Wondercon 2011: Fushna’s Amazing Wondercon Blog

(Last) weekend was an extraordinary weekend for me; I went to WonderCon for the first time in my life.  For those of you that don’t know what WonderCon is I wouldn’t fret too much about taking that wrong turn at Google and coming here instead.  WonderCon is a comic convention run by the same group as Comic Con International in San Diego.  For those of you that don’t know me I’ve been a member of this site since it first began back in the holiday season of 2006.  I’ve read less comic books than I have fingers on a hand and yet I can name all the original members of the X-Men team having read only one X-Men trade paper back.  Before going to WonderCon I had only been to Comic Con in San Diego, I would always skip the one in Calgary because if I was going to a con I wanted to go to the big one.

The style and format of the two cons are practically the same but the main difference between the two is at WonderCon you don’t need to stand in line for hours to get into a panel room and then sit through a few panels that you care nothing about just to go to the panel that you want to be at.  On Friday I arrived at WonderCon around 1630 and got in line for the fancy WonderCon exclusive footage of Green Lantern.  The footage restored my faith that the movie could be pretty rockin’ but I still fear that it’s just going to get over hyped.  Promptly after the Green Lantern panel there was a screening of Green Lantern: Emerald Nights.  If you know practically nothing about the Green Lantern like myself then I’d have to recommend seeing this film it gives you a little insight into the history of some of the other lanterns that protect the universe.

The Second day of the WonderCon I was able to see the trade floor and check out all the different booth while taking a few pictures of the Cos-Players, I also got the chance to get my hands on  Kid Icarus and Zelda for the 3DS.  Both of the games look stunning and if either of the games were launch titles you would have required a pre-order just to get the system at launch.  I noticed the quality of Cos-Players at WonderCon were much better than those I saw at Comic Con.  I did see some bad ones too but I’d rather not remember them right now.  One of the best costumes I saw was the Alien:

A close second going to a Mord Sith from Legend of the Seeker:

With me not being so into comics a lot of the panels were not my thing so I didn’t spend as much time at them as I could have but the ones I did see kept me pretty interested.  I was able to make it into the Terra Nova; before going to this panel I knew nothing about it but after seeing it I’m über excited for it.  Terra Nova is a new series taking place in a future where the pollution has made it next to impossible to live on Earth any longer when the LHC rips a hole in the space time continuum creating a time portal to the prehistoric age.  The series is produced by the dinosaur guy himself Steven Spielberg and will be on Fox this fall, as it appears now I would recommending checking it out but I plan on attending the presumed panel at Comic Con in July and will have a better of the show and will report my finding after that panel.

I also had the pleasure of attending the Thundercats panel and this was the one panel that I was looking forward to the most during WonderCon.  I remember watching the series on Saturday morning cartoons, Brother, sister and I had the thunder lair and one of my friends had the thunder tank (I was so jealous of him).  I currently have the entire series on DVD and haven’t been this excited about a carton since seeing the adds for the Lion King.  At the panel they talked about the changes that they made to the series such as Thundara is no longer the planet the Thundercats come from, it is now the kingdom where they live on Third Earth.  All of our favorite characters will be returning in the series and Snarf will be returning too.  They said they made Snarf less annoying and more cute for this series.  Snarf will not be able to say anything other than is name and make cat like sounds that Lion-o can understand.  The villains will be more menacing in this series and wont be the three stooges of villains like they were in the first series with Mum-Ra pulling their strings.  The last thing they mentioned during the audience Q&A was that most of the large defining plot points in the original series will appear sometime in this series.

The last panel I sat in on was for Human Target; they showed us some “all new footage spliced together for WonderCon” which turned out to be clips from season two.  This series of clips made me think that season two hadn’t aired in the U.S. yet but then when the cast came on stage it was clear to me that it had aired and they were still trying to create buzz so that the show could be picked up for a third season. 

The rest of the panel turned out to be them only talking about how they can be picked up for a third season and giving out Twitter hash tags so that we can let Fox know that there should be a third season.  They also decided what we should be sending Fox to get the series picked up for the third season.  I had enough of this so I decided to leave frustrated from that panel and go shopping on the floor instead.

Until the next convention, this Scapist is going back to his cave.