REVENGE OF COMIC CON

Toronto is under attack!

Mutants have been seen marauding through the Eaton Centre, raiding the Apple Store for components to fix their jet plane and Wolverine was spotted at Booster Juice applying for the position of "fruit dicer".

Even more alarming, Daleks have been spotted on the Gardiner Expressway. When questioned about their intention, they were heard to say something about the Leafs needing all the help they can get

Why is this happening to my city? To whom will Toronto turn in its time of peril? Should we send the Tactical Squad to Gotham and kidnap Batman? Possible, but you know, the dude can't even fly and he's kind of a whiner: "My parents were killed, I'm an orphan, my codpiece is too tight" Yadda yadda. Dude, you're the richest man on earth or something, shut the fuck up

Who else, how about Green Arrow? Right, another rich dude with a dead daddy. So papa dies and your response is to put on a mask and run around with your underwear showing ... Yeh, I think he needs more help than does my inperiled city

It's beginning to look grim for Toronto. Whatever shall we do? The big name superheroes don't seem to be viable options. Perhaps we should cruise Ossington Ave searching for random heroines, or hipsters or whoever the hell these are

In our desperate hour of need, quite frankly, we'll take anyone, even a giant apparently dead rodent .. hey, who was searching for heroes in City Hall

I suppose we could launch some kind of orbital probe and scour the greater universe for help, goodness knows what we will bring back; alien creatures, Buck Rogers, a couple of female Star Trek ensigns ... hey, they didn't come from space, unless the Brass Rail qualifies as space

OK let's face the facts here: Toronto may be fucked. All of these heroes seem a tad suspect. Yeh, I know, don't search for actual heroes at Comic Con. Now you tell me.

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?

THINGS LEFT BEHIND

This weekend we had our first garage sale to raise money for Collette's 60 K walk to support breast cancer research at the Princess Margaret Hospital. Everything went pretty well, the weather co operated, a couple of Collette's co workers came by and were of tremendous help. We ended up making over 300 hundred dollars and were happy with that; we are doing it again in a couple of weeks and hope to improve on that number. At any rate Collette is now over the half way mark for the amount of money she is obligated to raise in order to do the walk.


One of the things that happened that we did not expect was the number of people who donated items to the cause. Our neighbour Jesse brought over an air hockey table and a wrought iron bed frame for us to sell, Collette's principal, Susan, brought an antique style phone and some other items. Very generous indeed but it left us with items at the end of the sale that we did not have at the beginning; isn't this contrary to the whole exercise? Well, that is why we are having a second sale.


Sorting through the house for things to sell was really a process of deciding what we were going to let go of, finding the things we were going to leave behind; as in, I no longer need/want/care for this, so I will put it behind me. We put out or VHS movies (long since moved on to DVDs) I put out a lot of books (read it, never read it in ten years, have three other copies) we don't need these portable CD players, we have an MP3 player now. It was not painful parting with these items, we had, I suppose, grown out of them.


That happens with certain aspects of our lives, too. As we go along, we put things behind us, we "outgrow" them, often without really being aware that we have.


When I was a kid I was an avid comic book reader. Supherheroes. My brother Ed used to read me the text while we looked at the pictures. It was how I learned to read. The first one I remember was Daredevil, when he still had the yellow and black suit. I can remember once a month being given a dollar and walking for miles, from store to store, collecting all the latest editions of my favorite titles, till the dollar was gone. In those days a comic was 8 cents so I would trudge back home with my dozen or so comics, locking myself in my room, and just going on an orgy of superheroes and super villains.


My love for comics continued right on through high school and into my early twenties. We were entering into "graphic novel" territory by then but I still gravitated towards the guys in the costumes with super powers. Though, the one "comic book" I still have is a one off graphic novel, story by Samuel Delaney, art by Howard Chaykin; not a superhero but a science fiction tale.


I haven't bought or even looked at a comic book since the early 80s. I watch some of the movies but most of them are shite, really. But my reading tastes have moved on and I have no regrets about that. I still pick up a graphic novel from time to time but I am no longer interested in the flying guys in the colorful tights.


Another thing I used to be passionate about was science fiction. I am talking literature here rather than movies, but I loved the films too. Science fiction spun out of the comic books. I was obsessed with the stuff, for a long time it was all that I read. I went to a few conventions, and went to readings whenever I could. While sorting through books to sell at the garage sale, I found a hardcover Harlan Ellison, signed by the author. I had forgotten all about it; needless to say I didn't sell it for two bucks.


Science fiction is what inspired me to write. Most of my early short stories were ripped off from Lovecraft or Bradbury, complete with the flowery prose. In high school I used to co author Heinlein style space epics with my friend, Tanya Huff. She, of course, has gone on to be a fulltime science fiction/fantasy author.


My love for science fiction continued well on into my forties. I began to get fussier, though. I tended to stick to a small group of authors like Robert Reed and William Gibson and CJ Cherryh and Tanith Lee, who could A: actually write B: had some clue of character development and C: had some originality. I re-read those books occasionally but when I peruse the science ficiton section of a bookstore now, there is very little to inspire me. My reading taste has become more eclectic, my time for reading more limited, and there just seems to be too many other literary options to pursue.


Having said that, I could not depart with any of my Phillip K Dick novels. If he was still alive, perhaps I'd still be reading "science fiction"

What happens to these great passions that, during the moment of experiencing them, seem so overwhelming and all consuming. If we outgrow them, how is that so, what does that mean? Did I become too mature for superheroes? Well, maybe. There was a time when the superhero comic books maintained, over a year of monthly issues, long and complex storylines that would include character development; the Avengers introduced a character called the Vision who may or not be human and their development of that concept was at least as complex as any Star Trek version. In the seventies, Denny Lane took two of DC's more lack lustre characters, Green Lantern and Green Arrow and sent them on a long road journey to "discover Amercia" It seems that in recent years (decades) the regular monthly superhero comics are long on graphic displays and short on story line.

But what about science fiction? I'm sure there are still as many relevant novels in that field today as there were back when I read two or three of them a week. But I look at the glossy covers now and it is always number two in a series of four that, in itself, is a subset of a series of twenty that was spun out of a series of ten .. and my interest wanes as I stand there. But really, it has nothing to do with content. I think it has more to do with me. Opening my eyes, discovering new authors, looking for works of art that have more relevance to my everyday life, looking for stories and characters with whom I connect.

Perhaps that is maturity, as much as I am loathe to admit it.

Comic books and space stories are not the only things I have left behind, and they are not the most important. As I've gotten older I left behind jealously, and anger and a lot of self doubt ... not that any of that does not still exist, they are just in manageable portions. Those are the important things we leave behind.

Gosh, that really does sound like growing up.