Last day of the Con...

DC, Marvel, Image, BOOM!, Dynamite and more! Discuss everything comics and related to comics. If it's comics and Nightcrawler isn't in it, this is the place!
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Post by Crawler »

He seemed to just be a comic fan, though there could have been a Cat Man panel or show or something that we didn't know about.

He also apparently lives nearby. He kinda haunted the Small Press area on Friday and Saturday, so we saw him quite a bit. Nice guy, if a bit obsessed.

He was diappointed that we didn't have any merchandise with Bast on it. (Go figure)
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Post by kurtlover »

OMG! Jill i love your pics! thanks for sharing!
My favorites are the Buddy Christ pic and the Tiger Guy pic! :)
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Post by Northstars Love »

eh...did the tiger guy have whiskers, C? I'm just wondering how far this guy went to look like that. There are some people that I have seen on TV and pictures that get the whiskers added on. Not something I'd do tho. I find the whole thing odd. :smirk
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Post by Crawler »

He's got peircings that he can attach whiskers to. He had the little metal nubs in at the con, though...I assume that the whiskers getting hit or tugged on would not be a pleasant thing.
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Post by Panz »

:eek...I wonder when someone will come up with prosthetic tails that actually work....:LOL I'm REALLY sorry I missed this guy
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Post by Tatu »

Originally posted by Crawler
Oh! And this one was taken for Stevie:
http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC20 ... -yasha.jpg

You are my hero, Mr. Stuck. :D :P
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Post by Bamf Bunny »

I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't have to Google for tiger boy's website - I remembered the domain name.

Obsessed Tiger Dude

Am I wrong to laugh because he says he's following a Native American shamanic tradition, but has a totem animal from the other side of the world? Or to wonder what kind of Native American name "Dennis Avner" is?
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Post by NightPoofer »

Huh... I don't think I saw the obsessed tiger dude on sunday... :LOL
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Post by NachtcGleiskette »

Ok, time for Lisa's update:

All in all I had a blast.. thursday was spent at the Freaks and Geeks panel and on line to meet Martin Starr. I gave him my number and asked if he would come to dinner, and though he didnt, he called me a few times and I got his email address so we can keep in touch. He's a great guy. I also was interviewed by a few people including one right in front of Heathen Sent.......people think im enigmatic :coy

All the other days kinda mesh together for me..but I got to meet Judd Winick and Jim Califiore (which was a frellin honor!) even though I may have scared Jim a bit....he started referring to me as "that Nocturne girl" after I had gone to see him a few times. He's a very nice guy, as is Judd.....

We had lunch with Chuck which was really cool....it was really great to talk to him.... I took advantage of every picture taking opportunity there was, and got pics with a ton of characters....I got the Quentin Tarantino exclusive crazy 88 plus some original artowrk AND a Chris Giarusso drawing of Nocturne and Thunderbird....

All pics and drawings will be posted very very soon.....I hope I'm not forgetting anything...

EDIT:
This link should work:

http://photobucket.com/albums/v294/Nacht714/

And Ken is amazing....
"If you live your life to please everyone else, you will continue to feel frustrated and powerless. This is because what others want may not be good for you. You are not being mean when you say NO to unreasonable demands or when you express your ideas, feelings, and opinions, even if they differ from those of others.â€
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Post by Crawler »

Not enigmatic.

Exuberant. :p

And here are my pics:
http://www.cstuck.com/stuff/SDCC2004/

Like I said...all toys. :p
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Post by kurtlover »

C, seems like you had a blast taking pictures of toys :LOL
Lisa, of course you're enigmatic, exhuberant, and very pretty ;) no wonder why you were such a success.
Lovely pics you guys! thanks for sharing.
P.S. Zam costume is just AWESOME! :love
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Post by NachtcGleiskette »

armi you are incredible.....

*Sits and enjoys her Freaks and Geeks DVD set* I am so glad I shelled out the money for this....
"If you live your life to please everyone else, you will continue to feel frustrated and powerless. This is because what others want may not be good for you. You are not being mean when you say NO to unreasonable demands or when you express your ideas, feelings, and opinions, even if they differ from those of others.â€
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Post by kurtlover »

Question....who is the girl with the light blue hair?
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Post by Northstars Love »

Originally posted by NachtcGleiskette


And Ken is amazing....
Shouldn't you have said that first? :P

I loved all you guys! :kiss It was fun meeting all of you!

And Lisa when we get together again with Steve and Armi this time next year, we can all get real smashed at a club in downtown SD. :beer We might have to carry Steve back to the hotel room. :LOL
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Post by taekwondodo »

Originally posted by kurtlover
Question....who is the girl with the light blue hair?
I haven't looked at all the pics posted here, but my guess is that it's Zam out of costume. She's got the cool blue dye job.:)
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Post by Northstars Love »

Yep it's Zam. :) Love the cotton candy colored hair. heh
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Post by Tatu »

Originally posted by **Northstars Love**
And Lisa when we get together again with Steve and Armi this time next year, we can all get real smashed at a club in downtown SD. :beer We might have to carry Steve back to the hotel room. :LOL
I can handle my alcohol better than that thank you very much.

I mean..

...Um...

...nevermind :shifty

Though I think my job would be to help Lisa hike up her shirt ever 3 seconds to prevent spillage.. o_O
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Post by NachtcGleiskette »

Originally posted by **Northstars Love**
And Lisa when we get together again with Steve and Armi this time next year, we can all get real smashed at a club in downtown SD. :beer We might have to carry Steve back to the hotel room. :LOL
Actually...since little Stevie is still underage....he can pull our rickshaw...and I'm sure Bunny will lend us a whip :coy
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Post by Darkholme »

And actually, _I_ took the pics of the toys...C was too busy being a comics professional.
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Post by Bamfette »

ooh! great pics Lisa and C! who is it that has the lap pic? Lisa has the group pic with us and Chuck, but no pic of me in his lap. i can't remember who took that picture.

I re-sized some of you guys pics to fit my website format and uploaded them for easier reference in my post to follow... hope you don't mind.

ok, now i will try to cover some highlights... where to begin...

well, first, C and I arrived in San Diego, and Lisa, Andy and Drew who we would be sharing a room with were at the airpoirt waiting for us. we took a picture:
http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC2004/airport1.jpg
no clashes everyone loved eachother, and things were good. everyone was great :) anyway. we went back to the hotel, got settled in, then C and i headed off to get our badges for preview night. becuase we were exhibitors, we got to skip the stupidly long line. HAH! we got our badges in a matter of a few minutes, it was great.

behold the wonderous Exhibitor Badge: http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC2004/badge.jpg

we dodged forklifts getting the larger exhibits put together before the floor opened, and found our table. We were surprised to find another comic about a pagan god, one we were using, no less, right next to us, Horus. Johane is the writer and artist, and we got to know her well over the course of the convention, she's really nice and her comic is great too. here's Johane:

http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC2004/johane-c.jpg

C and I (C really) had run into some problems getting our merchandise to us... the shirts were being shipped to the hotel, and the buttons arrived at C's house after he had left for the airport, and had to be overnighted to us by his mom. so we had to begin the con with nothing but pens and some prints, and our table looked rather bare. but people LOVED the pens. they were fascinated by the things, becuase they ARE neat little pens. http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC2004/pens.jpg

and don't forget the buttons: http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC2004/buttons.jpg

after preview night began, we met Amy and her husband: http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC20 ... ll-amy.jpg
and Emily, who would later become our breakfast buddy, since she was an exhibitor as well, so had to be there an hour early every day like me and C. Amy had made everyone little badges with 'Scrawlers' on them which you can see in the pic of my badge.

then the days began to blur together... but highlights are breakfast with the Rebel Legion. have not lived until you've had breakfast with a bunch of people dressed as Jedis and Rebel pilots. oh. and R2.

Emily in costume was totally awesome: http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC20 ... emily2.jpg

Mini-Maul was the cutest thing at the con: http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC2004/mini-maul.jpg

yes, we met the tiger guy: http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC2004/tiger-guy.jpg he seemed nice enough, actually. and i really wish we had made those Bast buttons, cus it would have been cool to be able to say we had sold him something.

we had dinner a couple times with the group, one time with Taekwondodo joining us, and once with Ken and his friend Leo joining us in addition to the core group:
http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC20 ... -evilc.jpg
http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC2004/dinner2.jpg

I did a comission for a guy, and his request was merely anything i wanted, EXCEPT 'no Marvel, no DC, and no Catholic Schoolgirls'. so, with C there providing a corrupting influence, I drew him Wolverine in a school girl uniform ripping his shirt open to reveal the Superman logo as a joke. he was so shy tho, i don't think he appreciated i much. but I think he liked the mermaid that i drew him for real. Emily has the drawing now, maybe she'll show all you ;)

I was approached to draw porn comics. I went to the booth after this guy flipped thru my portfolio and told me to go there. this is a booth where they had porn stars posing for pictures. except none of the guys huddled around the booth actually got their pictures taken WITH the girls, they jsut snapped pics from afar. quite odd. tho you can see in Lisas pics, she got her picture taken with them. anyway. i was given the sample comic, and... oh. my. god. :LMAO well, lets jsut say i don't think i will be returning their call, even though i am certain they could pay quite well.

Chuck bought me, C, Lisa, Emily and Andy lunch, and it was much fun. http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC2004/group1.jpg that pic also has Drew, who graciously stayed behind to watch the table while we were out, since the table must be manned at all times.

a guy from Antarctic Press came to our table and well, i hope something comes out of that. they were one of our top picks for a potential publisher for Heathen Sent.

apparently, we need to be saved. One day, while C and I were out for lunch, someone left this card: http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC2004/card.jpg at the feet of the Buddy Christ figure we had on our table as a mascot (along with Anubis). :LOL We don't know who left it, we went to the Christian Comics table that was near us, and they did not have any cards like that, but it could have been them. I don't know if it was intended to be serious or a joke, but i find it funny ;) this is like one of my most prized souveneirs.

speaking of Christians, Buddy Christ graced the table with his presence, and he seemed to like the comic, too! http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC20 ... tbooth.jpg

I got Bill Willingham to sign Fables, Pia Guerra to sign Y, and Brian Froud to sign Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy collection. they were all very nice ;)

Chuck Austen and Eddie Berganza stole my Superman comics. bastards. like they don't have enough, they have to steal mine. :p I got Chuck to sign Action, Jim Lee and Ivan Reis were there beside him, but the lines were HUGE for those two, becasue, well, it was JIM LEE, and they were doing sketches, so the lines were moving very slowly. (where as i could basically skip any line for Chuck, he'd just wave me up to the front and i would stand there as he talked to other people), and because i had a table to be at, i could not afford the time to stand in line to get them to sign em. Chuck offered to take my comics and get them to sign them later. and well, they passed hands a few times waiting to be signed, I think Ivan did sign, but we were still waiting on Jim Lee and Brian Azzarello (who, while my comics were being handed around behind the scenes, i met, whith no line. figures. but he was grumpy.) maybe sketched on, i dunno, and last i heard, my comics were in the posession of Eddie, and then the con ended. oh, well.

and lastly, Emily and I may have switched toothbrushes. we aren't really sure.
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Post by Saint Kurt »

It wasn't so much that I wanted to switch toothbrushes, it's just that yours and mine looked so much alike that I felt it necessary to inspect it with my teeth.

Unless that was my own toothbrush I inspected with my teeth...

There's no way to know.

-e




(You have no idea how alarming it is to open up your bag and see that your toothbrush has multiplied and know that one belongs to you and the other doesn't and that there is no way to tell which is whose.)
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Post by Tatu »

Dude... that little christian card is the absolute funniest thing EVER!

You so should frame and hang it!
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Post by kurtlover »

http://www.bronzepig.ca/jillpics/SDCC2004/card.jpg
OMG! :LOL:LOL that was extremely funny!
Thanks for sharing that with us Jill :)
btw maybe Zam needed two thootbrushes because of the nigthy teeth :shifty :p
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Post by Northstars Love »

I asked Jill if anyone objected to their table. That's when she presented me with "The Card". First "The Chuck" now "The Card". :LOL :D Anyway, I would have loved to see Buddy Christ in person. Awesome costume!

Call Chuck up and tell him to get Eddie to return the comics Jill. :P I can see it now, "Look what I got from a comic fan at the SDCC." Then check Ebay for them. They could be on there in a matter of a few weeks or even days. :LOL
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Post by Maelstrom »

Maelstrom's Very Very Late Blog[/i]

So much for the idea of doing this as an up-to-date, up-to-the-minute, blow-by-blow thing during ComicCon. :blush Only now, the Tuesday after, have I had the time (and computer access) to do this... and it won’t be
until Wednesday the 28th until I can put it on-line. And I’m hoping I can keep all this straight: some of it is just a blur, and I’m not 100% of the right day.

Ah, well: better late than never, right? :oops:

The silver lining is the fact I can put this all down in one post. Or
maybe one series of posts; not sure how much text the poor thing can
handle, and I have managed to exceed the buffer once or twice. :whistle

Day One: Road Trip and Preview Night

Technically, my vacation started the day before, on Tuesday the 20th: I
wanted to take the day to make sure everything was ready, in a leisurely
fashion. It paid off: by 4am on Weds the 21st, we were packed, the
cooler filled with ice, and on the road, beginning our 500 mile trip from
San Leandro to San Diego. It was a pretty direct route: Highway 580 to
Highway 5, and from there straight down to San Diego, with only a small
detour around the dreaded parking lot that is Los Angeles.

The ungodly starting time accomplished many things. We avoided the
hellish Bay Area morning commute, we avoided LA’s equally hellish
Lunchtime traffic, and made it over the infamous “Grapevine” high desert,
high mountain pass before the heat of the day hit. The only snag was an
inexplicable stop-and-go section near the beach. Stop and go traffic,
both sides of the road, at an isolated section, during the weekday. What
the hell? :? Found out later that it was the opening day of some
sort of Malibu races. :doh! I guess we were fated to be caught in
traffic sometime along the way.

We pulled into San Diego a little after 1pm, where I got an unpleasant
surprise. It wasn’t that the room had mysteriously vanished off of the
reservation list: I checked that a month ago. No, this was the first
hotel I had ever stayed in where they charged your ass for parking. $16
a day to stay in the hotel parking lot, $22 for valet. Per day.
That was $80 more I hadn’t figured on spending. Ouch. :urg I guess
they were seeing so many people fly in, thanks to closeby San Diego
Airport, that they would cut rates for those without cars and charge the
others who drove in. (I sure wish that had been enclosed in their fee
list.)

About 2pm the room was ready, and at 3pm the pre-reg was supposed to
begin. There was a snafu, though, and it actually started at 5pm. Good
Lord, the LINE! :surprise It snaked all the way back to the tail end of
the convention center, and that center is a mile long! I felt like I was
waiting in line for a popular Disneyland attraction, except there were
fewer cool things to look at. And this was just us nuts who could make
it for the preview night! I asked someone how many were due for the
convention itself, and was told the staggering number of 15,000. That’s
15,000 pre-registered attendees. I don’t think it counted in the few
thousand day-trippers. The mind simply boggles.

Oh, and I found this out from a fellow waitee in line. Con security,
ironically named “Elite”, had no answers for me except misdirection.
This was to be the start of a major trend. :smirk

After a good hour in line, we got to the actual registration area: a
huuuuge room named the “Sail Room”, because the open ceiling was lined
with sailcloth in an architecturally pleasing design. I have to admit
that Con security did all right in the directing, because except for one
“stop spot”, the line moved with regularity. And the registration
process was efficient as well. Instead of you waiting in line for
someone to look you up on their computer, there were banks and banks of
terminals set up for you to enter your own information, find your
badge, and send it to the central printers. Eliminated a lot of
bottlenecks, though we still got hung up at the central printing station,
where con ops had to manually grab the sheets and call our names, hoping
we would hear them. (My husband’s badge took the longest because it got
printed out at an inopportune time, at the bottom of a stack, and was
passed down to the end of the line before being called. Oh, well.)
Perhaps next time they’ll make a program to alphabetize the names,
sending a-d to one printer, e-g to another, etc. Overall, though, it was
pretty well done, especially considering the massive throngs of
attendees. I shuddered to think of what this would look like on
Thursday....

After getting our badges, con schedule stuff, and various freebies off
the freebie table, we had the second fruitless run-in with “Elite”. From
here on in, I’m going to put these guys in quotes, because there was
NOTHING “elite” about them at all. I understand that a lot of the
red-shirted guys were volunteers, and their duties apparently stopped
with “you can’t come in here”, but, dammit, could just one of them
have [/i]any[/i] knowledge of the next room over? We asked no less than
three of them which way to get to the main exhibition hall, got
three different answers, and not one was correct. We just
kind of wound our way down there.

By this time it was somewhere around 6pm or so. We got to the hall, and
noticed that it curved a little bit, so we couldn’t see from one end to
the other. (Kind of like the inside of a big mall.) Also, there were
some tall exhibits blocking the full view. Fortunately, we found C and
Jill’s little place pretty fast, as it was very close to the back
entrance we discovered (and would never use again). To make matters
easier, and perhaps even humorous, the Heathen Sent table was located
right next to a table for a comic called Horus, and it had a bright
yellow Egyptian-theme banner. Two pagan deities right next to each
other. I’m sure Loki himself would have been appropriately amused. ;)

We talked for a few minutes, exchanged room numbers and all that, and
then I caught back up with hubby as we walked the aisles. And I was
thinking to myself, “Gee, these are just the low-level, private exhibitor
booths and tables. Indy comics, single artists, and so on. This is just
the stuff around the edges. What will the big boys do in the middle?”
But seeing as the place shut down an hour or two after I got in (Preview
night was cut a little short this year), I’d have to wait until tomorrow
to find out.

Once the main exhibit hall closed down, Jesse and I discovered how many
people came to SDCC in a big way: we tried to find someplace to eat.
Everyone seemed to have an hour wait or longer, because a HUGE horde of
people came out of the exhibit hall with us. A valuable lesson learned
about finding someplace early, because once the crowds poured out,
noplace within a six block radius was safe.

After dinner at Dick’s Last Resort, we went back to the room to
rest. Most everyone was there, but Zamweasel (Emily) was also rooming
with us, and I knew she was due in late. Later than anyone thought: her
flight was delayed by nasty thunderstorms over Chicago. Sometime about
11pm, she, and her electric blue hair, managed to make it in. (For
someone with so much costume gear, Zam travels incredibly light: no more
than three bags.)

And after all sleeping bags were uncurled, beds inflated, and every
square inch of space occupied by someone or other’s gear, we collapsed.

Day Two: The Exhibitor Hall of Doom

And here is my reaction when I saw that hall, in its entirety, for the
first time at 10am Thursday morning. :shocked O_O :shocked

One mile of length. You don’t think about how big that really is
until you see it encapsulated inside. There were lines forming the
second people flooded into the doors for all the freebies, giveaways,
wheel spins, etc. I was glad that I came with my own large, cotton duck
bag: it was big enough for those posters, and distinct enough that no one
could mistake it for theirs.

Let me reiterate: :shocked

I had never seen anything like this. I’ve been to conventions before,
but they were the smaller, regional ones. None of them were the
multimedia projects like this. I never saw any large exhibits in the
dealer’s room. Maybe a couple people with funds or engineering know-how
could make their booth look like a dungeon wall, but that was it. And
here I was, staring at:

* A life-sized X-wing replica, complete with opening canopy.
* A partial re-creation of the Cerebro unit from X2, complete with a
Xavier mannequin, for the X-Men Legends demo.
* A LOTR costume diorama and a “life-sized” cave troll looking over a
section of the exhibit.
* Life-sized statues of an Alien and a Predator trying to rip each other
apart.
* A huge purple wall of plastic and TV tubes for Sci-Fi Channel.
* 20’ x 20’ banners for G.I. Joe, Star Wars, Yu-Gi-Oh, Disney, Viz, New
Line Cinemas, and countless others, subdividing the hall even more.

And so, at the risk of overt and boring repetition, I again say: :shocked

I went through a chunk of it, grabbing freebies as I went, collecting not
just for myself, but for Ken as well. He wouldn’t be here, but I’d be
meeting him at the end of the week, and so I’d be able to hand it all to
him in person. Besides: I knew that these ravenous crowds were still
nowhere near their apex. It was only Thursday, and far more were due in
on Friday and Saturday. Better get while the getting’s good.

A chunk of the massive hall was all I got through before I headed back to
Jill and C’s place: I had promised to take over the table so they could
go and say hello to Chuck, grab some lunch, all that good stuff. Lady
Bamf and I met up at that point. (Since we had the same name, we started
referring to me as Amy and her as Blue Amy, as her hair was blue at the
time.) She wasn’t easy to miss: she was wearing her own “canon”
Nightcrawler costume. And soon I met up with Andy, Drew, and Lisa; all
were drawn to that Heathen Sent table. It was the “NightScrawler
Magnet”. :)

Dinner was at the Old Spaghetti Restaurant that night. We had hoped to
have Chuck with us, but he couldn’t make it. Emily, Blue Amy, and I went
a half hour or so early to put our names on the list, and by the time
everyone got together, it only took a few minutes for all those tables to
be pushed together for us. This was, most likely, the best and cheapest
meal to be had in all the convention. :lick

After dinner, I started thinking: shouldn’t I be doing a blog at some
point? :scratch Oh, well; C and Jill’s computer was having a hard time
connecting to the internet through the Marriot connection. Seemed you
had to tell them to turn on that thing in advance, because it was an
extra fee to do so. (MAN, these fees pile up fast! :doh!) They were
working with the phone lines. They’d let me know what was going on.

After dinner, it was getting late, but Emily, Blue, Jesse and I wanted to
play some Magic; the Gathering (Jesse brought his huge “everything in the
world” deck, which is meant for a whole bunch of people to play off of at
the same time). Much to my surprise, it turned out one of my other
roomies was planing on getting up at five in the morning to stand
in an autograph line. :faint Good Lord. I mean, I knew Emily had a
gig at the Lucas booth, so she had to be up by seven... but five?
It’s a good thing that Emily didn’t need much sleep, because I don’t
think we were going to get much. We played our Magic games down in the
lobby for a little while, then all got tired at the same time, manna
burned ourselves into oblivion, and went to bed. :rolleyes

Day Three: the Blue Crew

After my first overwhelming day, I started seeing some basic trends at
SDCC:

1) Collectible Card games are very much alive and well. Or, at least,
they were willing to put out the $$ to project that image. It seemed
that Yu-Gi-Oh had de-throned Pokemon as the anime trading card
game of choice, because I saw a massive display for the former, but
nothing for the latter. Also, among CCGs that I had not
considered: the G.I.Joe card game. I actually played a round of this.
The game play is fast and easy to learn, but I could see where it would
get old for me real fast.

2) Though the mainstream comics are moving away from the manga style
now, anime and manga are still popular as ever. Though the interest
seems to have waned in translated manga, I saw a lot of it there. Steve
would have had screaming orgasms at all the Trigun and Inuyasha stuff I
saw. ;pant

3) Speaking of anime, the Disney booth was heavily promoting their new
W.I.T.C.H. series. It’s about five 13 year old girls who discover
they have magic powers, and the name is an anacronym of the first letter
of each of their names. And if it wasn’t anime-based, I’d eat my shoes
and socks. It looked like it could have come straight from Tokyo Pop.
I’m wondering if this is another trend for them, seeing as how people
have been staying away in droves for some of their other stuff?
*coughBrotherBearHomeOntheRangecough* Or is this the wave of the
future only for their Disney Channel animated series?

4) Toys, toys, toys, statuettes, and more toys. The ancillary
merchandise is astounding. LucasFilm has come out with some lightsabers
that look like the real thing, glowing neon-ish tube and all, and was
selling them for a paltry C-note. And if you wanted a really impressive
lightsaber, down at the far corner of the hall you could find a booth
where some artists had machined their own custom lightsabers from solid
stainless steel. Twice as expensive, but no less worth it. They even
had a Maelstrom model (my pics are coming :D).

5) Golden and Silver age comics were everywhere, and everyone said they
were buying... providing you offered comics from the 70s on down. No
one was too interested in the 80s stuff, and the 90s? Forget it. :smirk
I was finding plenty of that in the “dollar bin”. This was a convention
for true collectors, who wanted that Detective Comics #45, that Spiderman
#2. For those who couldn’t afford such luxuries, the trade paperbacks
abounded. In fact, there were more TPBs than actual comics for sale, I
think. I finally broke down and got my own TPB of Watchmen there. But
no one seems to think they’ll do a TPB of Excalibur, though, dammit. :cry

I walked through the exhibits, covered about 1/3rd more ground, then went
to the LucasFilm to meet with Emily. At 11am-ish she got off her shift
as an X-Wing pilot, and today was the day she got into her real
costume. The one we’d all been waiting to see. ;pant Blue, Emily, and I
went back to the room, where Emily put things in motion for THE costume.


Much to my joy, not long after we got back, TKD and her eldest daughter
came to the room. She was visiting with her in-laws, and found the time
to come to the convention. Her other kids went to some other aerospace
museum or something. I’m not too clear on it because we all knew THIS
was where the action was, and that THIS little girl was going to have the
better part of the deal. You see, Emily was painting more than her that
day. She, Blue Amy, and TKD’s daughter all got to be “blue in the face”.
We had MovieCrawler, CanonCrawler, and Nachturne for the afternoon.
:naughty

Yes, I have pictures.

Emily has the entire NC costume down to a fine art. For all the jokes
about “leaving the bathroom blue”, it was a very clean process, one which
I attempted to document with my digital camera. Just watching her work
gave me more confidence with the concept of finding and using an airbrush
of my own someday. Basic makeup steps are:

1) Put on hairnet thingy and wash face.
2) Put in contacts.
3) Spray some blue over her “template” mask, giving her the scar pattern
to work from.
4) Spend an hour laboriously applying the “scars” to her face.
5) After drying, pat with fixing powder.
6) Put on ears.
7) Put in funky teeth.
8) Put fixative spray on chin and lower/under the lip area, which gets
the most movement.
9) Start with the blue makeup in earnest, then add more fixative after
that dries....

I know I’m forgetting stuff. There’s also the blue eyeliner, the black
wig, the worn costume, hands, and feet. And maybe things are out of
sequence. But she definitely wanted the teeth in before she started
spraying the blue makeup because of how they subtly rearranged her facial
structure. Just from what I put up there, you can see what a laborious
process it is.

But once it’s finished, there’s nothing else like it. I would
eventually find four other MovieCrawlers there, and NONE of them came
anywhere close to Emily’s. :thumbup We’re all sure she would have done
very well in the costume contest, but Emily wanted to have fun walking
around with it, and her friends, rather than perhaps getting some small
award. Gotta love that lady. :*)

I suppose the worst problem we ran into was the fact that two of her
toenails came off. :shocked Of the Nighty feet, not her own, thank you.
:smirk And none of that mattered worth a damn, because when you’ve got
three blue ladies walking around in a coordinated trio, you’re gonna get
attention. Literally every minute or two, someone wanted to take the
trio’s pictures. Little “Nacht” was a bit camera-shy, and had to be
coaxed out to pose once or twice, but not Emily or Blue Amy. And, yes,
there are pictures, including the infamous “Trojan burger” pic. :LOL

(This was also where I learned that a digital camera is NOT for strolling
around the convention with, snapping photos of whatever struck your
fancy. I went through a brand new set of Duracells that way! :bawl)

When a bunch of Nighty fans get together, you just know there’s going to
be competition for prime “stuff”. :LOL Lisa, Blue, and Emily all wanted
the same Exiles original art page, among other things. But everyone went
home with something. (Or had it shipped home, as the case may be. The
local UPS station inside the convention hall had brisk business, to say
the least.) The dinner get together wound up being at the local mall,
where everyone eventually split up. Jill, C, and Lisa had lots of
tickets to Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, enough for
everyone I believe. After all, they were handing them out at the
infamous “burger booth” in the convention. But, alas, I was wiped out,
and it was 9pm-ish by then, which meant at least midnight before we
walked home, and longer still for makeup removal. (Having being woken up
by a buzzer at 5am that morning did NOT help my disposition any,
as I never did get enough sleep the previous night....) Emily and Blue
Amy agreed that it was a bit late, and we walked back home, where makeup
was stripped and goodnights said.


Day Four: the Masquerade

By now I’d gotten to every inch of the exhibit hall. I hadn’t attended
any forums, which was about par for me. I rarely went to panels of any
sort, have zippo interest in autograph signings, and had been too busy
with the ‘Scrawlers crew to so much as glance at the program book. :blush
I was planning on going to the art show, though. The one thing I had
noticed was that, apparently, the cover to God Loves, Man Kills
was up for sale, or at least for show. The art show was on the second
floor, up next to registration. Well, it was a little subdivided spot in
the corner of the registration hall....

It was fascinating to look around at some of the 145-190 issues of Xmen
and see how much they were going for. That was when I started
collecting, you see, and they’re prized comics I have no interest in
selling, but it was interesting to see I’d been sitting on several
hundred dollars worth of books. Also, for the few of us who remember the
original Star Trek 6” action figures from 1973, put out by Mego, I got to
see some not in my collection. Good Lord, they were selling for $300
to $500 apiece!
How much would my treasured Star Trek figures be
worth now?? I was missing the Andorian, the Cheronian, and the Romulan,
but I had the Gorn (brown instead of green, but that was their fault, not
mine :smirk), the “Keeper” (the bald, freaky-looking puppet guy from the
first season’s Corbomite Maneuver), and the Neptunian (?? never
figured out why they included that one, because it didn’t exist in either
the live action or the animated series). And I looked at those dolls,
and saw that I could either get one of those, or a new computer... and
sighed and walked away... :shame

This was THE busiest day of the convention, and it was plain to see. It
was stuffy inside the convention center, and a bit humid. Wall-to-wall
humanity crowded the center exhibits, where the main eye candy was
located. I was told that last year, with ROTK coming out, the New Line
Cinemas exhibit was “the black hole”, pulling in such a mass of people
that they seemed to create their own gravitational field. But this year
there was no one draw that I could see. There was equal interest in
everything, which only served to spread that black hole out a little more
until it covered the center exhibits like a circling storm cloud.
Cutting through the crowds could be very difficult, unless you finally
got angry and shoved your way through. And.. well... as anyone will tell
you, I really don’t like barging in front like that. :oops:

Despite the crushing mass of people, it seemed that a lot of people had
the same idea of being polite. I had expected there to be more short
fuses, more frayed tempers, considering the stuffiness and crowded
conditions. But everyone was remarkably calm and civil. There was
excitement, yes, but no pressure. No one cut in front to play the
coolest game demos. No grabbiness, no churlish or childish nature. I
might have seen one or two little tantrums, from young children who were
just overwhelmed, but they were rare.

One of the reasons I had stopped going to the big Sci Fi conventions was
because the attitude had changed. It went from being an extended family,
where you were greeted with a friendly handshake, if not open arms, to a
cliquish “who are you supposed to be” kind of place. I didn’t like that.
I started cutting back. And here, in what is arguably one of the
world’s largest open air comic book markets, I saw that civility return.
Maybe you weren’t family, but you weren’t an outsider, either. It could
just be the capitalistic idea of never turning away a potential customer,
it could be something else, but there were no cliques. The Yu-Gi-Oh
people didn’t turn up their noses at Wizards of the Coast; Disney and New
Line Cinemas were on speaking terms. Again, it could just have been
professionalism. But regardless of the reasons why, the atmosphere
benefited immensely. This is a convention that I would happily attend
again.

In fact, when I heard about “stupid people problems”, the bulk of them
weren’t braggy, grabby, demanding assholes. They weren’t snobs, or
greedy, or pushy. They didn’t have bratty kids that made life miserable.
(Well, Emily had this problem with a lady who left her somewhat “slow”
little boy at the X-Wing while she went off for a few minutes, but that’s
her story....) Invariably, “stupid people” was about clueless individuals who lacked the
ability to relate to the real world.

The tickets for the much-anticipated Masquerade show were to be handed
out at 3pm. By 3:15 there were all gone. :eek I was wondering if we’d
even have a chance at seeing the show, even if it was to be simulcast on
the “Sail Room”. I mean, would there be enough room? How many would
there be in attendance? Emily, a veteran of many a masquerade, assured
me there would be enough room, so we went and got some seats a few
minutes before it started. Lo and behold, there was plenty of room.

One of the more interesting things about a masquerade is that those of us
watching through the camera have better seats than those doing it live.
We get semi-professional to professional angles, close-ups, and so on.
The detail is much better. Among the early contestants, Beast Boy, from
the new Teen Titans cartoon, absolutely stole the show. He was up there,
in purple tights, big ol’ honkin belt, and green makeup, gyrating and
performing rather impressive high leg kicks as his theme music went on.
He was clearly enjoying himself, not a hint of stage fright. This kid
had been doing it for a while, he was used to it, and he was good at it.
In fact, there was a crowd of devoted fans in front shouting “Beast
Boy! Beast Boy! Beast Boy!”
between contestants. :smirk


((Edited 7/30/04))
Eagles may soar, but weasels never get sucked into the intake of a jet engine..... :evil
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