I’m in the San Diego airport, waiting until it’s time for me to check in for my flight in five hours or so. (For various reasons, this made more sense than the alternatives).
So: Some random, tired notes about Comic-Con:
Comic-Con was neat. So huge! So much of everything! 99% of what’s there doesn’t relate to me or what I do in any way, but I decided to treat the experience as if I was a tourist, and that was fun. Plus, it was a chance to hang out with so many friends and neat people! I sold all the Herevilles I brought with me by Friday night, so I was free to wander the con. Which is unbelievably huge. You just walk and walk and walk and walk through these dense-as-a-subway-train crowds, and it never ends.
I was a little sad not to win the Eisner Award, of course, but I got over that pretty quickly. It’s a cliche, but being nominated really is an incredible honor. And Raina deserves an Eisner!
What’s weird about the Eisner loss is, at least four people told me that the nomination was something “they’ll never be able to take away from you.” It hadn’t occurred to me to worry that anyone could take the nomination away until so many people started reassuring me that it couldn’t happen. Now I’m wondering… :-p
* * *
Came within arms reach of Matt Smith (the actor who currently plays the lead on Doctor Who) while walking on the street. He looks like a beanpole on TV, but he looks even thinner in person.
* * *
Comic-Con is people-watching paradise, mainly because of the cosplayers.
Some of my favorite cosplays seen at Comic-Con (frequently not the best ones – some of those cosplayers do movie-level mask and makeup effects — but the ones that I found memorable for whatever reason):
- The centaur, with animated, natural-looking rear legs. (They were controlled with cables attacked to the cosplayers front legs, and moved fairly naturally.)
- The trio who “galloped” through the floor playing characters from Monty Python and the Holy Grail — the bard, the knight, and the squire creating a horse sound by clicking two coconut halves together.
- The mother-and-daughter pair of Batgirls I saw, walking and holding hands — they were both in head-to-toe Batgirl outfits, and I’m guessing the younger one was about seven years old. Awwwww.
- The short, female Tom Baker Doctor Who. (I saw about a zillion Matt Smith Doctors, including many women, but only a couple of Tom Bakers.) Not sure why this one entertained me so much — it was a pretty simple and easy costume, compared to many — but it did.
- The Robin who used very thin white mesh in his mask’s eyeholes, so he actually had the blank white eyes of Robin in the comics. Very neat effect.
- The enormously fat Spiderman, whose picture I’m sure will appear in mainstream newspaper coverage of comic-con. It just kicks ass that he’s that brave. Plus, is he the same as the fat Batman whose picture I’ve seen? I’d like to believe that it’s one very fat guy whose picture I’ve seen in all those dozens of news articles, just wearing different costumes each time, and that he gets a kick out of collecting his newspaper clippings.
- The very tall woman with beautiful, colorful wings — the nicest wings I saw at the con. She told me that she had bought the wings commercially, but then modified them by hand-attaching the feathers.
- The woman dressed as Black Cat, but wearing the shirt from a Spiderman costume. I liked this because it took me a while to get it — she was doing the thing some girls do of wearing their boyfriend’s shirt.
- The stormtrooper wearing a plaid kilt. Classic, simple, but still good.
- The woman in the head-to-toe Catwoman costume who stopped by my table and was very enthusiastic about Hereville.
- The man dressed as Beta Ray Bill. The cosplayer did an amazing job not just with the mask, but also with the inhumanly thick arms.
- The Rorschach walking around carrying a fake dead dog — extremely gruesome, but meaningful to folks who have read Watchmen.
That’s just a handful — there were literally hundreds of people who attended in costume. I wish regular life was more like that.
