I Survived Tampa Bay Comic Con 2014: The Epic

Ah, to revel in the geekdom of comic books, science fiction and fantasy, costume roleplay, gaming, and walking.  Lots and lots of walking.

Shall I sing to you the song of Saturday comic conventioneering?  Too bad, I can't carry a tune.  I shall narrate my journey instead...

always begin your journey with a Selfie...

With many thanks to Mom for sewing this Jedi outfit for me back when I was thinner (2006).  Unfortunately, I thought I had safety pins but didn't and I ended up not going with the samurai-esque shoulder pads to complete the Jedi effect.  I DID have a belt on which to hang my plastic lightsaber though...

This is my... sixth attendance of the Tampa Bay Comic Con, and the second that they've held at the convention center itself - I mentioned earlier how previous Tampa cons were at an undersized hotel near the airport - and while this year the hosts have done a better job preparing for the turnout, there's still an issue with lines to get in.

On the downside, had to wait in a long line - even with advance ticket - outside the convention hall this year due to the growing turnout.  On the upside: growing turnout.  You know your convention is getting popular when the lines circle half of downtown...

That was the line forming behind us at that same spot I took the earlier photo...

Inside, I asked about at some of the shopping booths to see if any had any safety pins for the Jedi robe I did wear: I had a clip trying to keep the V-neck together but it wasn't holding.  Turns out there is a cosplay assistance group - the International Cosplay Corps - that helps out with wardrobe malfunctions at a con, so many thanks to the Mending Mistress standing with me (I regretted leaving the Jedi shoulder pads behind...).

LOOK KIDS!  IT'S JIM STERANKO! (applause)

 Cosplay can become a deliriously detailed and complex work of art sometimes.  Also very life-consuming and bulky.  This guy - I think that's a Warhammer outfit - is on stilts wearing a body armor suit taller than I am, with a cumbersome gun to carry, a sweltering helmet covering 85 percent of his normal vision, and he stands there 90 percent of the time letting everybody get pictures of him.  This takes dedication.  And a lot of stamina.

The more successful your cosplay, the more likely you're going to be standing all day getting pictures of you posted everywhere.  I dressed up this con and... no requests.

The other part of a convention on display: model working, crafts, costumes for sale, artwork for sale.  This booth was just a display of someone's hobby making detailed models of famous SciFi spaceships.  The hand-painted touch, the eye to detail... incredible.

If you do cosplay: do it in a group.  Themed costumes draw a lot of attention.  This foursome are a steampunk version of Batman, Batgirl, Scarecrow and Catwoman.

Another thing that helps with cosplay: GLOWY LIGHT THINGEES.  Oh man, if I can find a reasonably priced glass-blue-neon lightsaber on the market... sigh.

This Dalek tried to photobomb those Jedi!  Foolish Dalek...

It's Mike Maihack!  I'm a geek for his fanart involving Batgirl-Supergirl, and was hoping he'd have his most recent work - see the bit I wrote about Batgirl's new outfit at the end of this blog for more - but it was too recent for prints to be available.  I got his first Batgirl-Supergirl print instead, still a good one to get...

It's JC De La Torre!  My fellow Buccaneer fan, at the comic con in the Artist's Alley promoting his Star Mage (IDW) series.

There are TARDISes everywhere.  But that's okay, because space-time is this kind of timey-wimey ball of... stuff.

As always, it's R2-D2 and he's working this convention like a pimp uh BOSS.  For some reason, this little droid wants to hang out with the ladies in the R2 tank tops...

Together, R2 and I will fight to save the Republic!  Either that or rescue Luke, who's fallen down a well or something...

It's the cosplayers for the Game of Thrones show!  Quick, name the ones playing characters that are still alive (so far...)  (P.S. I saw people cosplaying GRRM.  Seriously?  Why deal with the grief of people coming up to you screaming "WRITE FASTER, GEORGE!"...?)

A Tampa Bay Rays Stormtrooper made the rounds - mostly near the benches in a far corner, basically one of the best open spots for cosplayers to gather for poses - and I asked about how the trooper felt about the recent David Price trade.  The half-laugh half-cry of a damned soul I heard was all I needed to know.  Yeah, it was painful for me too...

During my patrol of the lower level - waiting for a presentation / open chat about publishing in comics - I spotted some professional-looking cosplayers coming out of the convention's work areas.  Including a fellow dressed up in a Wookie (might be Tarfful) outfit.  A massive, fur-covered outfit.  IN FLORIDA.  Even in an air-conditioned conventional hall, THIS TAKES COURAGE PEOPLE.

Unfortunately, I failed to take care of one thing during this: I bumped into two young women who remembered me from last year's convention from the pre-opening wait line, where I and a few other nearby geeks explained the tips and tricks of comic-cons (it was their first).  One of the ladies took my tip of cosplay to heighten the experience, as she showed up as a female (distaff) version of Han Solo.  And there I was, wearing a Jedi outfit... and I never once thought to get a photo of us posing.  /headdesk  I completely forgot to get a shot of her posing with the Wookie as well (granted, my smartphone battery was getting close to fading out, but still I had some juice...).  And damn me for a fool, but I'm lousy at remembering names...

Back to the Artist's Alley, where late in the day I come across Bernie Wrightson!!!  When I was eight-ish, we had a few comic books in the house, one of which was a special re-issue of Swamp Thing #1-2 by Len Wein and Wrightson as the artist.  He's the guy for gothic horror graphic art (his work on illustrating the story of Frankenstein is classic).  He's also (in)famous for his version of Batman... where he's wearing a bat-cape that's twice as long as humanly possible.  As a fan of both Wrightson's work, Swamp Thing, and Batman, getting a signed print from Mr. Wrightston was a huge treat.

Ahhh, Deadpool, my old nemesis.  Actually, nemesES.  A plurality of Deadpools are a given for any convention.  And every year they are driven by the same madness: to find a veteran actor of the Power Ranger series and worship him/her like a GOD.

This year it was a Red Ranger.  Go figure.  For some reason they got The Eleventh Doctor (see the fez?) to join in the ritual...

Finally.  Last photo I was able to take before the smartphone powered down.  I spotted a cosplayer in an excellent version of Batgirl's new outfit! (UPDATE: According to the tumblrs out there, her name is Alyson Larkin) Let me clarify my own little geek-out here...

When I did MegaCon earlier this year, it was just after Frozen had become the Number One ZOMG fan-thing, and I expected to see a bunch of Queen Elsas in her Ice Queen costume.  Sadly then, only counted about four of them (in a cosplay crowd of thousands).  This month, with time to craft the outfit, I counted about nine, maybe ten of them (I saw more Maleficents though).  I digress a little, but the point is when there's a new thing for costuming to do, I'm hoping to see how quickly the response is and how pervasive (in 2009 for example every other male cosplayer was Rorschach and every other female cosplayer Silk Spectre).

It was announced about two weeks ago that a new comic book team for Batgirl was giving her a new re-design.  The response to it was - via the fan art - huge.  Nearly everybody went ga-ga over it.  So when I went to the Tampa comic con, I was keeping an eye out for anyone with the new outfit - practical boots, leather armor, and the SNAP-ON CAPE - to see what the response would be for cosplay.

I kinda knew the shortness of time - two weeks - made it unlikely to see one... and yet, thank you Batgirl Cosplayer of Tampa Bay, you made it!  And you did a great job of it!  Thank you.

That said, here's that Maihack print I hope he gets printed up soon for the next comic con:

And next year?  I need a simpler outfit.  How much are Wookie suits?

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Brief Warning

Just to 

let you know

this will be a crazy

comic-con weekend for me

so I wanna make it clear to my 7 readers

that sometimes you just gotta

ride that flying shark

to freedom!

Welcome to August.

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Just So You Know, Another Comic Con Is Happening

and this time I threaten to show up cosplaying.

I'll look something like this... only fatter.

Sigh... CRASH DIET!!!

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Is This The Time For a Constitutional Convention?

For any of the readers who've been following my political blogging since Day One, you might remember I started off with the idea of blogging over a specific issue: the need to reform our federal government through any number of amendments that would fix things.  I even had the address as reformamendment.blogspot.com...

Of course, that all changed: I ended up ranting about current politics and election woes (GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT) more often, so I re-named the blog (see the banner) and re-created a new address (that old reformamendment one no longer takes you anywhere).

But the interest in reforming/fixing our federal system of governance is still here, which is why I perked up when I saw an Atlantic article asking "Is it time for a Constitutional Convention?":

In January, Gallup found that Americans from across the political spectrum picked the failure of “government” as the top problem facing America today. The vast majority link that failure to the influence of money in politics. Yet more than 90 percent of us don’t see how that influence could be reduced. Washington won’t fix itself, so who else could fix it?

It turns out the framers of our Constitution thought about this problem precisely. Two days before the Constitution was complete, they noticed a bug. In the version they were considering, only Congress could propose amendments to the Constitution. That led Virginia’s George Mason to ask, what if Congress itself was the problem?...

Which lead to the alternative solution: allowing a 2/3rds number of states to call for a convention to submit amendments for consideration.  Which is the point the article writer - Lawrence Lessig, one of the major constitutional scholars out there - is getting at.  He's openly musing over the possibility of enough states getting together for the express purpose of fixing Congress through the amendment process.

I've seen other calls over the years - Larry Sabato has been relatively consistent on the matter - for amendments, and I've joined in on the cry every so often, but I've been reluctant more often than not about pushing amendments as a solution because of one thing: a lot of the proposed amendments are f-cking disasters waiting to explode.

Lessig's article links to another article in Slate, highlighting the movement going on within conservative-led states to get this convention idea off the ground.  One of the primary amendments being pursued is that damned monster known as the Balanced Budget Amendment.  You know, the amendment Republicans conveniently ignore when they're in control of all three branches of government (between 2001 to 2007) but then trumpet and proclaim as our salvation whenever there's a Democrat in the Oval Office (especially now with Obama as President).

I've railed against that damnable balanced budget amendment before: the damn thing is rigged the wrong way.  Every conservative suggestion for a balanced budget involves making it impossible to ever raise tax rates or even create new taxes to, you know, actually pay for sh-t government needs to spend on to make this nation work.  They require a supermajority to raise a tax, yet require a simple majority to cut a tax: they make it too hard to do one thing and too easy to do the opposite, essentially ensuring that the easy thing ALWAYS gets done while the hard (yet sometimes NEEDED) choice never even gets considered.  This doesn't balance anything: all it does is force the government to take different actions, such as massive spending cuts to achieve that "balance" in a false and painful way.

And that's not the only one: that Article V Convention movement - named after the provision allowing it to happen - is also focused on passing amendments allowing Congress to override Supreme Court decisions (and preventing the President from overriding that override with a veto), essentially killing off a checks-and-balance system between the three branches of the federal government; an amendment abolishing the 17th Amendment that provided direct election of U.S. Senators, essentially taking away an individual voter's right and something fully ignoring the corrupt history of state-nominated Senators; an amendment allowing up to 34 states to override any federal laws or regulations deemed "exceeding an economic burden of $100 million," effectively destroying the Commerce Clause under Article I and pretty much giving those states license to kill off FDR's New Deal, LBJ's Civil Rights and Medicare laws, and everything ever born from those two eras.

These aren't exactly the amendments we need: we need genuine reform in federal government such as putting an end to corrupt campaign finance laws that have basically given the uber-rich direct access and control of our elected officials; we need to set tighter limits on a President's power to wage unlimited war and waste trillions of dollars without oversight or accountability; we need an amendment granting us all better voting rights and protection from intimidation and refusal, especially making voting a universal given for all citizens and making it easier to vote period.

Lessig's argument that a state-pushed Constitutional Convention is weak tea: he's arguing for a movement that is not working in the best interests of the American people.  He may have an honest intent - any potential for reform that Congress is unable to even consider is an honest one - but he's backing the wrong damn horse, and he's siding with the wrong team here.  The team he's arguing for is looking to UNDO every genuine reform our nation's had since 1900.

There's an even better solution than this, Mr. Lessig: it's called voter turnout geared towards removing every obstructionist vote in Congress in both the House and Senate.  It's called throwing the damn Far Right Wingnuts OUT of Congress, period.  Every failure of government the last 10-15 years can be laid at the Republicans' doorstep: the refusal to balance their own damn budgets from 2001 until 2007, creating the massive deficits we live with today; the refusal to work with Obama, deciding on obstructing every effort he makes to force history to label Obama "a failure" forever; the failure to maintain ANY oversight of the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to massive human rights abuses along with literally billions of dollars vanishing into thin air by 2005.  With no-one from that tenure ever being held accountable for the fraud, theft, lies, murder...

We need to vote out a Republican leadership in Congress that DOES NOT lead.  That will go a long way to breaking the damn logjam giving us a broken Congress in the first place, where we won't need a constitutional convention to fix any of that.

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I Survived MegaCon 2014

And all I got was... was...  oh no.  I forgot to pick up the complimentary "I Survived Orlando MegaCon 2014" t-shirt!  :(

On the bright side, I got pics:

I left home a little later than planned, and regretted it as soon as I got to Exit 72 on I-4, the turnoff to the convention center.  Traffic gets clogged real fast getting into the parking areas for the events (and Orange County Convention Center always schedules other events alongside MegaCon), and so when you get to International Dr. you get this (with the South Concourse right there on the horizon):

For 30 minutes.

Dear Orange County / Orlando Metro: WILL IT KILL YOU TO ADD EXIT RAMPS FROM I-4 DIRECTLY INTO THE CONVENTION CENTER PARKING LOTS?!  This can't be the only event that gets this freaking headache...

Parking aside, the next big woe is always the Getting In portion of the morning.  This year, rather than hosted within the West Concourse - the longer, spacier hall - MegaCon got moved over to the South Concourse.  As a result, the line formation for getting tickets was a bit off than usual:

 
 
Thanks to my obsessive, hate-to-wait-in-line attitude, I purchased an advance ticket and so got to get in the short Advance line (step to the left!).  Which still meant waiting this year.  Just not as bad as the impulsive, let's-wait-until-the-actual-day-to-buy ticket line that stretched out to Daytona Beach.

Once inside, prepare for the craziness of pedestrian traffic, posing for pictures, chatting with artists, and waiting for celebrity sightings that are SOP for your geek-themed comic-book/sci-fi/fantasy/horror/Lego get-togethers:

Now, the one thing I swore was going to happen at this MegaCon would have been finding a ton of Queen Elsa cosplayers: Frozen being a huge hit with the kids and girls and teens and women.  Sad to say, I saw very few.  Only explanation I can think of is that the Elsa Snow Queen outfit is tricky to make and not that many have been finished in time.  Maybe next year.  At least I saw one before the day was out:

Did see a few more Elizabeths from BioShock Infinite.  It's the corset look.  I met one at the CosplayDeviants booth (site NSFW!  Must be 18 or older and able to tell the difference between DC and Marvel characters!) and got a nice picture of her:

Saturday is usually the day at comic-cons to host costume contests, hence the high number of cosplayers that day (personally, I planned on dressing up as a Jedi this trip, but the Jedi outfit from years ago was in bad shape, and using a trenchcoat as an alternate uniform too hot to wear).

By 12:15 I left the main floor, I wanted to attend a writers' presentation on World-Building (to get inspiration towards that damned first novel I've yet to finish).  Heading out the main doorway, I passed the still-snaking line of the Day Ticket buyers:

While waiting for the presentation, I saw what had to be the tallest female cosplayer I'd ever seen, dressed up as Leeloo.  I asked for a picture:

 I'm 6'2", doing my best to stand as tall as possible.  She's still about an inch taller.  Wow.  Also, regarding this photo JJ Abrams will be impressed with the sun flare over the shoulder...








Also bumped into some Ghostbusters (FOR EGON!):

The writers' event was packed, as the rooms available in the South Concourse were clearly smaller than the ones in the West.  Our presenter, Glenda Finkelstein, kept apologizing for it.  At least the author-wannabes in attendance (myself included) got some good tips out of attending.  Above all, don't trip up over the details!  And when you're naming characters, use the Name Dictionary! (As a fully certified librarian, I know where the 929.4 shelf area is heh)


That's Glenda on the left of my photo. The author taking a photo of us taking a photo of them (it's called meta, get over it) is Bill (William) Hatfield. Next to him is T.S. Robinson, and on the right is Jade Kerrion.

After the presentation I circled back down to Artist Alley where they had tables, and chatted a bit.  Turns out Hatfield was the owner of one of the comic book stores (Novel Ideas) I patronized at U of Florida.  Small world...!

When I got back to the main floor - the vendor booths - after 2 pm it was this packed:

In that kind of environment I would have melted out of my trenchcoat.  Good thing I didn't dress up this weekend.  Still, I'd like to find something fun to wear next year...

Just to note the regular sites along the walkabout:

The Southern R2 Builders with their working astromechs:

Lego City:

As with any cosplay, expect dance-offs.

Ah, Deadpool, my old nemesis.

While I didn't dress up as a Jedi, I still brought my lightsaber.  When I got to the Mandalorian Mercs display area, I asked for a chance to pose for an action shot.


I'm not thrilled with how it turned out.  I should have single-wielded the saber, using the other hand to push the cage door open in a "You cannot contain me, bounty hunter!" way.  Also, I should have used Hugh Jackman as the Jedi this shot: this poor fat unshaven fool is completely unsuited.

Just as I was leaving, found out where the gamer tables were this year:

The nephews expressed an interest in D&D, so I asked after starter kits for them.  I'll check again to see if they're still interested and if I can get Wil Wheaton to DM a game.

As a final note, I leave you with this image:

I'm taking a picture of convention-goers taking a picture.  META!

Okay, peace out.  Next year, I need co-pilots.  Any volunteers?

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