Another San Diego Comic-Con is in the books, and this year was perhaps one of the weirdest in recent history—even counting those “@Home” years. As the lack of major attendees and the lingering shadows of Hollywood’s labor movement saw a more muted Hall H at San Diego this year, earth-shattering nerd news wasn’t to be found at Comic-Con. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t plenty to celebrate and read about anyway.
io9 was, as always, on the ground in San Diego this past weekend to bring you the latest news from across the show floor, from breaking trailers to epic announcements, hands on from the show with looks at massive booths and huge merch reveals, and of course, so much wonderful cosplay. Even for a muted SDCC, there’s a ton you can catch up on—click through to get access to all of our coverage from this year’s event in one handy place.
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It’s a weird year for San Diego Comic-Con, as this week the show opens with a raft of absent studios and amid the shockwaves of an unprecedented labor movement in Hollywood. But the more things have changed for SDCC 2023, one thing’s stayed the same: there’s plenty of cool toys and collectibles con-goers (and in some cases, those of us stuck at home) can get their hands on.
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Begun, the Comic-Con news, has. Though the convention won’t start until later this evening, Lego is already breaking news by revealing three brand new Star Wars sets that’ll be revealed at the event. Two are from Star Wars Ahsoka, the upcoming show coming to Disney+ on August 23, and the third is a big, brick-built Chewbacca.
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One of the best things about a brand new Star Wars show is brand new Star Wars tech. Blasters, ships, armors and, of course, lightsabers. And when you’re talking about a show like Ahsoka, one that has a lot of Force users in it both good and bad, there are bound to be a lot of new lightsabers. And now you can check them out.
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If you’re at San Diego Comic-Con and you want to maximize your “activation” situation—you can’t do better than “The Lodge: A Paramount+ Experience,” which combines multiple of the streamer’s projects in a pop-up packed with photo ops. There’s also a bar with themed cocktails.
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San Diego Comic-Con 2023 is officially open and, as usual, it’s filled with all sorts of goodies. The main convention floor is over 2 million square feet and no matter where you look there’s something to catch your eye. io9 hit the floor on preview night and snapped just a handful of the stuff that caught our eyes, from big displays to standout photo-ops, props, cool merchandise and more. But this is barely a scratch of the surface of what’s actually here. Check it out.
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Harley Quinn showed up to San Diego Comic-Con, giving fans a sneak peek at the fourth season that’s set to release on MAX at the end of the month. This is a different animated series than ISEKAI, but obviously we’re excited for every version of Harley that has her kicking butt and taking names.
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It’s not too much longer until we get to see the latest take on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when the sumptuous looking Mutant Mayhem hits theaters in a few weeks. But that didn’t stop the filmmakers behind it from coming to San Diego with some shiny new footage anyway.
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San Diego Comic-Con is back for 2023 but, due to the writers and actor’s strikes, it looks a little different. Case in point, a video game had a panel in Hall H. A video game! But this, of course, is not just any video game. It’s a video game based on one of the most popular comic book characters of all-time and a sequel to one of the best games in recent memory. So where else but inside the legendary Hall H would Spider-Man 2 be?
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Hollywood may not be a major force at San Diego Comic-Con this year, but India sure is. In a year where most major American studios were forced to skip the convention without actors to appear on panels, or writers to write upcoming movies, the Indian production company Vyjayanthi Movies stepped in and chose the convention as the place to reveal it’s upcoming mega sci-fi blockbuster.
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Pass into the after worlds with the Good Omens cast and crew in this new featurette from Prime Video, which is one of more than a dozen “exclusive behind-the-scenes videos” which will be available via Prime Video’s X-Ray. “If season one is a comedy about the end of the world, season two is a comedy about the beginning of everything else,” says showrunner Douglas Mackinnon.
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AMC’s Interview With the Vampire has finally released a teaser trailer for Season 2 of the series, following up on an absolutely stunning activation “The Street of Immortality” set up at the Hilton Gaslamp Terrace for San Diego Comic-Con. The teaser was being show at the activation before it was released to the public and con-goers visiting the New Orleans recreation were able to get a first-look at the trailer.
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These days, if you want original science fiction films, you usually have to turn to the on demand market. Low budget sci-fi with no name stars is happening all the time. But big budget sci-fi, in theaters, with famous actors? It just doesn’t happen that much anymore without.
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It probably feels a lot longer than that, but Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s sci-fi comedy series Rick & Morty is turning 10 years old in December. Ahead of the show’s seventh season premiering sometime in the fall, Adult Swim held a 10-year retrospective panel for the show at San Diego Comic-Con (hosted by io9’s very own Cheryl Eddy!).
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Daryl Dixon has pretty much always been the most popular character on The Walking Dead. Sure people love Rick and Michonne. They loved to hate Negan and The Governor. But Daryl has always been that perfect balance. That’s why it’s wild to think that finally, after all this time, he’s finally got his own show and now that show has an official trailer.
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Netflix’s adaptation of Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece has been slowly teased out over the past year or so ahead of its release next month. After a grand reveal during the streamer’s Tudum event in June, a new trailer at San Diego Comic-Con was released that features a more expansive look at the show.
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The mountain of merchandise revealed at San Diego Comic-Con this year included a couple of toys we wish we could un-see. Lego’s two foot-tall brick-built Chewbacca’s beady eyes are already a staple of our nightmares, and is soon to be joined by a growing Groot Hasbro that makes the character look like he’s being stretched out on a medieval torture device.
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With Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse being a theatrical success and Spider-Man 2 set to hit the PlayStation 5 in October, everyone’s got Spiders on the brain. Ahead of the film’s release, Marvel made an effort to push specific Spider-Man variants such as Pavitr Prabhakar (Spider-Man India) and Hobie Brown (Spider-Punk). But there’s one Spider who doesn’t appear in that movie, but is surprisingly coming back to comics after a few years of being retired.
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Star Wars: The High Republic may have began as a golden age for its titular government and the Jedi Order that stood beside it—but later this year things are taking a turn towards darkness, as Lucasfilm’s prequel publishing initiative kicks off its third and final phase. But as dark as things will be, the future got a little clearer at San Diego Comic-Con.
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There’s a new Punisher in town, and he’s a guy you’ve truly never heard of.
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AMC’s The Walking Dead went through plenty of characters during its 11-season run, but the departure of Andrew Lincoln’s leading man Rick Grimes was a momentous shakeup. Next to him, one of the biggest characters to leave the show alive was Danai Gurira’s Michonne, and the pair eventually fell in love before Rick was written out of the show in season nine. Michonne was written out the following season, but the series finale for the lead show of the Walking Dead universe ended with a tease that that the two would eventually find each other again.
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If you’re a Star Wars toy fan you probably already heard about Hasbro’s latest announcement. It’s going to release a mega, super, duper version of The Ghost from Star Wars Rebels and Ahsoka though its Haslab program. If 8,000 people pledge $500 to buy the ship before September 7, it’ll be made. And considering as of writing it’s almost two thirds of the way there into its 47-day campaign, it will almost certainly happen.
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The Eisner Awards awarded its 2023 winners last night at San Diego Comic-Con. While Image had the most total nominations, and DC the second-most, DC’s Nightwing won all three of the categories it was recognized for: Best Continuing Series, Best Penciller/Inker or Penciller/Inker Team, and Best Cover Artist. One of io9’s favorite WEBTOONs, Lore Olympus, also went home with hardware, winning in the Best Webcomic category; which makes this the second time Rachel Smythe has won, having been first nominated for Lore Olympus in 2019 and having won in 2022.
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Comic-Con may be more about movies and TV than comics some years, some times it’s more about comics than movies and TV (especially this year). But one thing it always is, thanks to Hasbro: a nightmare on your wallet for Marvel and Star Wars fans.
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San Diego Comic-Con has been very good to Star Trek in recent years, and even as Hollywood labor movements mean the franchise’s stars are sitting out of the action in Hall H this year, there was still plenty to be excited about in Star Trek’s new panel—like a long awaited first look at the return of Lower Decks.
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Not to be outdone by last year’s Comic-Con announcement that Strange New Worlds would team up with Lower Decks for a crossover episode in season 2, this year the latest Trek series returned to San Diego to go one weirder: the Enterprise is getting downright lyrical.
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Thought you’d had enough Star Trek: Strange New Worlds this week? Think again. To not leave fans who didn’t directly beam into San Diego Comic-Con feeling left out today, Paramount has made the surprise move to drop the latest episode of the series—its highly anticipated crossover with Star Trek: Lower Decks—for everyone right now.
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Buster and Babs Bunny are back with the Tiny Toons crew in a revamp produced by Steven Spielberg of the filmmaker and WB Animation’s original 90’s series for Max coming this fall.
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Though Prime Video’s animated series Invincible focuses on Steven Yeun’s titular teenage superhero, the first season highlighted other, more experienced young heroes that could show Invincible the ropes. One of those characters was Atom Eve (Gillian Jacobs), who’s getting a little boost to her character ahead of the show’s second season. Not only does she now have a standalone episode focused on her origins, she’s also starring in her own video game.
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Warner Bros. may be playing fast and loose with DC movies in live-action, but over in animation, the studio makes sure to release a handful of movies every year. Sometimes these are fun one-offs (often set in another universe, adapted or others), and others are part of their own ongoing world that’s technically meant to function as the primary DC animated universe. For 2024, DC’s going back to the nostalgia mines by adapting two of its most well-known works.
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TMNT: The Last Ronin imagined a universe where just a single member of the Turtles was left standing, a dark future with little hope—but its final conclusion didn’t just give a jolt of hope to that alternate reality, but set the stages for a continuation that is now coming to light.
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For decades, Toonami and Adult Swim have helped boost anime’s profile here in the west through popular shonen like Dragon Ball Z and My Hero Academia. 2021’s Blade Runner: Black Lotus was a joint collaboration between it and Crunchyroll, and now two of the late night block’s upcoming programs see it further team up with a pair of big name Japanese creatives.
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“We’ve got to reject the idea that is just something that’s going to happen to us and we can’t say anything about it,” said SAG-AFTRA national executive director, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland at the beginning of a panel focusing on AI and entertainment. “I think it definitely could, the question is whether we’re going to let that happen.”
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During the “Women of Marvel” panel at San Diego Comic-Con, fans got to learn more about the upcoming comic Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant, written by Iman Vellani—star of Marvel Studios’ Disney+ series Ms. Marvel and upcoming feature The Marvels.
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