Did you see that Iron Man dog? 😍

Hi readers,Every year, San Diego Comic Con brings a tidal wave of movie and TV announcements, and don’t worry, we’re not going to inundate you further. You can see any trailers you missed here, but we want to look at something different: not the movies and comics being announced and teased, but the full-fledged storytelling happening at Comic Con itself.As Andrew Liptak at The Verge wrote, “By now, San Diego Comic-Con is far more than a series of reveals for high-profile film and television projects and a giant, geek flea market. Over the years, it’s increasingly become home to immersive pop-up activations that bring to life a tiny sliver of a world for fans.” You can read a round-up of all these immersive off-sites here. Sure, these pop-ups are advertisements—isn’t all of Comic Con, when you think about it?—but they’re also very cool ways of approaching storytelling.Liptak wrote about an “activation” promoting The History Channel’s new scripted series, Project Blue Book, about Cold War–era UFO investigations. At SDCC, Liptak and other visitors got to enter a government facility where they were briefed on stories from the Blue Book files and recounted their own (real or made up) UFO experiences to sketch artists. Liptak highlighted the experience because it wasn’t just a cool space for a visitor to walk through, but rather a place where “you inject yourself into the story.”On a simultaneously darker and lighter note, SDCC attendees also got to visit Purge City, a one-stop shopping emporium for all your purge survival needs (in honor of the Purge TV show coming in September). Don’t think too hard about what life would really be like in the world of the Purge; just give in to the oddly cheerful sales associates offering purge essentials like emergency candles and masks, as well as, of course, merch celebrating the New Founding Fathers of America. That sounds like exactly the maximum level of purge-world immersion that you want!Happy reading,Serial Box