With 63,000 visitors on hand, this year's Comic-Con broke all attendance records. At right, Syd Mead signs books at the AWN booth. Photos courtesy of Dan Sarto.

Any successful party host will tell you that the magic ingredient to making your bash successful is that elusive quotient: cool. You can't plan for it, you can't fake it and you can't manufacture it. If you're lucky and have brought together the right people and circumstances, something cool might just happen. This year's Comic-Con International, held August 1-4 in San Diego, broke attendance records. Held in the football field length Convention Center, crowds swarmed the multitude of exhibitor booths, screenings, panel discussions and workshops. At one point on Saturday the registration line was reported to be over a mile long! With all that activity something special had to be going on. We invited five attendees, writers Mark Evanier and Scott M. Gimple, animation executives Jason VanBorssum and Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, and anime expert Fred Patten to share the cool things they experienced at Comic-Con this year.

One from the heart: Mark Evanier's cool pick was the emotional reception author Ray Bradbury received. Photo courtesy of Mark Evanier.

Mark Evanier
Mark Evanier is an animation writer (Garfield), comic book writer (Groo the Wanderer) and historian.

I was honored to moderate a mess of panels at the convention, all of which were enormous fun and some of which were highly enlightening. But the moment that stands out is from when I got to introduce Ray Bradbury to an audience of a couple of thousand admirers. Mr. Bradbury was confined to a wheelchair due to recent illness and it seemed like a miracle that he was there at all. But we got him up the stairs and onto the stage and, when I said his name in introduction, the crowd leaped to its collective feet and just applauded and applauded and applauded. I suppose if you heard it or saw a videotape, it would look like any kind of wild, tumultuous applause. But standing up there right next to Mr. Bradbury, seeing the sparkle in the eyes of all in the first few rows (as far back as I could see) and seeing all that it meant to Ray...well, that wasn't just a cool moment to be remembered for a while, then discarded. That was a keeper.

Fred Patten
Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s. A regular contributor to AWN.com, he has also written the liner notes for Rhino Entertainment's The Best of Anime music CD (1998), was a contributor to The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 2nd Edition, ed. by Maurice Horn (1999) and Animation in Asia and the Pacific, ed. by John A. Lent (2001).

The coolest thing that I saw was definitely the increased presence of anime & manga. There were several huge displays on the level that previously only the major American comic book publishers like DC and Marvel had: A.D.V. Films' launch of its new Newtype USA anime magazine with its free premiere issue; the TOKYOPOP "Mangaland" booth; Bandai and Pioneer both handing out DVD samplers of their anime titles; Viz launching its American edition of a popular Japanese manga magazine; and others. Anime and manga seem to have definitely "arrived."