Tag: cosplayers

#C2E2 Roundup

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Photography3 Comments

We had a good time! Other than having to park a full 27-minute walk away from the venue, that is. That’s a decent length for a walk in the cold, and my watch asked me on the way to and from my car if I was working out or not. No! I’m just trying not to die.

Also, when we got there, there was absolutely no signage that there was a security line or a bag check to go through? Just literally a few thousand people all milling around being confused, because no one knew why they were there but everyone stood in the huge mob because they felt like they ought to?

We had our badges already, and they were already activated, so I literally moved a barrier aside and the three of us went in. Somebody tried to follow us and got sent back, and tried to get security to go get us too, but they didn’t. For some reason I found that hilarious. I didn’t find out until after the show that we’d actually dodged the security line; as I said, no signs at all, just a lot of confused people in a herd. I wouldn’t have jumped out of line if I’d have known that, but … whatever, I guess. I thought it was will call, I swear. 😀

I feel like there were a ton more people at the show than the last time, but more on that in a few minutes. I had goals! Nerd goals! First one: meet Gail Simone and Al Ewing. Well, Al wasn’t at his booth at all on Saturday, which was a bummer. But I met Gail!

So, interesting detail: Gail follows me on Twitter. And the account belongs to Luther, which, remember, isn’t my real name. So the fact that I automatically went into “I’m at a con” mode and told her to sign my graphic novel to Luther took me by surprise. Then I found out she was selling scripts and snapped one of those up too– that issue of Tony Stark: Iron Man contains what might honestly be my favorite single-panel joke in all of comic book history:

Gail’s husband accidentally told me something VERY COOL that might be coming out and I was immediately sworn to silence, but I wasn’t told not to tell you that I know something cool now. Which I do.

Authors! We ended up leaving before Robert Jackson Bennett’s signing, but my wife got Sam Sykes to sign a book, and I got autographs from John Scalzi and S.L. Huang:

By this point, I’d set precedent that books were signed to Luther, so I decided to roll with it. John was nice enough to let me take a picture with him, too:

On the Charizard: the boy put it on the table, and John immediately volunteered to sign it if he wanted, which he declined, not knowing who the hell John was. We only talked for a minute or two but he was very nice– in general, everyone was, unsurprisingly.

Also, I bought stuff:

New leather dice bag! Forgive the vast amounts of cat hair on the piano bench, there; it’s one of Jonesy’s favorite spots and I’m not about to retake the pictures somewhere cleaner.

Leather dice tray! It was either this or a tower, and I went with this instead, because of…

…the super fuckin’ cool obsidian dice I bought, which the salesperson made sure to point out are made of glass, and thus, honestly, are probably not the best choice to make dice out of? The price of the set, plus the box and the tray was frankly ridiculous, but much more reasonable compared to the first set I looked at, which were made of Damascus steel and priced at four hundred dollars. But fuck it: twelfth/third anniversary and we both saved up to buy cool shit at this show and I was ferdamnsure going to buy cool shit.

Oh, and I ran into my friend Verna Vendetta, who I met at Starbase Indy a million years ago:

The only real fail of the show, at least for me, was the sparse number of cosplayer pictures I took. Turns out that 1) it’s way easier to get people to let them photograph you when you’re at a booth, and 2) it really was hugely crowded, so most of the time if I saw somebody I might have tried to get a picture of in other contexts, the ridiculous number of people in between us made stopping to do so practically impossible. So I missed out on, say, the guy in the 12-foot-tall Bumblebee costume, because despite being near him there was no way I was going to get him to stop. So I didn’t get nearly as many pictures as I thought I was going to, but I did get a handful of them:

So, yeah: didn’t get arrested, spent lots of money, met cool people, walked seven miles, Achilles tendons currently really painful. I’ll call that victory! If you’d told me at fifteen that I’d not only eventually attend a nerd convention with a hundred thousand people there but that I’d have my wife and son with me and we’d be doing it on our anniversary, I’d have called you a liar. It’s good to be a geek.

Hall of Heroes Con 2019 Cosplay, Day 2

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, PhotographyLeave a comment

Cosplay and broasted potatoes. More cons should feature food trucks with broasted potatoes. Also, the two panorama-style photos are from the cosplay contest, which … Jesus.

Hall of Heroes Con 2019 Cosplay, Day 1

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Photography4 Comments

Cosplay! Getcha cosplay right here! Highlight of the day: selling not one but two books to Genderbent Freddy Krueger In Comfortable Ugg Boots. Second highlight is the mother-daughter Wonder Woman combination, because come on.

#ConGlomeration cosplay

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, WritingLeave a comment

Again, not a ton of pictures today, but I suppose not-a-ton is better than the none I took yesterday, right?

(Note the complete lack of superheroes. There have barely been any! This has been a very different crowd than I’m used to seeing at these things; I’ll get more into that tomorrow, maybe.)

Hall of Heroes Con: Day 2

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Photography1 Comment

Not bad!  35 books sold over two days– not enough to leave a box behind but almost.  Made my booth back and then a decent chunk of change besides and actually sold out of some of my titles for the first time ever.  And I met Svengoolie, which I might talk about a little bit some other time because my reaction to doing so kind of fascinated me.

But we know you’re here for cosplay, so let’s get to the pictures.  One of the individuals photographed below could etch glass with his or her own nipples.  And it may not be the one you think it is!  As always, click for bigger:

Hall of Heroes Con, Day 1

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Photography3 Comments

That … went well.  I have already paid for my booth and then some, so tomorrow is going to be all profit, and since tomorrow doesn’t feature a home Notre Dame game at 3:30 (at which point traffic conspicuously dried up) I have high hopes that it could be even better a day than today was.  That would be quite nice.

Also interesting: every con I’ve ever attended has had celebrity guests of some stripe or another, but other than Timothy Zahn coming to the booth next to me I’ve never really interacted with any of them.  Seth Gilliam, Katrina Law, Kevin Sussman and John Schneider all walked past my booth several times, and it’s possible that William Katt did a few times too but I don’t actually know who he is so I didn’t recognize him.

(Seth Gilliam, in particular, is a ghost.  The first couple of times he walked past I was the only one who realized who he was.  I almost called him over to the booth the first time, thinking he was just a regular con-goer, and only stopped myself at the last second.)

Not as many cosplay pictures as I usually take, mostly because the one real disadvantage of my booth is that it’s not in a great place to ask people to stop for a picture.  Every time I tried it led to a traffic jam, so I stopped doing it after a while.  That said: enjoy, and remember you can click on the pictures to get a larger version!

 

IndyPopCon 2018, Day Three

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Much of today was spent staring, glassy-eyed and half-asleep, into the middle distance rather than actively attempting to hawk books, and it also happened that frequently cosplayers whose costumes I might have wished to photograph chose to walk by at the precise moment that there was someone actually at my booth.  To wit, I don’t have nearly as many pictures today, but I suspect y’all will survive.

 

IndyPopCon 2018, Day Two

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In accordance with prophecy, today was a much better day for sales; I’ve paid for my booth and then some and there’s still an entire day left for the con.  The cosplay contest was today, too, so folks brought their A game.  That picture of Iron Man down there was actually taken by my wife; I didn’t actually see him as he never entered the vendor floor, so my big winners were the Wookiee (who was at least eight feet tall; I should have gotten in the picture for scale) and Kratos, who was absolutely stone-cold perfect and is probably my favorite cosplay of the weekend so far.  Bonus points for the little girl in the BB-8 costume, who you have seen before, two years ago and hundreds of miles away.  Her mom’s reaction when I showed her my phone was all sorts of fun (and not in a “Why the hell do you have a picture of my kid from two years ago on your phone you creep?” sort of way, which was… well good.)

(Also, and for the record, any time I take a picture of a kid at one of these things I tell the parents I’m planning on posting the picture to the site and get specific permission from them for it.  I also usually give them a card so they can come look if they want.)

The other highlight was someone recognizing me from the previous IndyPopCon and coming over to tell me she loved Skylights and wanted to know what to read next.  I’ll have a sequel by the next time I come to this con, dear, I promise.