A Day At Comic-Con 2020 Online

I had some free time today, so I thought I'd take advantage of San Diego Comic-Con holding all their panels online this year. I watched five panels, all pre-recorded, roughly following the posted schedule but not exactly. These were the panels for "Star Trek," Amazon's remake of "Utopia," the "Marvel's 616" documentary series, "The New Mutants," and the 80th anniversary of Bugs Bunny. I wanted to put down a few thoughts on the experience.

First, there's no way that an online panel conducted via conferencing software is going to be able to match up to the live experience of Comic-Con. I've been watching recordings of past Comic-con panels that have ended up online for ages, and the crowd reactions have always been an integral part of the fun. Here, nobody makes any attempt to replicate them. Instead, you get a collection of celebs talking up their latest projects, usually with a couple of promo clips. A few trailers premiered, and a few exclusive clips were trotted out, but noticeably fewer than in recent years. There weren't any huge announcements that I could see, aside from the "Star Trek" panel confirming the new "Star Trek: Prodigy" Nickelodeon show.

There are clear benefits to having the panels online. I could attend multiple panels taking place at the same time. There were no lines, no space issues, and no getting your view blocked by other attendees. Because all the appearances were filmed in advance, there were no technical glitches to deal with and less time wasted on drawn-out introductions. However, this also meant no spontaneity whatsoever. There was never the possibility of people crashing each other's panels, no live Q&A mishaps, no unexpected fan interactions, and frankly far less energy and verve. Everyone's gotten used to the online panel format enough that there's no novelty there anymore. Some of the panels did try to incorporate some fan involvement, taking pre-submitted questions, and encouraging social media use. I thought it was very sweet that "New Mutants" spent a few minutes showing off some fanart.

All the panels were scheduled for an hour, but they varied wildly in actual length. The "Star Trek" panel, which actually covered presentations for three different shows, ran nearly 90 minutes and included a partial table read of the "Star Trek: Discovery" season finale. The "New Mutants" panel was just shy of 30 minutes, about the right length. The panel for Amazon's "Utopia" tried to fill a full 60 minutes, which was a bad idea because they ran very short of material. Based on the British "Utopia" mystery show, the cast had to keep answers evasive to avoid spoilers, which meant there wasn't really a lot for them to talk about. A couple of the participants were also relative newbies who clearly weren't used to doing press. The "Star Trek: Lower Decks" folks, by contrast, just let everybody loose and bleeped all the spoilers out for comic effect.

I did have something like the experience of wandering into random panels without really understanding what I was getting into. I got "Marvel's 616" mixed up with the "What If…" series, but the guests included Gillian Jacobs and Paul Scheer, who were super entertaining, and they totally sold me on the potential fun of an anthology series about the history of Marvel comics. I'm not really a Bugs Bunny fan, but I do enjoy Billy West, Leonard Maltin, and Jerry Beck. Their panel turned out to be a thinly veiled promotion of Warners putting out a new Bugs Bunny shorts collection, but it was still great to listen to a bunch of actors and animation geeks sharing their love of Bugs for an hour.

Since I'm not planning to attend another Comic-Con any time soon, I'd appreciate something like this being available in the future. It's not remotely close to anything like being there, but most of the panels were pretty fun to leave on all day, and I'm looking forward to a few other things on the lineup.

The best thing I saw today was definitely Marina Sirtis roasting Patrick Stewart during the "Star Trek: Picard" panel. I think she may be turning into our new Carrie Fisher.
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