Comic-Con: Jason Statham, Rosario Dawson, and more

The Star Wars theme song was majestically wafting inthe background as you entered San Diego’s Comic-Con yesterday. Andwhile we have to tip our hats to this old-skool gesture made by astereo-pumping fanboy, there’s really no denying how fashionable thiscomic-book spectacle has become in the age of Seth Cohen.

First up, Clerks II’s Rosario Dawson outed herself asa supergeek, and left the crowd smitten. Grinning from ear to ear, shegamely touted her new supernatural-crime comic book Occult CrimeTaskforce (or OCT) and charmed haters by earnestly name-checking herveteran-illustrator uncle, Gus Vasquez (Spider-Man). In another room,spiritual guru Deepak Chopra proved another unlikely convert, takingthe stage with eccentric Seven Soldiers writer Grant Morrison. Theirpanel: The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes. Chopra began the chatby expressing his sincere appreciation for the comics medium, thenexplained how he and Morrison hadn’t exactly hammered out what said spiritual laws were. As such, he encouraged the zoned-out audience tobe “interactive.”

Meanwhile, Jason Statham (pictured, signing posters for Crank) unwittingscored nerd points by sheer virtue of participating in awesomely baddirector Uwe Boll’s latest videogame adaptation, In the Name of theKing: A Dungeon Siege Tale. Statham told EW that he just finishedrecording dialogue for this; we wait with bated breath. Now for the recipient oftoday’s Award for Excellence: Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro. As ahandful mortified parents dragged their kids out of earshot,crowd-pleaser del Toro playfully cussed his way through discussionsabout his next release, Pan’s Labyrinth (a Spanish-languagehorror-fantasy about fascism), as well as his upcoming projects At theMountains of Madness (H.P. Lovecraft’s story about an Antarcticexpedition) and Deadman (an adaptation of the comic). Del Toro’s crowningachievement came when he worked the word “scrotum” into a diatribeabout Hollywood. Needless to say, the man got a standing ovation.