He had spent the past year being treated for diabetes.

The first Comic-Con International was held in 1970 and was attended by 300 or so people. This past year Comic-Con was attended by 125,000 and has come to encompass more than comic books.

"Shel had notable foresight in not only believing these people needed some public acknowledgment," says David Glanzer, a Comic-Con spokesperson, "but that this truly was an American art form that Americans knew very little about."

Dorf has not been directly involved in running Comic-Con for the past couple of decades.

Comic-Con founder Shel Dorf dies at age 76 [Reuters] [Pic]

Jean Grey and Gambit are, that's right, in MUA 2. No surprises here as Gambit popped up on the game's box art earlier this month. Still, there are screenshots right up there! And if you like looking at them, perhaps you will like looking at embedded trailers below.

Marvel Ulimate Alliance 2 is slated to hit retailers later this fall.

IGN Video: Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 PlayStation 3 Trailer - SDCC09: Jean Grey Vignette and IGN Video: Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 PlayStation 3 Trailer - SDCC09: Gambit Vignette [IGN]

Instead of just a single, lonely Kotaku editor roaming the halls, grazing the merch tables and listening attentively to panels, we're doubling our coverage. Expect reporting on anything and everything video game related at this year's Comic-Con thanks to a cross country traveling Mike Fahey. He'll be joining me at the show, ensuring that if you wanted a Comic-Con exclusive Transformer or Gleek action figure, your chances will decrease by one. Possibly two.

We'll be attending a long list of creator and producer panels covering everything from Halo to World of Warcraft to Bayonetta and beyond. We'll also be checking out the latest wares from EA, Capcom, Activision, Ubisoft, Konami, Sega, LucasArts and much, much more. We'll also be pestering game developers, comic book writers and whomever else we feel like pestering.

We'll find the time to socialize at sponsored parties in the evening, so expect the occasional rambling mess of a party wrap-up and someone singing drunken karaoke. If you'll be attending the show—passes are still available legitimately via eBay—let us know.

Excelsior!

Titles planned to be previewed on the show floor, at EA's booth, include Brütal Legend, Dante's Inferno, Dead Space Extraction, G.I. JOE The Rise of the Cobra, The Saboteur and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.

EA will also host the "EA Gaming Lounge presented by Xbox 360" at the Hilton San Diego Gaslamp Quarter Hotel during Comic-Con. That off-con event will feature Dragon Age: Origins, Battlefield 1943, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Left 4 Dead 2. Loungers will be able to test drive the second campaign in L4D2, known as "Swamp Fever."

For panel info, read on for official descriptions. See you at the con!

Dante's Inferno
Thursday July 23; 12:30-1:30
Jonathan Knight (executive producer, EA), Ash Huang (art director), Brandon Auman (writer), Christos Gage (writer), and Victor Cook (director) talk about the adaptation of this literary classic into pop culture. They will discuss how they translated the various aspects of The Divine Comedy into a video game, an animated feature, and a comic series, where they were faithful and where they invented, and how each of the mediums differs. Also get a peak at EA's game in development, and also watch the world premiere trailer for the animated feature Dante's Inferno co-produced by EA and Starz Media. Room 8

Dead Space Extraction
Friday July 24; 6:00-7:00
Chuck Beaver (Producer), Ben Templesmith (Illustrator) and Antony Johnston (Writer) will discuss utilizing the interactive gaming medium to portray emotion in a more visceral way than books & film traditionally display. Visceral Games executive producer Steve Papoutsis discusses the implementation of story and talent into games and the art of crafting a believable, epic story into this fall's Wii exclusive Dead Space Extraction. Room 2

The Saboteur Rethinking the WWII Gaming Genre
Saturday July 25; 2:00-3:00
Pandemic Studios™ lead designer Tom French and art director Chris Hunt discuss how historical events served as the foundation for their upcoming action sandbox game The Saboteur, who the Saboteur is, and how the innovative combination of game design and artistic style were employed to develop a unique experience. Room 2

Army of Two: The 40th Day - Bridging Video Games with Comics
Sunday July 26; 3:15-4:15
In this panel Reid Schneider (Executive Producer - Army of Two) and Alex Hutchinson (Creative Director - Army of Two) will discuss how they have been working with comic artists to show players the consequences of their moral choices throughout the game, and how the in-depth involvement of these artists in the production of Army of Two changes the feel of the game. Room 6A

To be given away free to advertise Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, it appears at first glance to be part of "the rule"; a rubbish black t-shirt doing nothing but blandly advertising a video game. But there's a trick.

Boo! Nice touch, Capcom.

This teaser image popped up on the DC Universe Online MySpace page yesterday, along with a bit of overly-obvious teaser text: "I just saw the poster that we're giving out at San Diego Comic-Con and people will be "clawing" to get it." Subtle.

I'll be sure to have McWhertor add this poster to the annual list of Comic-Con exclusive merchandise he forgets to pick up for me.

DC Universe Online [MySpace via MMORPG.com]

Toy company NECA will be offering a few video game figures that'll be exclusive to attendees of the show (or savvy online purchasers). One is a Lambent Gears of War figure, which we've seen before, while the other two are Guile wearing the outfit of his dead, dead friend Charlie and Dead Space's Isaac in an evil Unitology suit.

Meanwhile, SOTA toys will be offering a limited edition variant of that girly Ken statue we featured a while back, only this one is $20 cheaper at $90, and will be limited to 150 units.

My favorite pieces were the ice sculpture Slimer and the Ready 2 Rumble Revolution min-ring. Thank you, Atari, for spending some money on the show! The rest of the publishers mainly just had boring, ordinary looking kiosks set up. EA, of course, had the biggest space and the most playable games, meanwhile Hudson had like 15 feet of one wall.

Champions Online will be an vastly action-oriented MMO — the brief clip screened featured battles with exploding forcefields and clashing katanas. Unlike games where a single enemy is encountered, Champions will have its heroes fighting off squads of attacking henchmen at first, with new strategies and tactics introduced as gameplay progresses and your advancing character comes into contact with hardcore villains and supervillains. The game is especially interested in elevating the level of personalization and character-building, allowing for unique modification of powers and putting more power than ever in the hands of players.

What's special about this game?

—Customization! A huge part of what they're excited to bring to Champions Online is enabling players to have hands-on creativity within the game's world. The game will be classless, featuring pre-defined themes and power sets, but your character will be defined by the skills and talents you choose, entirely self-constructed. There will be opportunity for hybrid characters that can switch between offense and defense capabilities, and characters in general will be able to temporarily take over the action role of a team member if they go down. You'll be able to select various roles, switch up your build, and learn about more powers than you'll be able to use at once. The mobility of switching between active and supporting roles is an exciting development, meaning no one team member will feel forced into a box by their chosen skill-set.

—The Nemesis System — the creators seem the most excited about this new, extensive feature. You'll be able to build your own villain that you can fight once you build up your reputation. You can customize your villain entirely, choose their power sets and minions, even create a background and mythology for them. The game's creators suspect that as much time if not more will be pored into villain-creation than into heroic character-building. You'll be able to invite people to fight with you, then show off your nemesis-constructing skills when your personal villain attacks. This element of being able to create and share the result with friends is one of the features creators wanted most for Champions Online. By the time you're creating your own nemesis, you'll be very well-acquainted with the game, and your own villains will likely be the most difficult enemies you encounter.

—Action-oriented MMORPG — There will rarely be static fights and there will always be somewhere interesting to go. You'll be able to constantly move around, with lots of interaction in many different environments. There will be constant activity on the game, marked at first by fighting off swarms of lower-level minions. If you've always wanted to take on a ring of bad guys and show them how it's done, this will be your chance. It'll feel heroic to battle coordinated attackers, feel even better when you reach more challenging solo opponents.

—A Variety of Vistas — Champion Online's creators wanted to bust out of just being set in city-scapes. Millennium City (set in the ruins of a very old Detroit) will be the hub of adventuring, but there will be a ton of different places in the world to visit and find new challenges. Every area will have a strikingly different feel. A few of the settings the panel let slip featured a desert, a location in Canada, and Monster Island. While "everything and the kitchen sink" is in Millennium City, there will be many types of neighborhoods/genres within the disparate cites sites. Each place will look and feel distinct, and offer a different type of gameplay, from typical showdowns to espionage to crime-solving.

—Complex Storylines — One writer shared that "the amount of dialogue and scripting is insane." He had recently submitted 29 pages of dialogue for one neighborhood of one setting. Although there are several overarching storylines threaded throughout, there willl be tons of stories and missions that mingle horror and comedy with heroism.

Info from the Q & A:

—The stats operation system will be unique, and you'll be able to use items, talents, and "perk rewards" to alter your status.
stat operation: use items and talents and perk rewards, able to alter your stats

—Will there be unusual weapons? (The questioner wanted a guitar). There will be a lot of unusual weapons on top of more than 200 "mundane" weapons, plus we are promised "crazy fun cool new stuff."

—You'll be able to band together with other players to form "supergroups."

—Can you punch people through plate glass? There'll be breakable surfaces, along with interesting things to pick up and hurl (the biggest at the moment is a tank, but they hinted there may be an F-14 jet to throw at some point).

—Do you have to grind out levels with the daily grind so many other games require? Certain levelling-up is a feature of most MMOs, but the creators believe that Champions Online is unique because there are no limitations to where superheroes can go and what they can do; the genre gives more freedom, and players will be involved in creating their own content.

—Will there be super-vehicles? The game's creators are starting to work on vehicle tech, aware that some players are interested in "supercars and motorcycles and superpogo sticks," and are in development stages with those ideas. Super-vehicles aren't guaranteed for launch.

—What happens at the max level? Work is progressing on the endgame now. Items will continue to mean upgrades to your character, and they're working on having an arena-like fight club. The game is built to be in the hands of the players, and the endgame will grow with player suggestion and input.

During yesterday's Cryptic panel, we got a sneak peak at the highly-anticipated Star Trek Online MMO game. This absolutely gorgeous-looking game is set in the year 2409, 30 years past the events of the ST:TNG film "Nemesis." Klingon compromises have fallen apart, with the Klingon Empire on the verge of all-out war. There will also be "an ancient threat from the past." You'll be able to play as either a Starfleet officer or as a member of the Klingon Defense, with both choices at Captain rank. Yes, you will be a Captain of your own starship. You'll be able to select your bridge crew and command them, as well as pilot the ship yourself.

Early on you'll choose your career path — either tactical, engineering or science-based. But the game seeks to bring to the fore what the creators feel to be the fundamentals of Star Trek: space, shipboard and ground exploration. Gameplay will be focused on beaming down to planets for a variety of missions, mastering shipboard concerns and, of course, exploring the final frontier.

You'll be able to have "total customization" of your own alien races, with the ability to modify characters down to the slightest skin-textures and features. While you'll also be able to choose from all of the "known and loved Trek races" to play, if you've ever wanted to father your own alien species, this will be your chance. The brief glimpses and stills we were given of the actual game look extraordinary. The graphics are detailed, rich and look better than the space scenes in most movies. We got to see the character-design elements in action, and the level of detail will please even the most exacting of fans.

After the panel, I asked game producer Craig Zinkievich whether we could expect a high level of social interaction to be available between players along with missions and character-building. He confirmed that character interaction would be very present in the game — just as it is in the Star Trek universe — with sites like space stations offering places to congregate. "And pleasure planets?" I suggested, to which he laughed and skirted the issue — but implied that it could be a possibility, and definitely isn't ruled out. See you all on Risa?

The Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo will hit McCormick Place's Lakeside Center on April 16, 2010, a three-day geek-out that will feature "artists, creators and celebrities from Hollywood, TV , comics, books, video games, toys, anime, manga and all other applicable aspects of the popular arts," according to Reed Exhibitions' Lance Fensterman. Yay! Video games!

The New York Comic Con hits the Big Apple this weekend, with the corporately unrelated San Diego Comic-Con dorking it up in July. The CCEE will reflect "the essence of Chicago," which I won't attempt to determine, as the whole of my knowledge of the city has been learned from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Chicago's Comic & Entertainment Expo will have to compete with another new convention, as Penny Arcade's PAX starts a Boston chapter next year as well.

We'd expect to see a decent amount of video game related content at all of these cons, with the new Chicago event seeing some love from developers and publishers, such as Midway, Volition, Day 1 and High Voltage Software, who call the city home.

Chicago lands 2010 comic book show [Chicago Tribune - thanks, Justin!]

Character Customization
• There is a Tron suit you can wear in the game, along with a killzone helmet and mask.
• Not only that, but there are about 25 different materials and designs that you can choose to have your sackboy made out of, including 3 types of camo.
• There are held items that you can choose from, such as a wooden sword and a magic wand (a stick with a star on the top). You can’t use them as weapons, but when you slap while holding an item you hit them with said item.

There's more after the jump. Lots more.

Level Editor
• For those of you that don’t know, you can switch back and forth between flying and running around by pressing *down* on the d-pad.
• When everyone has a menu open, the menus auto-adjust to the top left, top right, bottom left, and bottom right corners to keep the screen clear.
• LBP comes with a nice 10 premade vehicles or so(I drove a lowrider!), but as with everything else you can edit them as you like.
• Logs burn. You can make a log, or anything out of wood, really, and set it on fire. We made a floor full of burning logs and then we drove a monster truck over them.
• There are “triggers” that you can place to have events happen right when you want them to. For example, you can make it so halfway through swinging on a rope across a gap, the rope snaps and you fall down to another area.
• Anything you can think of, you can make. Just be careful when making a “Sonic” level or a “Mario” level, because that won’t fly on the servers. Name it something generic that won’t warrant deletion.
• If you want to make carpet, you can. All you have to do is take a picture of some carpet, apply the sticker to something thin and soft(sponge, for example), and save the item.
• If you made a kickass vehicle, you can make that vehicle collectible through your level. For example, you could reward players who made it past a particularly difficult portion of your level with a buggy you made, which they could use at any time throughout making their levels. This applies to items, such as carpet, as well.
• The size of your crater on the moon corresponds directly with the amount of items you can place on a level. This way you can have a minigame taking up a small crater, while a full, hour long level would take up one of the largest craters.

The Construction Yard
• This is the level I got a chance to play three times.
• Eric (the producer) was really stressing the term “Coopetition”, which is cooperating so you can compete for the collectible items and points. For example, there was a lever that would slide a girder across a gap. It requires two people(at least) to complete. One would move the girder across using a lever, the other would grab the chunk of sponge at the other side, which the first player would now bring back with the same lever. That sponge was required to reach a certain height, so you could collect more goodies. In my case, I stood on the sponge with a friend while another guy dragged it across, and right before we got there I slapped my friend off so I could have the stuff to myself. That, essentially, is coopetition.
• The developers love to hide goodies that you have to find later. I didn’t notice all the stuff I could eventually collect until the third playthrough. If you’ve ever played Portal, and you know that usually there is more than one way to beat a level, the same applies here. The more difficult task you accomplish, the more collectibles they reward you with.
• At any point, you can bring up a sticker which is basically a live image recorded from your PS Eye. When you stick the image on a surface, it takes a picture at that moment, so you can tack yourself onto the walls in a level(or whatever else you feel like doing).

Emoting
• Emoting is awesome. Using the d-pad, you can select three different degrees of sadness, anger, happiness, and fear. For example, you press up to smile, press it again to smile big, and press it again to be ecstatic with your tongue hanging out.
• If you hold R2, the right stick becomes a controller for your right hand. The same goes for L2, the left stick, and the left hand.
• The sixaxis controls which direction your head is facing, and it was surprisingly intuitive.
• If you click and hold L3, the sixaxis controls your hips instead of your head.
• Using a combination of these, I made my guy do a pretty kickass hula dance. I forced him to do it, though, so he was pretty scared at the time.

ConfusedCartman’s LittleBigPlanet Hands On from Comic Con 08 [LBP Central]

When you talk about games evolving over the years and becoming more like movies, in many ways, they've gone beyond movies," he said. "To do a movie is difficult, but it's linear. There's a beginning, a middle and an end, and that's it — you write a story.

In a videogame, you're writing many stories within the story. It's a totally different structure and a totally different philosophy of writing and, I think, a much, much more difficult one. I get the feeling more work goes into these videogames than even goes into the movies.

I marvel at the fact the games look as good, and in some cases better, as the most expensive movies. [Those] guys are just geniuses. Now you watch one of these games and it's like watching the greatest superhero movie, except you're part of it. It's indescribable.

Yep, Stan Lee is awesome. But we knew that.

Games Are Exceeding Movies [Eurogamer] [Pic]

You've seen the on set pictures, you've seen the trailer, now look at the Max Payne movie posters. There are two of them, and one is right up there for you to look at and the other is after the jump. Look at that one, too!

Also, expect more info about the Max Payne from this year's Comic Con as Marky Mark and the Max Payne crew will be on hand to show new footage and chitchat.

I prefer the second one. You?

Max Payne posters! [JoBlo Thanks, Alex!]

Capcom Comic-Con Happenings [Capcom]

「稼働日発表！」　プロジェクトマネージャー：塩沢夏希 [SFIV Blog]

According to the Bungie weekly update, the Halo developer's presence at Comic-Con 08 will be minimal. Microsoft reps will be in attendance, however, hyping up the next Halo novel and shilling Spartan and Master Chief bobbleheads. Bring cash. Lots.

Bungie Weekly Update: 6/20/08 [Bungie.net]

Metal Gear Solid 2 Raiden Stealth Camouflage Version

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the hit video game, this exclusive NYCC figure from Medicom is a must-have for any fan of the action-packed franchise as well as nostalgia-struck gamers from the NES-era. 7" tall and features multiple points of articulation. Available from selected retailers on the show floor. Limited to 1400 pieces.

And yes, we want to give it away. To you. Or you. Or you. Let's do a contest. Oh yes, let's. We're going to kick off a Metal Gear mustache contest. But not just any mustache contest! Contestants must create and wear mustaches made out of anything BUT hair. Got that? Entries must be of a non-hair mustache, and it must be on the contestant's face. Finalists will be announced on June 12th. That's soon! Send your entry to kotakutcontestATgmailDOTcom. May the best 'stache win!

Hit the jump for a look at box's backside.

NYC Comic Con geek-gasm [Boing Boing TV]