New York Comic Con 2018: all the panels, activations, and trailers at this year’s show

“All of this is new to you, and new can be scary,” remarks Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor early in her debut episode, “The Woman Who Fell To Earth,” which kicks off the eleventh (or 37th, depending on how you count) season of the long-running sci-fi show.

And she’s right: change can be scary. But in the case of the Thirteenth, it’s mostly just a whole lot of fun, with Whittaker kicking off her tenure as the time-traveling, face-changing alien hero with flair and grace.

New York Comic Con wrapped yesterday, and it was a busy few days, with plenty of news about highly-anticipated titles like Daredevil, Star Trek: Discovery, and American Gods.

Interestingly, much like with San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year, the big reveals at this year’s NYCC were almost entirely for major television shows, rather than movies. While we did get previews of films like Aquaman, Mortal Engines, and Hellboy (the trailer for which hasn’t been released online yet), the slate of late 2018 and spring 2019 television shows dominated the show.

The final season of Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead game will be completed. The failed studio reached a deal with Skybound Games to finish the season, the development of which was halted when the studio laid off most of its employees at the end of September.

At New York City Comic Con, Kirkman told a panel that his company had come to a deal with Telltale to complete the story. According to Variety, Skybound will work with “members of the original Telltale team to finish the story,” although that hasn’t been finalized yet.

Marvel and Netflix took the wraps off a new trailer for the third season of Daredevil earlier this week, and held a panel for the show during New York Comic Con on Saturday. The trailer teases Daredevil villain Bullseye, who is both a fan-favorite and a force to reckon with, while at the panel, the cast and crew explored how the introduction of the classic villain will impact the series.

The main cast of Daredevil arrived on stage to not only answer questions from the panel audience, but also speak on the new dynamic within the cast. Some of season three’s newcomers include Maggie (portrayed by Joanne Whalley) and Agent Nadeem (portrayed by Jay Ali).

At New York Comic Con this afternoon, CBS unveiled the latest trailer for its upcoming second season of Star Trek Discovery showing off what’s next for the crew of the titular ship. The network also revealed that the show would return on January 17th, 2019.

Set a decade prior to the original Star Trek series, Star Trek Discovery follows the crew of the USS Discovery and disgraced Starfleet officer Michael Burnham as they contend with a war against the Klingons, and end up in the Mirror Universe, where they discover a tyrannical version of their world. Our first look at this second season came earlier this summer at San Diego Comic-Con, with a teaser that introduced Captain Christopher Pike (played by Anson Mount), as he takes command of the USS Discovery following the detection of a series of mysterious “red bursts” across the galaxy.

During the Star Wars publishing panel earlier today at New York Comic Con, Random House Books announced that Alexander Freed will be writing a new novel called Alphabet Squadron, which will focus on “rebel pilots hunting down Imperials.” To long-time Star Wars readers, it sounds very much like the Expanded Universe’s X-Wing series.

Freed isn’t a stranger to the Star Wars franchise. He wrote Battlefront: Twilight Company and the novelization for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, as well as a handful of short stories for Star Wars Insider magazine and several comics. There isn’t much more known beyond Random House’s brief description, aside from the fact that it’s set after Return of the Jedi. A temporary cover shows off the classic starfighters that seem to inform the title: a B-Wing, U-Wing, X-Wing, Y-Wing, and A-Wing. The book will be out sometime next year.

Syfy will screen the first episode of its upcoming space horror show Nightflyers later today at New York Comic Con. Ahead of the premiere, it announced that the 10-episode series will series will debut on December 2nd; the first five episodes will air between Sunday and Thursday starting December 2nd, while the second half of the series will air the week starting on December 9th. Each episode will be available online as soon as it premieres on television through on demand and via the network’s website and app. The online episodes also won’t be locked to subscribers; anyone can watch them.

Based on a novella by George R.R. Martin (of Game of Thrones fame), Nightflyers is set on a spaceship, as its crew sets off on a mission to search for extraterrestrial life. When they reach the edge of the solar system, they encounter an unspeakable horror that’s already onboard their ship. Martin described the story as “Psycho in space,” and it’s a show that Syfy has high hopes for. The Hollywood Reporter says that it’s the most expensive show that the channel has put together, and it comes after recent cancellations of space-oriented shows like The Expanse and Dark Matter.

Today at New York Comic Con, Starz hosted a panel for the upcoming second season of its fantasy show American Gods, and showed off our first look at what’s to come in the show when it returns in 2019.

The trailer shows off the continuing story of Gaiman’s novel, which looks to be picking up even more fantastic elements — and gods, old and new —as Shadow (Ricky Whittle) and Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane) continue their road trip across America. Also teased is the pending clash between the old gods of mankind’s past and the new gods, like Media and Technology, of the future. But mostly, American Gods seems content to just show off all the returning players from season one, which will have to suffice to tide fans over for now.

For the last two years at New York Comic Con, Audible has been on a drive to demonstrate that audiobooks are an altogether different experience for readers than sitting down with a book. Last year, the company rolled out an impressive faux museum to support Andy Weir’s novel Artemis, complete with a lunar art installation. This year, the company is showcasing a familiar classic, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, with an installation designed to mimic the memories of the books’ characters.

Titled “A Harry Potter Pensieve Experience,” the activation is a clever reminder that reading and listening are two very different activities. In Harry Potter’s world, the Pensieve is a way to access someone’s memories: a wizard extracts them from their mind with a wand, and they can store them at will. This experience replicates that: attendees select a vial containing the “memories” of a character — which is really a color-coded dot pasted on the bottom — when they enter. The exhibit isn’t huge, but it contains several stations equipped with a set of headphones and a place to slot in the vial. The computer dutifully figures out which character you have, and at each station, it reads a different excerpt from one of the novels. A screen in front of you flashes with an abstract bit of animation that matches the mood of the excerpt that you’re listening to.

We’re still a few months away from Aquaman hitting theaters, during New York Comic Con Warner Bros. has just given us our best look yet at the Jason Momoa-led film with a new extended trailer that’s packed with footage from the movie.

Clocking in at a hefty five minutes, the trailer gives us a general overview of what to expect in December, starting with the basic origin story. Aquaman — aka Arthur Curry — is the son of a human lighthouse keeper and the Atlantean queen (Nicole Kidman), making him the rightful heir to the throne. He’ll be teaming up with Mera (Amber Heard) on what’s revealed to be a quest for a legendary trident (likely the Trident of Neptune) to unite the disparate kingdoms of Atlantis. But there are plenty of foes in his way, including Orm, the present King of Atlantis, and Black Manta, an armored mercenary and classic Aquaman foe.

The Magicians — Syfy’s TV show adaptation of the novels by Lev Grossman — is coming back for a fourth season. And at New York Comic Con, we finally got the exact date: January 23rd, 2019. We also got an ominous first look at the upcoming season, which teases just how much aspiring magician Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) and his friends will have to go up against.

The events of last season saw our heroes succeed in their quest to bring back magic (which, all things considered, is probably a good thing in a show called The Magicians). But it was at a cost: a seemingly unstoppable monster is on the loose, and all of our would-be heroes are stuck in our boring, mundane world, believing that they’re fashion editors and DJs instead of world-bending wizards.

We’ve gotten a few mini-spotlight clips in the run-up to Daredevil’s long-awaited third season, but today Netflix delivered the full two-and-a-half-minute trailer, and boy, is li’l Mattie Murdock good at ruining his own life!

When we last left the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen in the Netflix team-up series The Defenders, the lawyer-vigilante was all but dead. But comic book stories being comic book stories, it’s not long before Matt’s back on the streets — albeit in an even darker place than we’re used to seeing him. “Darkness only responds to darkness,” he growls, before the trailer cuts to a room full of dispatched thugs. It’s looking like we’ll be seeing Murdock embrace the devil aspect of Daredevil this time around — maybe all those recurring head injuries are starting to have some negative side effects?

Today marks the start of New York Comic Con. Taking place at the Javits Convention Center in midtown Manhattan, it’s already begun welcoming fans from all over the world to take part.

While New York Comic Con isn’t as big as its West Coast cousin San Diego Comic-Con International, it’s still a huge event that’s bound to reveal plenty of news about films, TV shows, comics, books, and more on the horizon in the coming months. Here’s what to expect this year.