Look, there’s A TON of good stuff going on at Comic-Con this year, from the regular costumed and cosplay characters, to gossipy buzz, to the industry news, the parties, and the standing in ginormous lines for hours. But there’s also the panels.
Yeah, you could attend all the main days of Comic-Con, not see a single panel and still have a great time, but you are just ripping yourself off. There are tons of good speakers on a variety of topics, meaningful and frivolous from across the comic book, entertainment and superhero sectors.
But how do you choose what to go to? What are the best panels for your time? How do you pick between overlaps in the schedule? Fortunately, NMR happen to be experts on all things Comic-Con and we’ve gone through the enormous original list to pare it down to a few simple MUST SEES. Of course, for brevities sake (and because you Comic-Con types seem okay with narratives broken into multiple chapters), we then hacked the list in half to inform you over two days.
Here are the essential Comic-Con panel experiences from Thursday and Friday:
Thursday, July 9:
Skip all the morning stuff in which creators tell you how they made it — yours is a different path if you want to be a creator. Also skip the buzzy Hand of God intro, nothing amazing will come of it. Instead, if you want to be an industry professional (and all of you do), your best bet is to wait ‘til 10:30 for the legal class — Comic Book Law School 101: Woulda, Coulda Shoulda. While yes, it will arguably be the driest of the morning classes (it doubles as an actual law school credit course), it also is going to provide you with invaluable free legal knowledge — invaluable stuff.
If you don’t want to take your future in comics/creative enterprises seriously, I don’t know, go check out the Shonen Jump panel.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t also mention this discussion panel on making a successful web series, involving Shira Lazar and Jacob Israel:
What’s upcoming with Geek & Sundry? Find out at their 1:00pm panel:
The Class of ‘85 movie panel at 2:00pm will become one of the buzziest, you-shoulda-been-there panels of the whole convention. Mark our words.
Horror tends to be underrepresented at Comic Con — best to leap when you can:
Sheerly out of late-afternoon nostalgia, this should be an interesting panel for MAD magazine:
Friday, July 10:
If we’re going to pitch Day 1, we’re going to pitch Day 2 of the law school seminar on what you need to know about copyright in creative work. This class? Selling the sizzle.
This should be its own inspired brand of crazy:
Sure to be one of the smartest panels you can attend, Comics Strips In The Modern Era will teach you about the present and future of a subsection of the comic world:
This is just an interesting discussion:
Ahhh, missing this reveal would be the thing that gives you nightmares:
And, of course this will be awesome:
Another can’t-be-missed:
AND you can stick around for the likely-to-be-even-better Archer one:
Join us as we break down the best panels of the second half of Comic Con in our Part 2 article on Wednesday!
Share this in the meantime so people know what’s going down!
Thursday from 5-6pm you can see Fandom Is My Fandom- A panel on fanworks. I will be on it!