This is a huge expo/con that covers several different areas of fan interest: Comic books, Anime, Horror, Gaming and Sci Fi. It's billed as the largest fan expo in Canada and they predicted that over the course of three days, more than a million people would attending ... quite frankly, whevever Toronto has any kind of public event these days, they expect over a million people. Mind you, it's probably true. There are just too many people in this city. I can tell you, the thing was well attended, the conference hall was vast and there were times I cold barely move. Of course, some of that was due to the fact I was often sharing the floor with some characters who may have come from a dimension held to a different standard of spacial dimensions than my own.
As I mentioned, the expo had several points of interests. I had some interest in the Gaming area as I do own an X-Box and while I am not a 12 year old boy huddling in his momma's basement and therefore can't call myself a gamer I thought: "Hey, maybe I can pick up a couple of cheap games" So over to the Gaming area I go, only to find that nobody had games for sale; what they had were tournaments and contests all designed to humiliate old farts like myself. Later, I found a vendor in the comic book area selling some used games so that made me happy. And while there weren't many games to play, there certainly were a lot of games walking around in human form.
The other area that interested me was the Anime zone. I have a certain fondness for anime and magna but mostly I was going to pick up some gifts for a friend of mine. I fond it a very interesting experience. Anime is Japanese of course and the area was just chock full of young Japanese people, mostly girls, like these two cute neko girls
Hanging around and over hearing conversations and observing behaviour, I witnessed an interesting phenomon. Most of these girls were at least first generation Canadian, judging by the lack of accent and their colloquial speech. Yet in this environment, they seemed to take on a kind of hyper-Japanese quality, taking on the personae of their anime/manga heroines. Of course, you really didn't need to be Japanese to slip into an anime role.
Of course, fantasy is what the whole experience was all about. In the comic book area, I overhead heated discussions about whether or not "Amazon could take down a 747 with just one shot or would she need two" with the same ardent sincerity I may use when discussing some political situation. At the Expo, in that situation, these fantasy concerns were allowed to be important, and come out and play.
Peronally, I think old Green Lantern may be in over his head in the above pic. Which brings us to another area of the expo, the Horror area. Whereas in the anime area, we had a surfeit of Goth loli girls:
In the horror world, the Goth girls took on a very different identity. Scary, yes, but scary in the sense of "I know this is going to be bad but damnit, it just may be worth it"
So, clearly a big focus of this event is costumes There was a maquerade and there were prizes but people really seemed to love their costumes and a lot of work clearly went into them. Of course, if you just aren't very good with needle and thread, you can do what this young lady did and take an easier route, just have your friend spray paint your costume on to you:
Not all of the attractions at the expo were in costume. The organizers brought in lots and lots of celebraties, everybody from comic book creators, to genre actors to voice talent from anime. Leonard Nimoy was the big draw. You could get his autograph .. for sixty bucks a pop. While he was there I was standing by some people who were taking photos from about 20 feet away; one of Nimoy's handlers came out to tell them they couldn't be there and I of course had to comment "Why, does Mr Nimoy own the fucking air between us and him?" That did not endear me to Mr Spock's entourage. Another actor selling his signature was Bruce Campbell, of Evil Dead and Xena and many other credits; he sold his name for 30 bucks a pop but all I heard was how cool and awesome he was, regardless.
Then there were the actors that didn't charge a damn thing for their scrawl, which may be a measure of their popularity or maybe they're just really really nice ...
Like Linda Hamilton, the first (and in my opinion) only Sarah Conners:
Then we have Mr Spock's old comrade in arms, Ensign Chekov, I mean, Walter Koenig:
I'm not an autograph hound but, besides Bruce Campbell, the one I may have gone for was Lou Ferrigno. The Incredible Hulk was a terrrible TV show. His Hercules movies sucked beyond suckage but he's Lou, and he's cool. And check out the arm, the guy still looks great
Frankly, the actors were about the only interest I had in the Sci-Fi area of the expo. I like science fiction movies, have enjoyed some series, but my man interest in science fiction has always been the liteature, which was not represented. Which brings out to the Comics section. I was once a comic book nerd, a superhero comic book nerd. The kind of guy that indeed would have been involved in the Amazon bringing down an airplane conversation. I was easing out of comics when the grapic novel was easing its way into popularity. I read The Dark Knight. I'm a big fan of the Watchmen and a few others. But I haven't really actively persued that world for a while. But I took the opportunity of the show to pick up a couple of graphic novels. One of them, I have already read.
The Pride of Baghdad. All I have to say about this is: Holy crap. Written by Brian Vaughn and beautifully illustrated Niko Henrichon, this is a book that proves graphic storytelling can go far far beyond tales of guys in spandex underwear. Based on a real life event during the invasion of Iraq it is a heartbreaking, exciting, thoughtful exploration at the real effects of war told in a very unforgettable fashion.
But going to an expo like this and concentrating on one area only, would be a waste of your time and money. For me, what made it enjoyable was the entire experience, particualarly all the avid nerds, geeks, fans and wannabes who were wandering around all weekend like they had finally come home.
What I really found interesting about the experience was not just the costumes and the almost-celebrities and the vast amounts of speciality items, but it was the passions of these young fans. While I was perusing the titles at a manga stall, a teenage girl was standing beside me in her neko ears and tail, four hand written pages of titles in her hand; her eyes flipped from the pages to the books, trying to find her manga, pretty much trembling with excitment and anticipation. It made me smile. It made wish that she never lose that passion. And it made me wonder: Was I temporarily visiting her world, or did she normally temporarily visit mine?
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