Last week, we headed down to Comic-Con to soak in all the fandom and take part in the annual celebration of comic books, entertainment, and everything under the pop-culture sun. We brushed shoulders with Stormtroopers, Wonder Women, Dothrakis, and wizards, and waited in lines for hours – all in hopes of seeing our favorite artists, writers, showrunners, filmmakers, cosplayers and maybe, just maybe, a surprise preview.
Every fandom imaginable was accounted for from Game of Thrones to The Golden Girls. Everyone has a place at Comic-Con. If you want to do a mash-up of a Disney princess and The Walking Dead, why not?
We kicked things off at the Stargate panel - cuz we’re nerds - where James DeJulio, Tongal’s Co-Founder and President, spoke alongside GateWorld’s co-founders Darren Sumner and David Read, actors Christopher Judge (Teal'c) and Tony Amendola (Bra'tac), and prop maker Dean Newbury. The panel was moderated by Stargate Command editor Kieran Dickenson, who announced, to a packed room of Stargate fans, Tongal’s upcoming work with the franchise, giving fans the opportunity to shape new stories for the Stargate universe:
We at Stargate Command 'HQ' are busy working on a whole load of different initiatives, and it's all because of you guys [the fans]. It's because of the amazing love for Stargate that you've shown us on Twitter, on Facebook, and on Stargate Command. That's why I think working with a company like Tongal, where we can start engaging with fans directly, and fans can actually start shaping the stories we tell, it just fits perfectly.
From there, we hopped on the SYFY shuttle to check out the various pop-ups downtown. NBC’s The Good Place created a true-to-set experience replete with shrimp cocktails; The Purge set up shop à la Party City offering provisions for survival, and Amazon Prime built an obstacle course worthy of the Marines for their new show, Jack Ryan.
SYFY had a huge presence at this year’s Comic-Con with genre-themed bingo trolleys, buses wrapped in fan art, surprise fan awards with Orlando Jones (American Gods), and 10 official panels on the schedule, including the popular SYFY Wire The Great Debate, where Felicia Day (MST3000), Adam Savage (MythBusters), and other celeb-nerds hotly debated the most contentious topics in the genre world. Notice how the word “fan” appears a lot in the last few sentences? That’s because everything SYFY did at Comic-Con tied back to their reverence for fandom - and what fans everywhere stand for: passion, creativity, community.
SYFY also celebrated its partnership with Tongal to power a new fan creator initiative, placing fans front and center in the content creation process. They released a series of 10 mini-documentaries shot by the Indie Machines, celebrating fan creators - those who not only follow a character or story world but feel inspired enough to create and contribute to that world in an original way. These gorgeously shot docs explore what drives fan creators to create. Through Tongal, SYFY is letting fans do everything from create logos for their TV channel to film a trailer for a digital pilot. SYFY understands the power of fandom because who better to source ideas and creative from than those who are deeply engaged with your content?
Here are a few other highlights from our frenzied 4 days:
• ‘Supergirl’ casts Nicole Maines, TV’s first transgender superhero.
• Neil Gaiman talked about the making of the Good Omens TV series, 28 years after the book was published - and the difficulty of making it without his long-time collaborator Terry Pratchett.
• A conversation with Joye Murchison Kelly who, in the mid-1940s, wrote many of Wonder Woman’s original stories under the male pseudonym Charles Moulton. She was an assistant to William Marston, the original creator of Wonder Woman, who contracted polio and died of the disease in 1947. She was honored with the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing.
• Watching shorts and features by up-and-coming filmmakers at the Comic-Con International Independent Film Festival. Yes! Comic-Con has a film festival, too.
• The Twilight Zone marathon.
• DC Entertainment announced their new subscription streaming service that provides digital access to theatrically-released DC movies and much more, and they also screened the first look of the new Aquaman movie.
The big takeaway from Comic-Con is that fans wield incredible power. They speak their own language (Klingon, Dothraki to name a few), they bring characters back from the dead, they can even save an entire series. Fans engage with content in new and exciting ways and it’s important for studios and networks to pay attention and engage their fan communities in equally exciting ways. As a platform that empowers fans from around the world, we see our role as bridging the gap between fan creators and studio creators.
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What characters or story worlds do you hold close to your heart? Which ones inspire you enough to create?
