Gems of Wisdom (& Stuff)

As Halloween approaches, yours truly recalls the truly unique experience of going to New York Comic Con last year around this time. The Dame C has befriended many a geek over the years, which occasioned her visit last October to the East Coast’s largest gathering of geeks, nerds, dorks, & associated parties.

For the uninitiated, Comic Con is an event wherein aficionados of comic books, superhero movies, anime, and anything with actor Nathan Fillion converge to share their love with the movers and shakers of the genre.

Geek is such a huge subculture nowadays that every splinter and subgroup of nerdism attends Comic Con, everything from your standard comic book geek to the hardcore online live action role players that have trouble prying themselves away from their computers to do things like eat and sleep. Some enthusiasts wear costumes of their favorite characters, although such is not required. And they buy things. Lots of things.

The entire set-up is staggering in scale. Rows and rows of booths line the convention center floor, each filled to the brim with comic books, toys, sketches, posters, t-shirts, you name it. Major comic book and video game publishers put on huge displays of what’s new and forthcoming. Strobe lights, blinding colors, gargantuan banners are all there. Hundreds and hundreds of geeks fill the space at all levels.

Oddly enough, at least while I was there, the area called Artist’s Alley, where real live comic book artists appear in person to dialogue with fans, was woefully sparse. My walking comic book encyclopedia and I spent a good bit of time there and quite enjoyed discussing art with the artists in the same manner as a modern art exhibition, albeit liberally peppered with nerdy in-jokes which were explained to me later. (Yours truly speaks fluent Standard Geek, but particular comic-and-video-game sub-dialects are beyond my capabilities.)

Discussion panels run in other rooms with the same level of detailed questions and self-aggrandizing answers one finds at the most elite scholarly conferences. For example, “Do you find Jack Kirby’s use of angular lines and sharp dots on helmets to be more futuristic or pop art?”

I should note that not all discussion panels are created equal. There are some like that which absolutely require a Geek-to-English translator, often with the verbal equivalent of footnotes, and some that the general only-know-Saturday-morning-cartoons crowd can appreciate.

Happily, I witnessed one such accessible panel that was an utter crowd pleaser. I can best sum up said discussion panel as actor Bruce Campbell of Evil Dead and Burn Notice fame being a hysterical wiseass for an hour. One cannot argue with the potential hilarity of fake hostage situation calls to bewildered friends and the proper technique of autographing breasts.

Thus it is safe to say that that Comic Con panels provide something for everyone, as long as that something is nerdy. You’d be surprised just how much fits into that heading these days.

To get into the spirit of things… and only partially so as not to be recognized… I went in a head-to-toe comic book character cat-suit costume complete with domino mask and full makeup. My usual popularity was heightened to a staggering degree because 1) I was female in a massive herd dominated by teenage and twenty-something males, and 2) my costume was amazing.

A few women took this opportunity for outlandish costumes even further, much to my chagrin, my dahlin minions. Some people just don’t have the lithest, ahem, stems and buds, necessary to wear a Poison Ivy leaf-leotard costume that most bikini-wearers would consider gauche from being too tiny. Surely these ladies should have known it takes virtually no effort at all to be considered desirable at Comic Con; you really only need XX chromosomes.

Similarly, while there I learned some new geek jargon. A “Dr. Girlfriend,” while on the one hand a reference to the hilarious cartoon The Venture Bros., means a woman who is clearly present in a store-bought costume because her nerdy boyfriend dragged her there & has a thing for [insert big-boobed comic character in slinky outfit here]. However, I am pleased to report that the majority of “cosplayers” seize the chance to create appropriate fun costumes in a real world tragically without regular masquerade balls.

To conclude, my Comic Con experience, like many of the American population, amounted to a great big extra Halloween party. With adoring hordes. Who doesn’t like that? For the run of the mill geek, Comic Con is a cultural mecca. It provides a space to wade hip-deep in nerd culture and emerge with a greater sense of community. Certainly, between the recent spate of superhero movies and the prominence of Star Wars-referencing musical artists like MC Chris, geek presently is très chic.

Sincerely,

The Dame C

10.13.11

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