Derek’s Emerald City Comic-Con Recap – Saturday
Day two begins! Well, day three for everyone who was able to make it on Thursday.
I was especially excited for ECCC on Saturday, mainly for two reasons. Today would be the first massive pop culture convention floor that Mikaela would be able to walk (Fan Expo Vancouver is fun, but is incomparable in size to Emerald City), and the evening would also hold ECCC’s always huge, always impressive cosplay competition. I had the opportunity to watch this competition a few years back and was absolutely floored by the quality of some of the outfits on display.
Before we could head to the convention, however (the show floor didn’t open until 10), there was other work to do. If you’re a GeekscapeForever follower on Instagram, you may have noticed a bigger influx of photos coming in over the past day. Mikaela decided that we need to start being more active on our social media pages (we do) and decided to take the reigns for the weekend. She’s been posting photos, adding followers, tagging and hashtagging out the wazoo, and I’m pretty convinced that she should just take over at this point.
I, on the other hand, had a podcast to record. Matt Kelly, Josh Jackson, and I couldn’t make our schedules work earlier in the week, so it meant getting up a bit early so that we could chat wrestling. I’ve been having a blast with Double Count Out so far – I know very few wrestling fans in my day to day life, so it’s great to jump online with these guys to chat WWE (and the occasional indie promotion).
Today’s recording was… weird. We brought a MacBook and Blue Snowball with us, and as soon as I jumped on Zencastr (our podcasting platform of choice), something that sounded like weird old radio or television began coming through the monitor. This persisted after restarting the computer and disconnecting everything, and only went away when switching the audio input to the computer’s built-in microphone. We could not figure this out for the life of us – there was absolutely nothing audible in the room I was in (or any of the surrounding rooms), Mikaela couldn’t hear anything either, and it simply would not go away. I just figured that it was ghosts, due to the really old building I was in, but imagine that some sort of standard interference makes more sense. Still, the actual audio it was picking up was super creepy.
Finally, we were ready to make the gruelling six minute walk to the convention centre. We grabbed a quick, overpriced (inside the convention centre) Taco Del Mar (with some less than helpful staff – when Mikaela asked what kind of beans they had, the guy begrudgingly waved his hand over the beans directly in front of us, and did not proceed to actually name them) and wolfed it down before heading into our first panel.
The panel was called Everyone Starts Somewhere: Cosplaying At Any Level, which had five professional / semi-professional cosplayers detailing how they started in the industry, and offering a ton of tips on budgeting, methods, accuracy, and much more. I appreciate cosplay a ton, though I doubt I’d ever have the courage to try it myself, but Mikaela has been super interested in getting involved but just hasn’t quite brought herself up to it yet.
The panel offered some good conversation, and I think that Mikaela definitely took away at least a few tips from it. Maybe she’ll make it to San Diego one of these years with a costume of her own?
Finally, Mikaela made it to the show floor. She was pretty overwhelmed pretty quickly, as the whole thing is simply exponentially larger than any event she’d been to before. Having survived numerous SDCC’s, it’d been some time since I’d felt that feeling, and it was definitely cool to see that again in someone else.
We became pretty enamoured with the Skybound Games booth pretty quickly. We played a demo round of the Grimm Forest title that had caught my eye yesterday. The game has a slight Catan feel, where you, a descendent of one of the three pigs, must build three houses before your opponents to win the game. You can choose to make your houses from straw, wood, or brick, the less sturdy materials being quicker to build, but easier to break down through various other cards. From our quick demo, the game felt extremely well balanced – it supports 2-4 players, and definitely feels like one of those games that takes just a few minutes to learn, but will take a long time to really master, as ‘Friend’ and ‘Fable’ cards also introduce mechanics that can really change the course of the game in just a turn.
They also gave us a demo of Superfight, a card game that’s been catching my eye since I first saw it in San Diego a few years back. It’s a party game where you and an opponent use a few cards to create a character with superpowers. You then have to argue back and forth about who would win, and the people spectating then vote on whose argument they agree with. The loser, well, loses, and the winner moves onto another opponent. In the demo round that we played, my character was Finn from Adventure Time, but the top half was Justin Biever, and he was made of lava, while Mikaela’s was a Lucha Libre Wrestler that has two arms and is riding a depressed Centaur. I argued that a Lucha Libre Wrestler would likely have had the advantage in this scenario, any advantage is lost due to my character being made of lava. Any of this character’s body parts would simply burn up whenever they came near me. I don’t quite remember Mikaela’s argument, but the judge ended up going with me.
Once we left Skybound, we continued across the show floor. About halfway through, with Mikaela checking out many of the booths and their offerings in great detail, we decided to go grab some lunch before the Twisted Toonz panel on the main stage.
Rather than grabbing an overpriced, tiny sandwich from the convention centre, we decided to head towards the food truck area that I had seen on my Szechuan journey the day prior. Today… none of the food trucks were there. It also turns out that Mikaela hated the Szechuan sauce, so we definitely weren’t headed back to McDonald’s any time soon. We kept walking and ended up at a delicious sandwich shop called Potbelly. We scarfed down some sandwiches and milkshakes and speed walked back to the convention centre so that we could score some decent seats for Twisted Toonz.
We arrived 45 minutes prior to the presentation starting… and it was already standing room only. Twisted Toonz features well known actors and voice actors doing a live read of a script (often voted on by fans) as all sorts of insane characters. We had an opportunity to see Twisted Toonz in Vancouver last November for a reading of The Princess Bride, and today had Solid Snake himself, David Hayter, Adventure Time‘s Jeremy Shada, The Walking Dead‘s Khary Payton, every game ever’s Nolan North, and Samurai Jack‘s (among other things) Phil Lamarr reading Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. There were plenty of warnings from the performers that this panel was not for kids, and the hilarious reading definitely lived up to said warnings with voices like Bill Cosby, Herbert the Pervert, Solid Snake, Michael Caine, Jason Statham, Batman, and many, many more showing up as Wonka characters. Twisted Toonz typically puts their performances up on YouTube, so I’d definitely recommend watching their performance of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in full whenever it becomes available.
Once Twisted Toonz was over, we had just over an hour before we needed to get in line for the ECCC Western Championships of Cosplay, which I’d had an opportunity to attend a few years back, and which I was absolutely floored by every moment of. Mikaela and I spent this hour browsing through ECCC’s ‘Home Grown’ area, where Seattle local creators were showing their novels, artwork, comics, clothing, soaps, tea, and way more. Here, Mikaela instantly fell in love with numerous pieces of artwork (how we walked away without buying any just yet I’ll never know), and was pretty impressed by the graphic novels shown off at indie publisher A Wave Blue World’s booth, where one unique looking anthology even had all proceeds benefitting Planned Parenthood. Pretty cool stuff.
After chatting with a few more artists we decided to head outside in order to join the line for the upcoming cosplay competition. The start of the event was still about 90 minutes away at this point, and as we didn’t bring sweaters to the convention so we could avoid carrying them around all day, Mikaela was instantly freezing. She quickly decided that she needed to go and grab a hot chocolate, and proceeded to disappear for like 15 minutes. When she came back… she didn’t have any hot chocolate. It turns out that she was distracted by some cosplayers, saw the line grow exponentially in that time, and then decided to just come back. She was also assured by one of the event staff that the doors would be opening promptly at 6:30, meaning that she’d actually only need to wait in the (moderate) cold for 20 more minutes.
50 minutes later, the doors finally opened. We grabbed some pretty decent seats while the on stage hosts welcomed everyone in (these hosts did a fantastic job, by the way), and before long the room was completely full. Before beginning the actual competition we were introduced to an organization called Magic Wheelchair. It’s an incredible-sounding nonprofit that helps build costumes for children bound to wheelchairs, at absolutely no cost to the families. The organization debuted a new Stranger Things themed costume for a girl named Kylie. The costume itself was phenomenal, but the moment itself was unforgettable. Check out the video of the reveal below, and head to Magic Wheelchair’s website to learn more, you definitely won’t regret it.
So excited for Kylie to become the most epic demogorgon at #ECCC thanks to @MagicWheelchair. It all happens with donations, so help us help more fans like Kylie experience #cosplay https://t.co/3OGLqcBgKp pic.twitter.com/co8hPzBS1u
— Emerald City Comic Con (@emeraldcitycon) March 4, 2018
The competition itself had three categories: armor, needlework, and FX. Each and every entrant was impressive as hell, and some of the incredible costumes included Hela, an insane Doof Warrior that had a screen accurate guitar-blade thing that actually shot flames, K-2SO, Sweetums (the same one we saw back at Fan Expo Vancouver, in fact), a 10+ tall foot Brute, Soundwave, Venom, and way way more. It was absolutely incredible to hear just how many hundred of hours went into each costume, and the event as a whole was definitely one of the highlights of this year’s ECCC. Mikaela looked pretty amazed watching these artists as well, and I’m betting it jumpstarts her into actually making a costume of her own, too! If you haven’t been to one of these things, you owe it to yourself to make it happen, as the entire thing is freaking unbelievable.
Green looks good at #ECCC, congrats to @CorvidaeCosplay, @EpochEchoCos & @Thranduart on their big wins at the Western Championships of Cosplay! Special thanks to our sponsor @SINGERCO for providing this year’s prizes. pic.twitter.com/POZ9SPa85L
— Emerald City Comic Con (@emeraldcitycon) March 4, 2018
This marked the end of ECCC for the night, so before turning in and getting read for the very last (dang) day of the convention we grabbed a quick lift to a local sushi joint, where I had probably some of the best sushi that I’ve ever tasted (and I live in Vancouver and we have a lot of sushi), for way less money than sushi goes for where I come from.
Following this, all that was left was to head back to our AirBnb, work on a recap for the night, and then turn in decently early so that we could absorb as much of Sunday as possible, knowing that it will be some time before Mikaela would make it to another convention.
