I'm exhausted from this past couple weeks (short version: gave notice at my job and celebrated my last day on Wednesday, lost my debit card on friday right before heading to the airport, flew to San Diego for Comic Con, have had 3 hours of sleep/night for past 3 nights.) But I kinda figured, what better way to celebrate my current unemployment with a trip to San Diego and the chance to geek out over comics, Warren Ellis, and Winchesters, than venturing down to San Diego for Comic Con?

I was able to get a primo front and center seat for the Supernatural panel by sitting through an intriguing Q&A session with Laurell K Hamilton (whose books I have never read and man is she intense!) and an absolutely hilarious Family Guy panel (Seth MacFarlane et al. are adorable and v. v. funny, now I can't wait for the new season to start.)

My photos from the Supernatural panel are up on flickr here.

My highlights from the panel:

Kripke loves the fans. At the end of the panel he thanked everyone for coming, for having helped SPN get a third season, and he reiterated how much he appreciates how "[spn fans] are the most intelligent, dedicated fans out there" and he asked us all to go home and bribe encourage our friends to watch to that we all don't have to go through the scary will there or won't there be another season thing again next year.

Kripke and Ben Edlund (co-exec producer/writer for SPN, also happens to be the genius writer/director of Angel's "Smile Time" aka. the best Angel episode evar) talking about how excited they are for the third season and how seasons 1&2 were all about getting the chess pieces in play and really setting everything up for the upcoming war in the 3rd season. Kripke said he's been looking forward to diving into this season since the beginning and that he started out writing the show with a multi-season major plot point road map in mind.

A fan asked what kind of engines the Impalas have and the entire panel gave a collective 'uh...how the hell would we know?!' before Jensen jumped in and said that the stunt car which they use for all the chase scenes has a 427 in it and proceeded to list off a slew of other technical details (souped up suspension system, brakes, god knows what else) at which point Eric interrupted with this low-voiced, slow "Jensen's a maaaaan" and the whole audience sighed in some sort of massive collective attack of ovary combustion. And Jensen finished with this fantastic Dean grin and said, "and all the other cars are boring boring but that one's fuuuuuun."

When asked about practical jokes Jensen said that him and Jared learned pretty quickly that they would be best off tag teaming everyone else on set rather than try to get each other. He didn't specify any incidents, but did say that Kim Manners got him and Jared pretty good when he literally switched the entire week's production schedule to have one particular scene be shot at the end of a day. I can't remember which episode it was but Jensen and Jared had to climb down a 15 foot sewer pipe which had been built on set and when they got to the bottom of the ladder they were all crouched down on the ground and they looked up and saw two 5 gallon buckets of water being tipped down the pipe and all Jensen could think was "This wasn't in the script..."

On the possibility of doing more episodes set pre-Pilot: it's not in the card for the first 10 episodes on Season 3 (which have all been blocked out) but they're definitely interested in doing more with the "little Winchesters" (a la Something Wicked) depending on JDM's availability. And Kripke said that Jared and Jensen loved the little Winchesters episode because it meant that they could actually get some sleep that week and that J² are forever going, "so, about those little Winchesters...*wink, wink, nudge, nudge*"

In short: Jensen is a very, very pretty man. I was bummed that Jared didn't make it (he was filming SPN until 6am the night day before and missed his flight) Kripke and the writers all rock hardcore. I love how dedicated they are to producing quality tv each week and how all of them are just super excited about where the show is going in the coming seasons. It's pretty clear that they all love their jobs and the show, and it's pretty awesome that they've been picking up such awesome writers (like Ben who started writing in Season 2 and said that he fell in love with the show during season 1.)

Also: I shook Warren Ellis' hand! eeee!