FAN EXPO 2011:

You really have to give it the TTC. They keep raising the fares here in Toronto but I guess I shouldn't complain. Most subways take you across your city, ours takes you to another dimension: A strange land populated by game warrirors come to life

 and kick ass schoolgirls

and monsters

and superheroes

... or it just takes you to downtown Toronto to this year's Fan Expo.

I do go to the fan expo to find some deals on books, comics, gams, movies etc but definitely a big part of the fun are the costumes. All the usual inspirations were in attendance, from anime

from TV

from movies

from comics

and from gaming

Last year Steam Punk was the "new thing" at the convention. A visual style influenced by writers like Bruce Stirling, it posits a technological society from a Victorian sensibility

This year the convention "offically" welcome loli, a street fashion originating in Japan (where else) where girls wear exaggerated frilly dresses, umbrellas and usually huge blond wigs. Now, there have always been loli girls (the term stems from lolita, and is often called Goth Loli though that variant of course focuses and darker clothes) but this year there were even more of them. What does one call a group of loli girls? Perhaps a parasol of lolis ...

Besides buying crap that I don't need and that I want (and let's face fact, when you're talking about a Japanese movie about the legendary blind swordsman Zatoichi done a musical, the line between need and want quickly blurs) and gawking at kids in costumes, what else does the Fan Expo have to offer?

One of my favorite areas at the convention is Artist Alley where you can actually converse with artists, look at their products, talking about past and future projects and sometimes land some good deals. This year I picked up a couple of prints from a young Japanese artist, barely two years out of art school and perhaps this could be one of those "I knew him when" moments ... or I'll promptly forget who the guy is. At any rate, I picked up some lovely art at a good price.

The gaming area was much better this year, there were more new games being demoed and you could go play some of them in a tournament style setting. No, I did not participate. It's tough enough when a computer keeps slaying me in a game, I can't bear the thought of a 12 yr kid kicking my ass as hundreds watched.

The other draw at the expo are the celebs who show up. I'm happy to saw that comic book and anime creators got as much if not more buzz than the Hollywood types. The year Stan Lee came the place went nuts but having said that, William Shatner was back this year and proved to be the most popular in terms of ticket sales for his autograph .... that being over 80 bucks. As much as I love Bill (and we all know that I do) the man is all over TV .. he don't need my money that badly.

I won't pay for anyone's autograph but the two people who I would have considered was Michael Biehn, who I missed and Eliza Dushku who I did see. Some may know this actress as Faith from the TV version of Buffy but for me, she is Rubi Malone, the foul mouth mercenary from the video game Wet. Seriously, she was too cute and too charming to be so rough and tumble.

Another relatively new event at the convention, or at least one I had not before seen, was the dancing .. there was dancing at the Let's Dance video game booth (no surprise there) and apparantly spontaneous dancing from the costumed kids that I believe is called J Pop. I'm not sure exactly what this is, but it was both funny and frightening .. check out the video to see why.

Obviously, there is a lot of commercialisim involved in a function such as this. People are there to sell you shit; fair enough, I'm there to sell shit. Problem is, I'm not sure exactly what people are trying to sell, as evidence by the next few pics ... I'm pretty sure as a happily enspoused man, I'm not allowed to buy whatever is being sold here.

So that was my Fan Expo experience this year. In the coming months I'll be reviewing some of my purchases. Enjoy the video below and here's just a few more pics to give you that warm fuzzy "oooh weirdo's in costume" feeling.

So stop your gawking, this isn't that kind of post .... here's the video

TORONTO FAN EXPO 09: VIC GOES THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

This weekend I took a journey to a very strange land. A land where video game characters come to life, where Japanese loli girls rub elbows with hardcore Goth girls, where old star fleet ensigns sign autographs beside giant green superheroes ... Yes, I went to Toronto's Fan Expo.

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?