Comic-Con 2013: "Kick-Ass 2′ and "Riddick" panel packed with action The most striking thing about Friday's panel on "Kick-Ass 2″ was what wasn't mentioned - specifically Jim Carrey's decision after the Sandy Hook massacre to not support the R-rated comic-book action movie in which he plays Col. Stars and Stripes, a masked crime-fighting vigilante. Though there were cheers from the audience when Carrey's movie showed up in the trailer, moderator Drew McWeeny never asked comic book creators Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. about the issue, nor did he take any questions from fans - who would have been likely to bring up the issue in similar fashion to Thursday's "Ender's Game" panel when the first question to the filmmakers was about controversial novelist Orson Scott Card's involvement with that movie. Rather, the "Kick-Ass 2″ panelists discussed the sequel, which tracks a self-made high school superhero who joins up with a gang of vigilantes to fight crime and is set to hit theaters on Aug. 16, four years after the first movie debuted. Writer-director Jeff Wadlow ("Never Back Down") inherited the project from director Matthew Vaughn, who stayed on as producer with the cast that included star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, villain Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Chloe Moretz, the latter of whom joined the conversation via satellite from Boston. Donald Faison, John Leguizamo and Lindy Booth were also on hand as the new characters of the film. "I'm the fan boy who saw the first one in the theater," said Wadlow, who was hired by Vaughn for the project after he worked with the director on a development project. Wadlow said that Taylor-Johnson, who seemed to have spent an inordinate amount of time at the gym prior to the start of production, and Plasse were not contractually obligated to sign on to the sequel but did so out of their own interest in the project. "The script was a page-turner," said Taylor-Johnson, who is also at Comic-Con to promote Warner Bros." Godzilla. I was cracking up laughing, and it was really emotional. Each character goes through a lot of life changes. David Twohy and his "Riddick" franchise have also been through a lot of changes since they first debuted the film "Pitch Black" 13 years ago at Comic-Con, with an "unknown" star named Vin Diesel. Since then, the sci-fi franchise, which presented materials after the "Kick-Ass 2″ session, has grown with Twohy and Diesel collaborating on a third film, "Riddick," set to hit theaters on Sept. Twohy said he and Diesel went the independent route to make the film, holding creative meetings in Diesel's kitchen, where Twohy sat on the counter and Diesel paced the room and smoked cigarettes. The two brought on Katee Sakhoff ("Battlestar Galactica") to play a gun-toting warrior trapped on a sun-scorched planet destined to fight an alien race of predators. Twohy and company unveiled the first trailer for the movie. "Pacific Rim": 50 images from Guillermo del Toro's kaiju film