Meet Blair Heald. By day, human services specialist for the County of San Diego. By night, an award-winning cosplayer. Blair has participated in amateur costuming competitions since the late '90s. At his first Comic-Con appearance, he won Best in Show for a massive Giant Robo costume. He's become well known for specializing in robot costumes.

But this year, Blair decided to do something different. He created an original 7-foot rock monster as an homage to the popular Masquerade "rock" chant. This year, he took home three awards including Best Original Design. Here is his routine, posted to YouTube by a member of the audience. You can see many of his other costumes in fan videos posted online.

Congratulations to Blair and all the other creative cosplayers who make the Comic-Con Masquerade a must-see event every year.

Smiling fans pour off the trolley, funnel into the convention center, and swarm the halls of Comic-Con. Shoulder to shoulder, every stranger with a badge is an old friend.

All right, muggles, get your potion-making ingredients ready.  Comic-Con is your first opportunity to play the video game, Harry Potter: The Half-Blood Prince. And the game is so new, that they wouldn't even let us put it on videotape.  So, I hope you have your tickets. 

It was a classic Comic-Con surprise visit, the kind that every fan hopes for - and one even newbies could get starry-eyed over. The LGBT Portrayals in Comics panel had just settled into a fun Q&A when moderator Patricia Jeres of Prism Comics interrupted to welcome a "very special visitor."

Will Wright is finally making a game that does not start with the word "Sim," and he's here in San Diego to tell Comic-Con fans all about it. Spore mashes evolution with intelligent design -- and you get to be the intelligent designer (well, you get to be the designer, intelligence is optional).  You start with a single-celled organism that eventually moves out of the water, builds villages, civilizations, and finally a space empire.

Spore lets you build any creature that your brain can imagine, however cute or depraved that might be.  And you don't need years of training in 3ds Max to do it!  "One of our design targets was that in 20 clicks, you should be able to roughly replicate a Pixar character," Wright told me.  I made my first creature, Beelzecub, in about an hour
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The mad scientists at Wright's lab have figured out how to make these creatures come to life using a technique called "procedural animation."  "Since we don't know what the player is going to create, we had to teach the computer to do what the animator typically does.   So the computer kind of steps back and analyzes this creature, looks at where the legs are, and figures out, 'how would that thing walk?' And then it figures out, 'how would it eat, how would it show emotion, how would it be happy or sad?'"

There are people who come to Comic-Con and then there are Comic-Con people. The quartet of filmmakers represented in this video are Comic-Con people. Sam Raimi, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and Guillermo del Toro come to the Con because they like it and they get it. They are also willing to provide aspiring filmmakers with some solid advice. Here are a few clips with these filmmakers imparting their words of wisdom. Raimi provides, perhaps, the most practical and yet still inspirational words of wisdom. 

Robert Rodriguez has a panel on Red Sonja with Rose McCowan, Thursday, 2pm Room 6CDEF.

Thanks to Comic-Con for providing footage of the panels for our news coverage.

San Diego resident Billy Martinez has been working in the comics industry since 1996. He’s an artist and writer, as well as the owner of Neko Press, which publishes his successful Wildflower and Kick Ass Girl comics. Martinez also runs an art studio in La Mesa specializing in classes for young people (although adults and advanced students are also welcome). I’ve had Martinez come into my Anime and Manga Club to provide art instruction to students, and he’s great working with kids, He inspires them because he finds ways of easing them into the process of drawing so it doesn’t seem intimidating. He had kids afraid to draw anything except stick figures starting to sketch faces before class was over. That’s impressive, and so is his work. He specializes in bold, hip art that features tough, sexy chicks who exude confident attitude. In 2004, Martinez began a line of paintings for galleries and live art shows, and in 2006 released a compilation of his works titled Girls. In 2003, he spoke about his work and about the Con.

You can check out his comics, books and other cool products at the Neko Press website. You can find Neko Press and Billy Martinez at Booth 1622 at the Comic-Con. Thanks to Comic-Con for access to the interview for our news coverage. All images of Martinez' work are copyright Neko Press.

There are probably more than 100,000 reasons for going to the San Diego Comic-Con International -- one for each person who attends because that's how different and precise everyone's motive is for going to this gathering of pop culture fanatics. And yes, we are fanatics because we care passionately about our obsessions and we appreciate that Comic-Con is put on by people who feel exactly like we do.