Animated Travels

Robot Chicken panel treats fans to talent and sneak peeks.

When the New York Comic Con premiered four years ago, its exhibit area was a relatively small but instantly overcrowded portion of the Javits Convention Center’s basement space. This year’s exhibitors filled the high-ceilinged main floor, a football-field sized area where you could score anything one’s geekish heart desired while dodging the multitude of Rorschachs prowling the convention.

Alfred University wasn’t named for Bruce Wayne’s butler, but for the upstate New York town where Dan Napolitano offers his Drawn to Diversity course. A big crowd filled a small room to hear Napolitano outline the ways in which minorities have been represented and misrepresented in U.S. pop culture. According to Napolitano George Carlin may have had his seven dirty words but Warner Bros. has their censored eleven Looney Tunes. The Jap-bashing and black-belittling cartoons are officially out of circulation – except for YouTube bootlegs and academic explication.

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