Back at the 2004 Comic-Con, Hellboy creator Mike Mignola appeared on a panel with director Guillermo del Toro about bringing Hellboy to the screen.

Mignola appears at the 2008 Comic-Con to discuss the Hellboy graphic novels. Saturday, 11:00am, Room 8.

Some filmmakers and celebrities come to Comic-Con because they need to promote their movies to a particular fan base. But others come because they ARE that fan base.  This includes Quentin Tarantino (whom I met at a friend’s poster booth before Reservoir Dogs came out), Robert Rodriguez, Sam Raimi, and of course, Guillermo del Toro. Con attendees embrace these people because they share the same obsessions. After del Toro's panel in 2004, he was mobbed by fans in the hallway but took time to talk with almost everyone (including Aaron Soto, one of our KPBS Comic-Con team members, who gets a photo op with del Toro at the end of this video).

You might have tracked down a VHS copy of Jodorowsky's hard to find film at Comic-Con. (Producciones Panicas)

Back in the '90s one of my favorite things to do at the San Diego Comic-Con was to get my hands on plenty of fantastic genre movies. Right before the rise of DVD and after the death of Laser Discs, the Con was that unique place to get your rare, obscure movie fix. I remember getting El Topo and The Holy Mountain VHS tapes at $25 apiece, a bargain considering the hard-to-find collector's items these legendary Alejandro Jodorowsky finds were. That's when Comic-Con was about even more than comics or about huge studios presentations. Independent distributors were part of the act too with crazy and fun oddities such as The Star Wars Holiday Special or Roger Corman's lost classic The Fantastic 4: The Movie. You can't go wrong with titles like that!