proof somewhere.

It took about 4 weeks of arguing, 5 cases of beer, and one long-ass night to put it all up. We messed with it for another week or so, but the bulk of it went up in someone’s backyard in one night. It was by far the biggest pain the ass thing I have ever built. Its a miracle that it didn’t fall down on top of everyone, and kill them all in a single blow.

However it was bad-ass looking and managed to stay up for the 7 hours of the event. Plus, it was the coolest thing we had ever done. From there, every year, it has gotten bigger, harder, more fun, and much more cool. As we got older, our disposable income grew, and our imagination grew with it. Every year since 1990 we have started the planning earlier and thrown a larger shindig. Sometimes in the past we would take a year off and do something mellow since we were burned out from all the work of the year before, but for the post part we would do some type of large shindig every year. Recently we started moving to more than one event a year even though it drastically cuts into our drinking time on the weekends. (via freaksnightout.com)

Blue Blood is going to have a few flyers for my little site in booth 433 at the Comic Con. The booth is sponsored by The Brotherhood. Here is gallery number one of the adventures in that booth last year. Thanks so much, guys.