Back from MegaCon, here's the news:
Fray #7 is finished and will hit the stands in April. #8 is almost done, and looks like it will make the cut in June. The plan from Dark Horse will be to release the entire run as a limited hard-cover collection first, followed by a trade paperback. No schedule on these.
Buffy will continue as a monthly for the time being, but they are waiting to see how things go once the show ends. There will be a mini-series or series of one shots titled Tales of the Vampires, written by writers of the show and focusing on past vampires in history, similar to Tales of the Slayers. Sales of those issues will help determine wheter they continue Buffy as a monthly, or a series of one-shots and minis. All in all, though, they figure they will be running Buffy comics in some format for the forseeable future.
Angel will unlikely ever be picked up again as a series or limited set.
Action figures were selling strong. I picked up a Giles figure (with book and axe as accessories) for $12. Most of the figures were $20. A "wolfy" Oz (still with guitar accessory) was $30. Anya in a bunny suit has now shot up to $60. Two more series of figures are due to be released; beyond that, the dealer didn't know what was going to happen.
In other comics news of note:
JLA/Avengers will be released in the 4th quarter of this year. George Perez himself said that he had the first two issues of the 4-issue set completed, and had the pencils finished of the 3rd issue and had that inked one quarter of the way through. This was confirmed by the DC panel.
Neil Gaiman has a hard-cover 128-page graphic novel called Endless Nights that has a raft of artist attached to separate stories dealing with each one of the Endless. He also has a Marvel series currently titled 1602 that the Wizard editor said looked comparable to The Sandman, but he could not offer any details, even what the project was about.
New issues of Planetary may actually hit the stores this summer.
Most of the show was dominated by the CrossGen group (they are just down the road in Tampa, so this is like their home ground). Most of their major announcements had to do with the deals they have in turning their seireis into movies and TV productions.
The convention itself seemed to go well. I think attendance was larger than last year. One thing I did notice was that anime and manga had a much larger presence than last year.
Most tempting item that I did NOT buy - LOTR:The Two Towers bootleg DVD for $25.
My best score of the convention - Complete three-issue Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comic book series for $3.