That gentle popping you hear is the arrival -- via pneumatic tube -- of another batch of Gil Riego Jr.'s top-shelf Comic-Con shots. This time, Riego has documented the convention's galaxy of new toys, action figures, and whatnot, including this not-a-doll of that newfangled Captain America. It's the new Cap, thankfully, the one whose retro-Ultimates look has at last liberated the character from looking like some inflatable you might see on the Fourth of July at a Duluth Chevy dealership.
But before we get to the other toys, here's an important exclusive:
Let's say you're a premium cable channel given to funding ambitious television series. And let's say you decide to adapt a no-end-in-sight fantasy series whose first book is longer than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. And then let's say you get a cast of hundreds to Ireland, work nudity clauses into everyone's contracts, and then get to filming the choicest beheadings, disembowelings, throat-rippings, and general grimy fantasy awesomeness TV has ever seen.
And then you can't train the damn dire wolves. See, in the books, each of the numerous Stark children is paired up with a giant wolf that symbolizes stuff and shares their brains and deus ex machinas them out of life-or-death situations. But even on the Game of Thrones budget, those are prohibitively expensive.
So, what can you as a producer do? The answer:
Anyway, here are some of the best of Riego's shots from yesterday's Comic-Con madness:
It's fun to say "wood Bender."
Carrie Keagan is not a toy, but she played one at the Voltron panel.
I can't work out who this next one is.
Is this what participants in the Voltron panel assembled into? Is it one of those I-know-how-to-rip-your-spine-out-but-not-how-to-spell-"combat" dudes from Mortal Kombat? Is it that guy from the Thor movie who stood guard over the Rainbow Bridge to Care-a-Lot?
I have a recurring nightmare of an angry David Byrne standing outside my grandma's screen door.
Hey, it's the Greendale Human Being!
"Will Do Green Screen 4 Money"
Here, we seen Tony Stark being pulled in too many directions, this time by a contraption rather than the script for Iron Man 2.
And, hey, what the hell, here's more Futurama, the show that is always starting again on a new, smaller channel! Look for it on Current any day now!
Check out more of Gil Riego's Comic-Con shots here.
You can follow Gil Riego on Twitter at @gilphotography, Alan Scherstuhl at @studiesincrap, and SF Weekly's Exhibitionist blog at @ExhibtionistSF!
