Conning of Wonder a Story in Pictures II

Conning More Wonder from Photos

It's now officially more than a month since the end of WonderCon and I'm still posting about it. While not exactly timely I hope it is at least a little enjoyable. The second and third days of WonderCon yielded many more opportunities to catch photos of people in gorgeously elaborate costumes, or just gorgeous people in costume...you'll see what I mean. I was also able to attend a few interesting panels, and more than a couple that were a complete waste of time. Overall I had an amazing weekend and walked away with a few one of a kind mementos. Here are some more of my photos.

Anyone who follows Doctor Who has "their doctor" for me and Mildly Sensational it's the fourth doctor. He's the one we remember from being kids and our parents let us watch Doctor Who for the first time. In both cases the show scared the dickens out of us with all of its monsters and crazy over the top action. These guys clearly like the ninth Doctor played by Chris Eccleston. That or they like leather jackets and buzz cuts. The best part of their cosplay was the Dalek. It was built around a dolly so they could wheel it around with them. 

If not the best Star Wars themed costume I saw that weekend, it was certainly the most badass. I heard some of my fellow geeks call this guy "dark Mandalorian" and he was getting a lot of attention from fanboys with cameras, though probably not as much as...

...this lady's hammer. Seriously. Look at the size of that thing. How does she lift it with such tiny arms? I bet swinging that thing causes her some serious back pain. She attracted a lot of attention for...obvious reasons. I know she wanted to move freely around the con because shortly after this picture was taken she told the clot that had formed around her, "I would like to keep moving now." I didn't see her after this so I can only assume that she must have gone back to her car or hotel room at some point to change into something less...conspicuous. Ok. I have to get this out of my system, "BEHOLD! IT IS THE LADY OF THE STORM HERSELF! THE MIGHTY THORINA THUNDERBOOBS!" There I said it. Moving on. 

Easily one of my favorite costumes of the weekend, if not my absolute favorite. This young lady's Astrid from How to Train Your Dragon was absolutely spot on, and it was fun getting this picture of her holding the axe out toward the camera. The pose and the attitude were perfect. I don't know if she was there for the masquerade or not. If so I hope she did pretty well.

He claws outward, grasping at relevancy. Saturday really did have some great costumes. His is the only Spawn costume I've seen out of three conventions, and it was pretty much flawless. The only way I can think of to make it more accurate would have been for him to pull of the mask and reveal that he's actually Michael Jai White.  

I spotted these three getting their photos taken by a couple of guys with gear that looked they were at the con as professional photographers for another blog or news site. I managed to sneak in and get a couple of pictures. After asking Astrid to hold her axe out toward the camera I had a lot of fun getting similar "action poses" from other cosplayers. It's fun to get pictures of their costumes, sure, but I think the effect is better if you can get them doing something active. 

No convention would be complete without t least one Wolverine. It seems like he's in just about every other title from the M branch of the big two, so I'm honestly a little surprised there weren't more. As good as this costume was there was one other guy there who was built like Thor, but was sporting the claws and weird haircut of everyone's favorite human blender with rage issues. His was the best Wolverine costume of the day, but this guy was a close second.

Gifts
Saturday was the day I set aside to do shopping for friends and family. When I knew that WonderCon was coming up I reached out to some dear friends living in Boulder and asked if there was anything they wanted. They gave me a few ideas and I headed to the Con looking for the perfect gifts for my Colorado brother-from-another-mother and his family. In my search I stumbled across a booth that was selling a number of comic books with blank cardstock covers. These are becoming more popular as collectibles because they allow you to take them to a favorite artist and get them personalized with one-of-a-kind cover art. I picked up four. Three to go back to Colorado and one for myself. For my friends in Colorado I picked up Uncanny X-Men, Avengers, and Superman Unchained. For myself I picked up The Shadow. Below are the finished covers and links to the artist's websites.

Uncanny X-Men by Josh Figueroa

Avengers cover by Brianna Garcia 

A breath taking cover for Superman Unchained by Ruben Martinez

And a little something for me: The Shadow, cover by the only artist I know outside of WonderCon, the terrific Anthony Diecidue

Conning of Wonder a Story in Pictures

Conning of Wonder in Photos

When it's almost a month past the event it's probably too late to tell a Con Story that will mean anything. For the record, it's not for a lack of wanting to post, or a lack of something to say. Even when I don't have something specific to write about I can always fill the space with paragraphs of gibberish like "Flerpy werpy derpy floop!" There are nights I get home from work when it feels like that's about all the mental juice I have, anyway. I digress. A picture is worth a thousand words so I thought I would share a few thousand words worth of photos from my weekend at Wonder Con.

Anaheim's convention center has a couple of really nice courtyard areas with fountains and palm trees. At one point in the afternoon I went out on one of the balconies to get some air and to call the family. While I did my best to decipher what my daughter was trying to tell me in the secret language of three-year-olds I took this picture looking out over the courtyard. It looks like there are a lot of people hanging out, waiting in line at the food trucks, and running between panels at the convention. This is not a lot of people. Take all the people pictured here and increase the density of the crowd by about fifty percent and you'll just about get to how crowded it gets at Comic Con.

Easily one of the best things about Wonder Con in Anaheim is the number of people in costume. Every one of my friends who attended this year commented on the number of cosplayers and the quality of the work put into their costumes. I saw these two as I was walking back in from having some lunch. Hers was the best Poison Ivy I saw the entire weekend. He was a pretty decent take on a male Harley Quinn. The best thing about this moment happened when I walked away. A couple of little boys, who could not have been older than seven or eight, were there wearing a Robin and a Spider-Man costume. Both little boys ran up to these two and asked to have their picture taken with them. Poison and Harley both lit up and posed for a series of pictures with the tiny superheroes. From where I was standing on the outside I couldn't tell who was enjoying it more.

I took this picture on Friday, then ran into him again on Sunday and had the chance to talk with him. It turns out he's in the service, and everything he's wearing and carrying here is the genuine article, including the rifle. It was rendered inoperable for the purposes of the convention. It's funny in a way that in a gathering of people dressed as their favorite fantasy heroes there is a real one walking around almost unnoticed.

Comic book conventions are hardly limited to comic books. The experience just would not be the same without the occasional TIE pilot waving a fist at you. I'm sure he's judging me from behind that mask.

Doctor Who is nearly as big a deal at the convention as Star Wars. She was dressed as "Sexy" the mind and soul of the TARDIS in the body of a woman from an episode of Doctor Who that was written by Neil Gaiman. 

It might look like there are only a couple of reasons why I took a photo of this costume, and there are. I recognized her as the bartender from "Poker Night at the Inventory 2," an indie game from Telltale Games, and if you know the game she nailed the costume.

These two were wearing what I think are the best costumes I saw all weekend. They are not any characters in particular, and the best description I can come up with to give them is "Steampunk Space Gunslingers." All of the pieces were either purchased or hand made.

There are more pictures from that weekend, but they'll have to wait until this tired ass dad has had some sleep.

Geek Speaking of Doctor Dolittle's Whovian Collection

Geek Speak: Home at Last

I remember watching Doctor Dolittle as a kid in the same vague, conceptual way that you know you were once a two-year-old tearing around the house and driving your parents bananas. When I talk about remembering Doctor Dolittle I am, of course, referring to the original film starring Rex Harrison as the titular physician. My sibs and I must have watched that movie a dozen times, but I can recall only a few vague things. It seems like I thought Doctor Dolittle dressed funny. There was a scene at some point in the movie where Dolittle is making funny noises through a megaphone that he's floated on the surface of the ocean, and for some reason I remember him talking to a giant snail. 

It doesn't surprise me all that much that I don't remember much of the film. I was very young and my attention span was about what you would expect for that age group. What surprises me is that my brother and sister and I were able to sit through the movie even once, much less repeat viewings. Just to refresh my memory before posting this I pulled it up in Netflix and happened to glance at the running time. The original Rex Harrison film is two-and-a-half hours of an Englishman in goofy turn of the century clothes running around making burping sounds at trained animals. That's in the same general ballpark as the running time of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Admittedly there's more activity in Doctor Dolittle and the musical numbers are better. I still wonder how my parents managed to get me to sit through 146 minutes of movie. They must have drugged my juice.

We're going to be leaving Ted and Francis for a while after this. I have a few one-off strips I want to do, then it's back to some of our recurring characters.

Knock, Knock; Whovian's There?

When my son was born he was a few weeks early so he was required to spend some time in the neo-natal intensive care unit, NICU ("nick-you") for short. That it would cost us more as a result was something my wife and I knew without being told. What we didn't realize was five days in the NICU would effectively double the cost of our son's birth. The delivery itself was paid for by the time we left the hospital. The NICU stay, however, is another thing.

Around the same time I changed jobs, and there was a period of being between jobs where I didn't have any income. Money was tight. Between the holidays and no income we barely squeaked through the month of December and made rent for January. The hospital bill slipped as a result, and we received a letter from collections.

I'm not proud of it, but it happened, and it was something that needed to be addressed before our account went to an agency and caused our credit to be righteously screwed. To ensure that didn't happen I called the hospital's billing department and was put through to a lady to discuss our account.

The funny thing about being a fan of science fiction, and naming a child after a character in the long running British series Doctor Who is that you have a built in ice-breaker with other fans of the series. It's been long enough now since that phone call that I couldn't tell you how the subject came up, but while we were discussion my past-due account we also started talking about my son's name and where it had come from.

I asked the nice lady on the other end of the phone if she was familiar with Doctor Who.

"Oh, my yes," she said, and though I couldn't see her face I could almost hear her beaming, "I love that show. I've watched ever since it was in black and white."

I explained that my son is named for one of the characters and the actor who played him.

"Oh that's lovely," she said in a tone of matronly indulgence, "that show has been on for a long time hasn't it?"

Of course I agreed and said it had been on for fifty years. She joked, as people from her generation will, about how that dates her, and I laughed with her.

Eventually we conducted the business that had been the reason for my call. We managed to pull my account back from the brink of falling into collections, made arrangements to pay on a monthly cycle, and we parted on friendly acquaintance through a shared appreciation of a (if I'm honest) somewhat goofy British Sci-Fi drama.

When I spoke with Mildly Sensational afterward there was silence on the other end of the phone.

"How," she said and I could all but hear her hands being thrown in the air out of exasperation, "HOW do you do it?"

I really don't know. If it means getting exactly what I need at a critical moment, I'm not going to question it.