NY Comic Con 2017
photo by Amanda Hatfield

NYCC day 3: Rick & Morty, Mad Max, more cosplay pics ++ The Weeknd showed up

UPDATE: Pictures from Comic Con Sunday HERE.

New York Comic Con continued its four day takeover of Jacob Javits Center on Saturday (10/7) with huge crowds, a bustling sales floor, panels and events about genre TV, movies, comics, anime, and gaming, and of course, lots of excellent, detailed cosplay. You saw pictures from Thursday at Comic Con HERE and Friday HERE. Above, find a gallery of pictures from Saturday. Highlights include a group dressed as characters from Mad Max: Fury Road, Sailor Moon in a VHS box, a gold chain sporting, subway dancing Spider Man, lots of Game of Thrones cosplayers, including a great Hodor, Freddy Krueger with a boombox, The Flash as a flasher, and someone dressed as the Jacob Javits Center itself.

The Weeknd also made an appearance at Comic Con on Saturday to announce his upcoming Starboy comic series with Marvel, inspired by his 2016 album and persona of the same name. Later, he stopped by the Marvel booth to sign autographs. See the cover of Starboy‘s first volume, which is due out in 2018, below.

Starboy announcement aside, Marvel is in the middle of a rocky weekend at Comic Con. After cancelling their Punisher panel originally scheduled for Saturday, they also officially ended their partnership with defense contractor Northrop Grumman after fan backlash. io9 reports:

Marvel previously teased a major announcement at its New York Comic Con booth on Saturday involving a team-up with Northrop Grumman, which was the world’s fifth-largest defense contractor last year. The company doesn’t sell guns, but it deals in cybersecurity systems, bombers, laser weapon systems, aerial drones, and other military hardware, selling mostly to the US government, generating over $20-billion in revenue each year.

There’s not a lot of information available on how extensive the partnership would have been, but it featured a promotional all-ages comic (which is no longer on Marvel’s website) starring the Avengers and the “Northrop Grumman Elite Nexus,” or N.G.E.N. The comic featured the tagline “Start Your N.G.E.N.s,” and it included career recruitment advertisements and a contest where readers could enter to be drawn into an upcoming issue.

Fans immediately criticized Marvel for the partnership, accusing it of trying to propagandize the Military-Industrial Complex to children. They brought up how Tony Stark eventually stopped selling his weapons to the military after realizing he was contributing to a global crisis, and how this partnership contradicts one of its main characters’ own journeys.

Marvel also released a statement of their own:

The activation with Northrop Grumman at New York Comic Con was meant to focus on aerospace technology and exploration in a positive way. However, as the spirit of that intent has not come across, we will not be proceeding with this partnership including this weekend’s event programming. Marvel and Northrop Grumman continue to be committed to elevating, and introducing, STEM to a broad audience.

In other news out of Saturday at Comic Con, The Walking Dead and spinoff Fear the Walking Dead revealed an upcoming crossover between the two shows. Deadline reports:

“There is one character that is going to go from one show, that I will not name, to another show, that I will not name,” [Robert] Kirkman told the crowd of what has been a question fans have asked since prequel of sorts FearTWD debuted in the summer of 2015. “This is a huge event in the world of The Walking Dead,” he added of the crossover expected to occur in the next year.

The panel at The Theater at Madison Square Garden also showed a previously unseen clip from The Walking Dead’s 100th episode, which you can watch below.

Another panel at The Theater at Madison Square Garden, for Star Trek: Discovery, featured cast members Sonequa Martin-Green, Jason Isaacs, Doug Jones, Shazad Latif, Mary Wiseman, Anthony Rapp, Mary Chieffo, and Wilson Cruz, executive producers Alex Kurtzman, Gretchen J. Berg, Aaron Harberts, Heather Kadin, and Akiva Goldsman, and a surprise. Entertainment Weekly reports:

Star Trek: Discovery star Michelle Yeoh made a surprise appearance at the series’ New York Comic Con panel Saturday afternoon at Madison Square Garden. Hidden behind oversized sunglasses and a mask, she pretended to be a fan with a question for the cast — “Is Captain Georgiou coming back?” — before unveiling her identity to the cast and creators’ delight as they leapt to their feet to embrace her one by one. (Fans who have also missed Georgiou since her death in episode two applauded the loudest for Yeoh’s hug with Sonequa Martin-Green, who stars as Michael Burnham, the Starfleet mutineer whose actions caused Georgiou’s death.)

At Hammerstein Ballroom, the Hey Arnold! panel included a showing of the first trailer for the upcoming Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie, which comes out November 24. Watch that below.

Comic Con wraps up on Sunday (10/8). It’s sold out, but some panels and events stream live. You can also catch up on pictures and news from the weekend with our report from Thursday HERE and Friday HERE.

photos by Amanda Hatfield