The cast and filmmakers of Universal’s The Thing made an appearance at the 2010 New York Comic-Con on Saturday to promote their upcoming prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 film, and revealed the first footage from the new film (see footage description here below).

Director Matthijs van Heijningen said that in the film we will get to see The Thing creature in its “pure form” — the form in which it’s been trapped in the ice in for all these years, but he also hinted that since the very nature of The Thing is stealing the biological identity of other lifeforms and it being from another planet, how could we know what this entity’s pure form really is.

Heijningen talked about a bit the effects used in the film, stating that they used as many practical effects (as opposed to CGI) as possible. He said he feels that playing against a man in a suit is much better for the actors than looking at a tennis ball on a string against a green screen. “We had as many real monsters on the set as possible,” the director said.

Fans of Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale‘s series of “color” stories (Spider-Man: Blue, Daredevil: Yellow, Hulk: Gray) have been waiting for their next installment in the series for a long time, Captain America: White, ever since it was first announced. We have only seen one issue, the #0 issue which saw print in July of 2008, but we haven’t seen anything since.

However, at Marvel’s Cup O Joe panel Saturday at the 2010 New York Comic Con, Loeb said that work is still going ahead on the series, and that Tim Sale is still drawing. Loeb said that they are waiting for all the issues to be completed and that Sale is basically painting every page. Loeb also said that they plan to have the series out in time for the Captain America movie.

On my way into the 2010 New York Comic-Con on Friday afternoon at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, I noticed a banner for The Thing prequel hovering high above the entrance to the Con, so I decided to snap a photo of it.

Check out the banner here above (click for larger, full view).

The banner is a teaser that has the name of the film, which even though it’s a prequel, is simply titled The Thing, the same name as the 1982 John Carpenter film from which it stems (confusing? I think so). There’s also its release date — April 29, 2011 — along with a nifty tagline: “Before it was unleashed, it was discovered.”

Friday at New York Comic-Con 2010 brought another edition of Marvel‘s X-Men panel, and attendees got a few sneak peeks of some upcoming projects.

Probably the biggest announcement at the panel was the one with the least details. Towards the end of the panel, a new series called Age of X was announced with a promo picture with some obvious and not so obvious silhouettes of characters. Panel host and Marvel Sales Manager Arune Singh described it as “the end of mutants as we know them” and made it pretty clear that this series would at least be a spiritual successor (if not an actual sequel) to the fan-favorite “Age of Apocalypse” storyline from the 1990s. Singh said that more details including who will be writing the series, who will be handling the art, and who the mystery characters are will be revealed on Marvel’s webpage in a few weeks. The series will be out in January 2011.

With DC Comics announcing that they are dropping the price on their regular 32-page single issues, I wondered if Marvel Comics would follow suit. Turns out I didn’t have to wait long, because it has now been announced that Marvel in fact will be dropping the price on some of their titles.

Speaking Thursday at the ICv2 Conference on Comics & Digital, Marvel Senior Vice President of Sales and Circulation David Gabriel announced that any new books released after January of 2011 will not be priced at $3.99.

Gabriel spoke about how Marvel’s relative success in digital distribution has allowed the company to decrease their prices. While sales of digital copies of Marvel’s comics has not passed sales of print copies yet, they are still apparently strong enough to make this move.