Has the thrill of San Diego Comic-Con waned (gasp!) in the last few years? Is the scheduling for the San Diego, Chicago or New York Cons not ideal for you? Or, would your love of comics, games and movies inspire you to travel internationally (this writer is definitely in that camp)? If you fit into any or all of these categories, then today’s your lucky day! Mark Millar is about to become your new hero (if he isn’t already)!

Millar (Kick-Ass, Wanted, Civil War) has announced that he is launching a Comic Con-themed event for the UK market next April. The Kapow Comic Con will take over London’s Business Design Centre on April 9 and 10, 2011 and be dedicated to the world of comics, movies, TV, games and more.

Stars from Hollywood and TV-land have yet to be announced, but Dave Gibbons, John Romita Jr, Frank Quitely, Bryan Hitch and Andy Diggle have all been confirmed for attendance.

Kapow will also introduce the Stan Lee Awards, which will pay tribute to the comic book legend by giving recipients gong statues for Best Comic, Best Superhero or Sci-Fi Movie and Best Comic Book Hero among others.

For more information, check out the official Kapow Comic Con site. See you in London!

Muppets are becoming more of the “hip” thing, as big stars keep finding themselves cast in the newest film. Ricky Gervais and Emily Blunt are the latest high-profile celebrities to join the growing list of cameos in Disney’s newest Muppets movie. The specifics behind their cameos have yet to be announced.

The Hollywood Reporter has announced that the duo are joining a packed lineup that includes Alan Arkin, Jack Black, Billy Crystal, Zach Galifianakis and Jean-Claude Van Damme, who have appearances in a story that reunites the Muppets in order to save their movie studio from a developer. I smell musical numbers!

The new Muppets flick, directed by James Bobin, is currently being filmed in various locations around Los Angeles. Jason Segel, who co-wrote the script with Nicholas Stoller, is the human lead (no surprise here after his vampire number in Forgetting Sarah Marshall) while Amy Adams, Chris Cooper and Rashida Jones round out the cast of human leads.

Stay tuned to The Flickcast for the latest developments on the new Muppets movie.

To the relief and delight of fans everywhere, Futurama finally returned to Comedy Central in June, with an anticipated season of 26 new episodes that will air through the rest of 2010 and into 2011. Riding the wave of elation and acclaim (what Comic-Con wouldn’t be complete without the presence of Groening) Matt Groening (Creator) and David X. Cohen (Executive Producer) shared their ideas for the future of Futurama and what they love most about being in San Diego for Comic-Con.

Groening thanked the fans who are devoted to the show and attributed Futurama‘s return to their persistence. He also teased fans with the vague spoiler of two characters kissing in an upcoming episode, but that it will be completely unexpected and the audience won’t see it coming (anyone want to start a betting pool?).

Fans who are patiently waiting for the early seasons of not only Futurama and The Simpsons to be released on Blu-Ray are going to be waiting for a while. There aren’t any current plans for their release, but they will be available on Laser-Disc very soon!

As for the future of the show, Groening stated that back when he was developing the show with David X. Cohen, they made a list of all the things they wanted to write about, and they still haven’t exhausted that list. Additionally, he revealed that there aren’t any current plans to do direct to DVD movies, but that the ultimate goal would be to develop and release a full-length film that will be released in theaters.

Julie Benz appears to have gone from victim to hero in one fell swoop. After leaving behind Rita Morgan after four seasons on Dexter, the actress is primed to portray Stephanie Powell on ABC’s upcoming family show, No Ordinary Family.  No longer the dead body in the bathtub, Powell is a busy professional scientist and researcher who develops super speed following a crash landing in the Amazon on a trip with her family. After deciding to move on from Dexter, Renz related that she was looking for a new challenge and the character of Stephanie was just what she was looking for.

“When pilot season started, my quest was to find a character that was strong female character, a character that is more active than Rita. I was getting offered a lot of parts that were similar to her and I was turning them down because I wanted to find something that was different.”

While there might be the temptation to compare Rita with Stephanie, Benz insists that she didn’t pull inspiration from portraying a mother on a previous show. For one thing, the personalities are incredibly different.

“I think they’re both mothers, but other than that, there’s really no commonality. Rita was not career driven at all, she was very dependent, very damaged with a lot of  vulnerabilities, very emotional. Stephanie’s very controlled, a Type A personality, goal oriented and has a hard time interacting with her own family.”

In his first TV show since retiring the role of Vic Mackey in The Shield, Michael Chiklis will soon be bounding into your living room as Jim Powell, a police sketch artist who receives the supernatural powers of super-strength, the ability to be bullet-proof and can leap buildings in a…well, you get the idea.

We caught up with Chiklis at San Diego’s Comic-Con and talked to him about his upcoming role and how it is and isn’t a departure from characters he’s portrayed in the past. After all, how do you follow up Vic Mackey by playing another cop?

“Here we have a family show at its core, wrapped in a police procedural, wrapped in a superhero show. That’s something I’ve not seen before. If The Shield lacked any credibility at all, it was the fact that Mackey didn’t have an aneurysm. Seven years of that can wreck havoc on your nervous system and it’s really kind of great and refreshing to do something that I can sit with my family and watch. My eleven year old was starting to question whether I was even an actor. She’s like, ‘dad, do you really act? I can’t see anything you’re in.’”

The concept behind No Ordinary Family will sound familiar to Fantastic Four and The Incredibles fans, but there hasn’t been an adaptation in this vein developed for television in recent memory. Sure, four characters get powers (strength, super speed, telepathy and super intelligence) and yes, it’s combined within a family that is struggling to stay connected and important to each other. But what would you rather see? Superheroes or more Cops?

“I thought it was long overdue. I did the Fantastic Four movies and I’ve been a comic book geek for a long time, since I was a kid. It’s funny though, a bunch of people have said to me, almost as if there’s been tons and tons of superhero shows on television, and to mind, I only can think of one, really in the last 20 years, which is Heroes, which is a decidedly different show.

But I’m thinking, we’re on cop show 475,000 and no one goes, ‘oh really, another cop show?!’ And some people are all, oh you’re going to play another superhero again? Yes! This place (Comic-Con) isn’t getting smaller. Now they’re making more money at Comic-Con than they did at the SuperBowl. This is a genre that’s here to stay. And it’s only natural as a genre to explore the different shapes of it.”