Comic Con, is an annual multigenre fan convention on comic books held during the summer in San Diego, California, at the San Diego Convention Center. This year's Comic Con, which concluded yesterday, will be remembered for two things. The opening keynote address by Will Wright and the detailed demo of the new Spore online game that is sceduled for release next month.

Will Wright, as most gamers will know, is an American computer game designer and co-founder of the game development company Maxis, now part of Electronic Arts. He is best known as the original designer of computer games such as SimCity and The Sims.

Currently working with the Spore design team, Wright also revealed the MashON Spore Comic Book Creator which will help players to take the creatures and other assets they make in the game and import them into an interactive comic book creation engine.Users can rate and save other players' stories on the Mashon.com site and play them back as digital flip books as well as print them out. Wright talked about how the Comic Book Creator fits with the overall ethos of the game, which is about putting players more in the role of George Lucas than Luke Skywalker.

The demo kicked off with Wright describing the various phases of the game. There are various phases which start with the "tide pool" phase and then the "civilization phase", the "space phase" etc. Wright mentioned that one of the goals for Spore was to give players better and more creative tools with which to learn something relevant about the mechanics of science, evolution and human history divorced from the traditionally dry textbook methodology in use by most school systems today.

Fast forward to September and the game will be out for us to explore!