There is no single reason to attend Comic Con International in San Diego

If you go around asking people why they have come to San Diego Comic Con (aka Comic Con International in San Diego) you'll get a wide variety of answers.

Some come to see what is "hot" in entertainment in general.

Some come to meet creators of comic books, whether they are current books, or books they've loved for years and wish were still putting out new issues.

Some come to go up under the sails and get auotographs, this year new autograph signers included Eric Estrada and Lindsay Wagner.

Some come for the schwag, the freebies at the booths that vary from day to day, and cover the range of everything from dogtags (a popular give-away this year, I think I got dogtags from at least three different booths), t-shirts, bags (ranging from grocery size plastic bags to nearly four foot square canvas bags), bobble heads, pins, posters (by the dozens of designs and thousands of copies) and a great many of other items.

Some come to sit in the panels for the once in a lifetime experience of hearing someone they respect tremendously talk about a project them enjoy emmensely.

And others, like myself, come to get hooked on things they had not otherwise discovered... whether it's new tv shows just starting to get buzzed about (like Fringe), new Comic Books, or independent and small press comics they aren't familiar with (Greatest American Hero, Justice For Hire, Bushi Tales come to mind) or novelists... yup, Del Rey is no longer the only publisher on the floor, and I've got books a plenty to tempt me into becoming an avid reader of a wide variety of authors.

As a result of admitting that the novels/novelists are why I come to con, I've been asked to post a list of books I picked up this year (and that friends gave me after getting and deciding I was more likely to read than they were), so {in no particular order} here goes:

Raintree: Inferno by Linda Howard
Raintree: Haunted by Linda Winstead Jones
Hard Contact (Star Wars: Republic Commando) by Karen Traviss
The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove
His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire, Book 1) by Naomi Novik
The Book of Fate by Brad Meltzer
Pleasure Unbound: A Demonica Novel by Larissa Ione
Grailstone Gambit (Outlanders) by James Axler
Passage by Connie Willis
The Devil's Right Hand (Dante Valentine, Book 3) by Lilith Saintcrow
Snake Agent: A Detective Inspector Chen Novel by Liz Williams
Exit Strategy (Nadia Stafford Series, Book 1) by Kelley Armstrong
Wild Hunt by Lori Devoti
The Powers That Be (Room 59) by Cliff Ryder
Out Of Time (Room 59) by Cliff Ryder
Aim And Fire (Room 59) by Cliff Ryder
Killing Trade (The Executioner) by Don Pendleton
For Love of Mother-Not (Adventures of Pip and Flinx) by Alan Dean Foster
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
Kitty and the Midnight Hour (Kitty Norville Series, Book 1) by Carrie Vaughn
Seize the Night (Dark-Hunter, Book 7) by Sherrilyn Kenyon
Witchling (Sisters of the Moon, Book 1) by Yasmine Galenorn
Shadows Return (Nightrunner) by Lynn Flewelling
Kushiel's Scion (Kushiel's Legacy) by Jacqueline Carey

And thus ends the list of Mass Market Paperbacks I picked up... as in, that doesn't include the larger size paperbacks, the hard backs, the children's books I picked up out of curiosity, and with an eye towards young people in my life, or the reviewer galleys, or for that matter, review copies such as Deborah Pratt's The Vision Quest Book One: The Age of Light (Vision Quest Book 1).