Comic-Con 2008 Programming

Half of the four-day schedule for San Diego’s Comic-Con International 2008 is up and running.

Here’s Thursday. Here’s Sunday.

Obviously, much cool stuff to choose from. Too much cool stuff, in fact. Makes me almost not sad that I won’t make it this year (watch out 2009!).

While we’re on the subject, Variety has a retrospective of the early days of Comic-Con, when film people had little idea how to relate to comics fans.

Although it was more than 30 years ago, for example, I keenly recall a preview of the 1978 feature “Superman,” where the studio rep described the campy villain Lex Luthor, played by Gene Hackman, as a real-estate mogul, not a master criminal. He was practically hooted off the stage.

Gradually, the studios started to wise up, hiring publicists specifically trained to handle Comic-Con’s savvy but easily riled audience. When Ridley Scott’s space-horror film “Alien” was showcased — using little more than a slide show of surrealist H.R. Giger’s jaw-dropping conceptual art — the crowd was blown away.