Comic Con Report, volume 1

Waste not, want not, that's the Sarlacc's philosophy.

So like I said, I didn't see many panels, the Con this year for me was almost entirely about roaming the exhibit hall and waiting. I did see a lot of great costumes. Almost immediately on Thursday, I ran into this girl;

"You again!" I said the moment I saw her. I've now run across her three years in a row at the Con, the girl who makes her dress out of the enormous bag they give you to hold the Con schedule and souvenir book in.

2010

2011

I actually saw a couple other girls this year wearing bag dresses, but they were always bags from previous years and not as well made. The original Bag Girl, let's call her, always uses this bag from the current year, and mind you, I ran into her early Thursday morning, which means after she got the bag the night before she made an entire dress for the next day. You can see this year she even made a scaled skirt that kept the image advertised on the bag.

I was at the Con early every morning. I wanted to go to portfolio review, which is where a variety of publishers basically give job interviews to artists and writers--mainly artists. I did two interviews, I don't know yet if anything will come of them. Thursday there was simply no panel I wanted to see--at least, not one that happened early enough for me. I wish I could've gone to the RiffTrax panel.

Joss Whedon at this point could probably be called King of the Con. I got to the Con at 9am on Friday, which was much too late to get into the Firefly anniversary panel scheduled for 12:30. I overheard one girl complaining, "They're stopping us at twenty thousand!"

I ran into this girl dressed as Kaylee from Firefly (I'm not sure who her friend's supposed to be) on the trolley Saturday evening and she told me the reason the Firefly panel was held in the woefully inadequate Ballroom 20 upstairs, which seats 4,500, instead of Hall H, which can hold 6,500, was that Hall H was reserved only for promoting upcoming media. This is an example of some rather inflexible thinking on the part of administration, if you ask me. In any case, it seems like Firefly fandom, instead of waning in the years since the show's cancellation only seems to be getting bigger, and I think it's only partially due to the success of Whedon's The Avengers.

The life size trolls at Weta's booth were really impressive.

On Saturday, I wanted to get into Hall H to see the Hobbit presentation. I got up at 6:30 am and got to the Con at around 9am. For some reason I didn't feel like I needed to hurry--I wanted to see the Django Unchained panel early in the day in Hall H and the Hobbit panel was scheduled for 2:30pm. Somehow I didn't reckon on so many people willing to sit through so many panels to see the Hobbit panel because not only did I not get into Django Unchained, the people in Hall H didn't leave when that was over because The Hobbit was their only objective all along. I waited in line from 9am to 2:30pm. Which would've felt like a waste of time, except I met a really nice girl from Austin named Katie who was waiting to see the Iron Man 3 panel scheduled after The Hobbit. Katie's more hardcore into comics and cons than anyone I've ever talked to, and while I was with her she briefly texted a friend of hers who was at another Con in another state trying to acquire for her rare, Junior Justice League comics from the 1980s that had never been collected in trade form. She told me about seeing a panel for the latest of the Ninja Turtles reboots, a television series, not the Michael Bay movie. It seems like Ninja Turtle reboots are coming so frequently nowadays--in the past five years, there was another unrelated to each other TV series and movie. Katie said this new one sounded like it might be good and made an effort to pay homage to the old series, using one of the voice actors and having a theme song resembling the old one. I was really into Ninja Turtles when I was a kid, but it's something I have more trouble reconnecting with than anything else I enjoyed in my childhood. I suspect if a new series works, it'll be because of an adult working from an impression of the series as remembered than how it actually was.

Katie was also a big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation when she was a kid and I mentioned to her these pictures I got of LeVar Burton, Brent Spiner, and Marina Sirtis on Friday;

Okay, that's about all I have time for to-day. I'll leave you with this video of the belly dancers of the Adrian Empire which was incredibly awkward video to take I'll admit. They were all facing the wall and when I walked over I felt uncomfortably like they were dancing just for me. The knock out on the left gave me a smile once that seemed to say, "This is my empowering public display of sexiness of which you are partaking," and when I smiled back she stopped smiling abruptly as it felt more like a "moment" than I think either of us really wanted.