Previews Are The Best Part: SDCC 2012 Preview Night

So Preview Night is past us now, and while I know it’s not even theoretically possible that it was busier than last year – after all, Preview Night passes have been selling out since about 2009 – it sure feels like it was. A few years ago it was possible on preview night for someone to, say, get ripped to the tits on Stone Arrogant Bastard IPA for four hours before he doors opened and then cruise around the floor, staging stupid and adolescent photographs with the Jabba The Hutt prop at the Hasbro booth. If you tried that now, you would inevitably stumble into someone waiting in a truly horrific line for an exclusive S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier playset, be unable to convince said line-waiter that you weren’t claim jumping, and wind up instigating a pathetic slapfight.

There is very little convention programming that occurs on Preview Night, so the action is centered on the main convention floor. The night’s original and intended purpose is to allow people who are attending the con to obtain exclusives, or who are looking for some particular, special item, piece of art or back issue, to have access to the vendors early and get the purchase out of the way so they can enjoy the rest of the convention. As such, any actual comic news is few and far between on Preview Night… but there is certainly some, and if there isn’t? There is spectacle.

Hard As Iron: First Photos of Iron Patriot In Iron Man 3

While we comic fans are still swooning over The Avengers movie, let us not forget that Marvel Studios is not resting on the hundreds of millions of dollars that that movie has brought in the way your or I would if presented with hundreds of millions of dollars… actually, given a second thought, I would not be resting on it. I would be furiously masturbating on it. But already, I digress.

No, Marvel Studios already has Iron Man 3, directed by Lethal Weapon writer and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang director Shane Black, in the throes of principal photography. That means they’re shooting it now, in laymans’ terms, and when a geek movie is being shot? That means spy pictures are being leaked to the Internet. Such as the ones after the jump.

(And by the way – “spy pictures” is not industry jargon for “upskirt shots.” Don’t make that mistake and learn about it the hard way, like I did.)