Tracking Kevin Smith at NY Comic Con

Kevin Smith has never met a comics convention he didn’t like. That fact was irrefutably proven on Saturday at the New York Comic Con, which the writer-director was all over like a virulent but good-natured rash -- despite the fact that he didn’t actually have anything to promote.

The first Smith sighting occurred at 11 a.m., when the Clerks auteur moderated, for his own fan-ish reasons, a Battlestar Galactica panel featuring Tricia “Number Six” Helfer, James “Gaius Baltar” Callis, and Sci Fi Channel marketing bigwig Adam Stosky. Friday, Callis and Helfer had dropped by the EW office to say hi, and the former predicted that Smith’s chairmanship would probably be “interesting.” So it proved. Smith's questions included the following:

To Stosky: “I’m going to start by asking the most obvious question, as we’re in a room full of Battlestar Galactica fans. Adam, how do you get into marketing?”

To Callis: “James, this season we saw you get into a three-way with Six and Xena, Warrior Princess. If you were also to nail Gillian Anderson, circa ’99, that would be the trifecta, right?”

To Stosky: “Friday night seems like a great time to air the show. Because the people who watch it don’t get laid anway. Why did it move to Sunday?”

To Callis: “You getting laid off this show, or what?”

Of course, the trio’s answers tended to be less interesting, and certainly less raunchy, than Smith’s questions. But Stosky did confirm that a straight-to-DVD Battlestar movie is in the pipeline and that series producer Ron Moore is also working on a prequel spin-off.

Meanwhile, those jonesing for another fix of Kevin Smith did not have to wait long: Later that afternoon the director returned to the stage for his own Q&A. Frankly, we can’t reproduce much of what he said, for reasons connected to both good taste and the laws of libel. However, we can say that EW learned the following:

If Kevin Smith had another kid, he would name it H.R. Pufnstuf.

His ultimate steel-cage fantasy fight would be between the Swedish Chef from the Muppets and Martin Luther King.

If you want to be a really good film director, then you should go to film school. But if you want to be a director like Kevin Smith, “then f--- it.”

Superman Returns was not the “gay fantasia” he had been hoping it would be.

Earlier that afternoon, he had tried to have sex with his wife — unsuccessfully.

He is currently working on a CW pilot called Reaper (“They came to me — which says that everyone else passed”) and then intends to make two films back-to-back, a horror movie and then a comedy.

The other thing we learned Saturday? That if you build a comics convention, then Kevin Smith will come.