For the fourth year in a row we went to the New York Comic Con this past weekend. This time we took the plunge and got 3-day passes and made a vacation of it. It was a mad, mad weekend at one of the biggest cons in America and an absolute playground for a mad otaku like myself 🙂
That’s a crowd shot from the Friday, which wasn’t anywhere near as busy as Saturday would turn out to be. This year the con filled the entire Javits convention center and some – spilling into a nearby wing and spanning three floors as well. Every year I say it’s hard to believe it could get bigger, and then it does. But this time I think it must have maxed out, unless it moves. Which is unlikely, since there is no bigger venue in NYC 🙂
Hundreds of exhibitors and over 100,000 attendees celebrated comics and gaming and anime and sci-fi and every imagineable otaku fringe you could imagine. From a massive, massive Intel booth dedicated to Starcraft tournaments to tiny booths by artists peddling their wares there was so much to see and do that I doubt I actually got to all of it in even 16 total hours of attendance.
The scale was big this year. Massive crowds (especially on Saturday) meant if you wanted to be noticed you needed to have a gigantic poster or movie screen or statue at your booth, and as you can see they were truly gargantuan at times.
Celebrities were also in attendance, as usual, and here’s a few snaps of some of the ones we saw:
The guy in the top right, taken at long distance, is Mark Hamill. He was also autographing, which cost $100 per person, and the line was epicly long. Felicia Day’s line wasn’t much shorter, and apparently had a 4 hour wait. I don’t know how much she charged though.
That’s Hiro Mashima, the creator of the manga series Rave, Fairy Tail and Monster Hunter Orage. We went to his panel, which was great. He was very charismatic and happily answered questions from the audience and also gave a live-drawing demonstration:
We also saw this guy at the Doctor Who store booth:
It’s Winston Churchill! The Dalek Ironside next to him (incidentally, the final old-style Dalek in the series…) was an amazing reproduction… quite possibly an original prop. I of course had to pose for a snap:
We purchased an insane amount of loot, which will in time get it’s own blog post. Virtually any sort of obscure otaku item imagineable was for sale (excepting, of course, everything on my recent graduation gift post!) including the following:
What’s that you ask? Did we see the worst t-shirt ever made? Why yes, we did:
We also saw a couple of nifty statues that haven’t yet been released:
And zillions, and zillions of comics (quite a few that I even bought…)
But of course everyone knows one of the biggest appeals of events like this is the cosplay, and it was bigger and better than ever. Not only had the quality of the costumes increased, so too had the diversity. The field was so mixed, that unlike previous years it is difficult to describe the most popular theme (which last year was Kingdom Hearts, for instance). Here’s a gallery of some random cosplayers, followed by some of the ones I liked best:
That last girl is Glados from Portal. Her headset was lit and she played the part mysteriously and well.
Here’s a pretty Tardis. One of many at the show and in my opinion the best:
And here’s a fellow that looks so much like his character we did a double-take:
And here’s probably my favourite of the hundreds and hundreds of cosplayers I saw, a great female Goblin King from Labyrinth (complete with prop!):
There’s no question we’ll be back next year (especially since it falls on KLS’s birthday weekend), because 2011 was the best yet. I just wonder if it will continue to get even bigger 🙂
