Monster Comic Con post

Okay. Mail has been logged. Coffee has been consumed in large quantities. Procrastination has taken place in the form of checking the LJs of everyone else I know who went to Comic Con to see if they had reports posted and to comment on them if they did. I am now ready to write the disjointed and only semi-coherent squee-fest that will be serving as my con report this year.

First, it's important to note that I have awesome friends:

First of all, Greg is a peach for once again scoring me a badge, and for letting me basically use his booth as a place to sit and drop stuff that I didn't want to carry, despite the fact that I did absolutely nothing useful, like help him sell t-shirts and sketchbooks, or anything. One day Greg is going to realize what a useless limpet I am and stop letting me mooch off of him so shamelessly.

sarcasticval is a fantabulous line buddy and just generally a Delight to Be Around (tm). I am very grateful for her personal policy against eating at the food court or at chain restaurants, because it got me out of the convention center and into the Gaslamp Quarter twice during the weekend. There was sour cherry gelato, and it was yummy. Also, Val is handy if you plan to make your way across the part of the dealer floor dedicated to all the big production companies: she is not afraid to use her elbows in order to get through a thick crowd, and it's possible to simply glide along in her wake without having to bite anyone to keep from being stepped on.

ladybrick is still the cutest person ever, especially when she's carrying around a "Big Frakkin' Bag" (courtesy of the Sci-Fi Channel) that is bigger than she is. She came to lunch on Friday fresh out of the Joss panel, and armed with many photos of Nathan Fillion and Neil Patrick Harris to share. I think she has convinced me to pick up the first season of Eureka on DVD, her endorsement of it was so enthusiastic.

jetpack_monkey is so much fun to chat with in person, and is also alarmingly tall. Nate had just come from interviewing Jamie Bamber, and we had the most delightfully geeky discussion, which--to my eternal glee--included the phrase "sapping his energy to fuel the Doom Planet." I can't tell you how much fun it is to say these things out loud (or, as in this case, hear them said, since it was Nate who got to bust that particular puppy out). How often do you get to enthuse face-to-face with someone about how much cooler Kyle Rayner was than Hal Jordan? Not often enough.

I hadn't hung out in person with ashlan in way, way too long. Stargate, Supernatural, Due South, and Star Wars geekery were all in abundance, with an emphasis on discussion of the angst and the pretty (and how the two are interrelated) on Supernatural. Greg laughed at us when she showed up at his booth and the two of us promptly started flailing about the SPN panel.

Since I couldn't have either izhilzha or feliciakw with me in person, I called them on my cell, and they both indulged me by letting me squee at them about the SG-1 and SPN panels. Hopefully I didn't do any permanent damage to their eardrums.


Secondly, costumes! I have no pictures. I need to get a camera with more memory and start harrassing random people with mad costume skillz for pictures. *adds to next year's to-do list*

- Dear Steampunkers: You are my favorite cosplayers. Your dedication to cosplying is epic. Costumes that involve big wrenches, old-fashioned goggles, and hand-machined parts? Yes, you are definitely my favorites. I wish I were one tenth as cool as you, people.

- Probably the single best costume I saw on the floor was actually a pair of costumes: Zelda and Chantal from The Sandman. Full silhouette effect with the hands and faces wrapped in something sheer and black, massive, cobwebby dresses that looked just like the comic, hats, the whole shebang. Very impressive.

- To the two rather athletic gentlemen dressed as helmet-wearing, cloak swirling, chest-and-stomach-baring Spartan soldiers from 300: The female population of Comic Con International thanks you.

- A contender for best single costume I saw all weekend would be the Transformers movie version Bumblebee. That's one tough costume to put together, guys. Even tougher to actually walk when you're wearing it, especially considering the fact that it featured light-up blue eyes just like in the flick. So cool.

- Another impressive ensemble costume was an entire five-person hunting party of Predators plus the Mary Sue Raised By Predators Chick from the tie-in novels. Full body suits plus weaponry on the aliens, dreadlocks and armor on the gal. Really cool to just see them all walk by together.

- Lots of people dressed as Stargate teams, plus lots of people that I thought were dressed as Stargate teams that were actually dressed as Raccoon City Police. Also a few guys in full Jaffa armor and forehead tattoos.


Thirdly, panels!

SG-1 fans: I would say this review is spoiler-free for Continuum, but really, I'm one of the only people who hasn't already seen it via internet piracy, and the trailer we saw at the panel was just a lot of cool images that I don't really remember. So.

SG-1/Continuum:

First and foremost: RDA WAS THERE OMG!!!!!1

Ahem. *composes self*

So yeah, Richard Dean Anderson was there, as were Michael Shanks (absent last year) and Ben Browder (present but extremely hungover and/or sleep-deprived last year). Amanda Tapping and Chris Judge continue to be sparkly and wonderful. Martin Wood continues to amuse me. Brad Wright was quite a good moderator, although he had nothing on Gary Jones's performance in that capacity last year.

Like I said, the trailer for Continuum was cool but short and apparently didn't make much of an impression, because I can't remember many specifics. It did look really cool, though, that much I remember.

RDA is every bit as much of a spaz in person as he is on the show as Jack. I don't think he sat still for more than thirty seconds at a time. Most of the pictures I took (which may not turn out to be in very good focus, we'll see) are of him fidgeting with anything within reach. Also of Amanda Tapping burying her face in her hands while he talks about how in Antarctica your poop freezes. Yeah, it was that kind of panel.

I'm not going to do a play-by-play of what was said because a) I have a very bad memory, and it was big, over stimulating weekend, and b) YouTube exists for a reason. I highly recommend you see what vids from this panel you can dig up, it was a lot of fun, and also still photos don't do justice to how much fun these people were to watch.

There was a really nice tribute to Don S. Davis, which struck a somber note in an otherwise light-hearted hour. *sniff* We miss you, General Babyfacehead!

Hearing the cast's stories about filming in Antartcia (or, in Michael and Chris's cases, of playing golf and generally carousing in eighty-degree weather while everyone else filmed in Antarctica) was a lot of fun.

Brad Wright made optimistic noises about Stargate Universe, which...I don't really care about yet, because whether or not it's worth watching will depend as much on the casting as on the premise, which is all we have any idea about, right now. Also, apparently Michael Shanks has recently been filming on Atlantis, which is something I hadn't been aware of. Yay! Ben Browder was adorably pouty about how everyone gets to be on SGA except him.

I thought of you all, because one of the first things Brad Wright said was, "Amanda, your hair looks amazing," and then went on to talk for about three minutes about Amanda's hair. Hee! It's like he's one of us! (Her hair really did look Amazing. I love her blond, but I love her even more brunette, and it's all long and wavy and feminine. *hair squee*)

Did I mention what a spaz RDA was? Because he was a spaz. He could not leave the water pitcher alone. It was priceless. And! When they all got up to leave, he made everyone come out in front of the table so we could see that they had legs, and announced that he "bought this outfit special" (it was standard RDA fare, and thus at least two sizes too big for him). So much squee!


Willis fans: I have not yet finished Passage, and I haven't read Bellwether. So if you could avoid spoiling either of those for me in comments, I'd appreciate it. The rest of Willis's works are fair game, though my report is non-spoilery.

Connie Willis:

I am now an even bigger Connie Willis fangirl than I was when I went into this panel. How is this woman so awesome, you guys?!

Willis started off by giving us an update on what she's currently working on (All Clear, which she says may end up being two volumes, because it's becoming too long for a single volume to handle) and by saying that no one should take up writing as a career because it's dreadful and she doesn't know why anyone chooses to do it full-time of their own free will (according to her husband, Willis has no choice in the matter, because if she didn't write she'd be a serial killer). Hee.

Willis talked a bit about the various aspects of WWII that made her want to set one of her time-travel novels there. I cannot wait to read this book, people, it sounds so cool. Willis seems most fascinated by the oddball, anecdotal elements of the war, and the way in which the war was really fought by, as she put it "shop girls and church choir members" in the streets of London as much as it was fought on the front. She had some wonderful stories to share from her research, which involved, I kid you not, inflatable tanks. Inflatable tanks, guys.

So the big news is that I got to ask a question during the Q&A. I expressed my admiration for both Lincoln's Dreams and her time-travel novels, and asked if there was any possibility of a time-travel novel involving the Civil War as a destination. She said no, the Civil War was a terrible place to send anyone, and anyway we didn't need anyone to time-travel there because we already had Bruce Catton. Which is all very true, but still: *pout*

Other questions led to discussion of the following points (please note, I've probably forgotten more than half of what was said):

- How affected Willis was by visiting St. Paul's and standing on the roof, knowing that it was absolutely impossible for it to have remained standing when everything around it burned to the ground during the Blitz.

-How awesome H.L. Mencken is. This was the second time in a week that I had Mencken Chrestomathy mentioned as something I need to go out and buy. *adds to amazon list*

- How writing Bellwether put her in the best mood ever for the entire time that she was working on it, because it was a book about everything that annoyed her, and thus made everyday nuisances into useful material.

- Change and causation and consequence and all that thinky stuff that she does so well in her books. An example she gave of unforeseen results was the radio and phonograph, which were great in that they brought excellent concert performances to everyone, but sad in that they quickly squashed the tradition of drawing-room music: people no longer enjoyed playing and singing just for the fun of it because they knew what it sounded like when music was done well, and they were suddenly aware of their own mediocrity.

- Willis says that she is so sorry that she wrote Passage because it makes people come up to her and ask "So what does happen after death?" Like she has a better idea than anyone else. *headdesk* Note to self: people are stupid.

- The topic of research was discussed in some depth. Willis says that there are three kinds of research:

1. Basic background research, for which she recommends children's books. To paraphrase her thoughts on kids reference books vs. adult reference books: you have a choice between 500 pages of dry reading or 37 pages of interesting reading with pictures. No brainer! (I can't express how hilarious and awesome I found this statement.)

2. Nitty-gritty detail research, which she says serves mostly to keep five hundred people from sending you sharp letters about things like the fact that there were no beech trees in Balliol quad during the fifties. (Again, this cracked me up. She rhapsodized for a bit about how people will accept time-travel with a shrug but will criticize you very harshly for getting impossibly tiny details off.)

3. The research you don't know to do, which she describes as "Looking for that piece of information that makes you go 'Oh, this is it.'" She talked about finding things in the course of research that just fit and make the whole purpose and point of the story clear. She said that the moment like for Doomsday Book was reading about how the scattered villages of England were cut off from each other during the Black Death, but how they could still track the advance of the plague by the tolling of the church bells. *shivers*

There was more, but I don't remember it specifically, and I kept forgetting to take notes because I was enjoying myself too much. I know Remake was touched on, and she talked a it about how she loved the "screwball comedies" of the fifties and was happy to see them revived somewhat in the past few years. I have to watch "His Girl Friday" now, because the pixies have been telling me how good it is for over a year and Connie Willis enjoined everyone in the room to rent it.

So that was the Connie Willis panel, and like I said, I left an even bigger fangirl than I was when I went in. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, Willis stuck around and did a signing on Sunday, which I could not have attended even if I'd known about it because I was at the SPN panel with Val. However, my awesome, awesome husband found out about the signing, stood in line, and got me a signed and personalized copy of Bellwether, which is the only Willis book I didn't have. *gleeee* How much does Mr. Bill win at all thing, yo?


SPN fans: I will endeavor to avoid Season 4 spoilers in my incoherent raving report of the SPN panel. I make no promises about Season 3 spoilers, though, so those of you who have only seen what's on DVD may wish to skip. The short version is: it was AWESOME, Kripke is hilarious, the boys are very pretty, the writers are cooler than everyone, and Season 4 is (reportedly) going to rock. I love our show.

Supernatural:

No one actually expects me to write a proper report of this panel, right? There are links to all kinds of reports on SuperWiki already ('ware spoilers), and the whole second half of Val's Con Post is a good overview of of the panel (skip past the bullet points to avoid the bit about S4). So I'm just going to write a list of things that made me squee and flail:

- Let's just get this one out of the way first: OMG BOYZ!!! *pets them from far away* Alas, Val and I were too distant from the stage to make actor abduction feasible, so the big boxes we brought for bringing our crushes home went entirely to waste. The boys are just hilarious in their reactions to the fangirls:

FANGIRL 1: Jensen, I love you!

FANGIRL 2: I LOVE YOU JAREEEED!!

JENSEN: *smirks at Jared* I got it first.

JARED: *smirks back* I got it louder.

ME: *dies of giggles*

You should all go look this panel up on YouTube (try that SuperWiki link above to get you started) because there's no way to do justice to how funny and silly the guys are. Also, Jared Padalecki is very easily reduced to giggles (not that we did not already know this) and Jensen Ackles jumped up out of his seat to pull out Sera Gamble's chair for her. And whenever they were asked to share something that would spoil S4, they both pretended that Kripke was zapping them via electrodes in their seats. I LOVE THEM SO!!

- Kripke really is his own biggest fangirl, isn't he? Val and I were vastly amused. My favorite thing ever is the fact that during a discussion of a S4 casting spoiler, Kripke just came out and said that he purposely wrote one of the new character descriptions in such a way as to cause the fandom maximum panic. He's all Evil Genius cackling and saying how much fun it is crewing with the fans who get all bent out of shape about what they think he has planned before they have any idea what he's actually going to do. Bwah! I want to be Kripke when I grow up.

- Sera Gamble and Ben Edlund (whose name I totally could not remember after the panel because I am a bad fangirl) were so, so cool and had thinky things to say about the scripts they had worked on. Gamble was intelligent and snarky and talked about how well "Jus in Bello" turned out when it could have been complete flop. Edlund joked around with Kripke about his original pitch for "Ghostfacers" and how he'd had the theme song already written. Gamble said that Season 4 is the best mytharc she's seen since Season 1. (Yay!)

- Speaking of Ghostfacers...they showed up halfway through the panel. In character. With a camera. And sang the theme song. And heckled Jensen and Jared. IT WAS SO FLIPPING BRILLIANT AND FUNNY THAT I HAVE NO WORDS!!!!11ELEVEN!!

- So we got to see the first five minutes of Season 4. (!!!) It was excellent. I can't wait for September 18th. For a very good play-by-play of what we saw, go read Val's, because you won't be getting one from me. *is lazy*

- We also saw the gag reel that will be on the S3 DVDs. Hee. Lots of Katie Cassidy being bleeped for cussing when she fumbled lines. Lots of the boys completely failing to discourage the slashers. Like wow.

- A big reason to squee is that after the first two questions in the Q&A segment (which were so stupid and un-classy that I may have gone temporarily BLIND from embarrassment on behalf of all fans everywhere) the rest of the fan questions were really quite intelligent and led to interesting discussion. I usually feel sorry for the writers on panels like this, because a lot of the time they get a little overlooked because most of the questions are directed at the actors. The crowd at Comic Con, however, consists of so many creative types that this wasn't a problem. In fact, after a while, I was sort of wishing someone would ask something a little more actor-centric, because Jared and Jensen weren't getting to talk enough. Not that this stopped them from making faces at each other and generally hamming it up anytime they had an excuse.

- Technically, this has nothing to do with the panel, and more to do with how awesome my husband is (again!) but I'm putting it here because I can. While we were waiting in line for the panel, Val and I kept seeing people walk by with giant canvas Warner Bros bags tattooed all over with a big, pretty picture of the boys. Turns out they were handing them out at the WB booth. I liked the bags, but figured I wouldn't have any use for a giant bag, and anyway, I was going to be in line all morning, so they'd surely be out of them by the time I got onto the dealer floor. Well, after the panel, I got back to Greg's booth to touch bases with Mr. Bill and lo, and behold! A giant bag! With the Winchester brothers on it! My husband fought through the insane crowds of fangirls at the WB booth to get me a useless giant bag with my TV crushes on it! I have the best husband ever! Later that day:

ME: Guess what!

BILL: What?

ME: I have a wonderful husband!

BILL: Where?!

ME: Right here!

BILL: On the giant bag?

ME: No, silly!

BILL: Silly me, there are no husbands on the giant bag, only boyfriends!

- Also technically not panel-related, but Jensen and Jared were supposed to be signing autographs at the WB booth after the panel. Val and I had to fight our way past there on our way somewhere else, anyway, so we decided to see how close we could get before the crowd just became impassable. The sheer mass and press of people was a little unnerving.

ME: Val, I don't like this, I'm scared!

VAL: It's okay, you'll be fine. If you faint I'll just go "Oh no, she's fainted! Someone needs to carry her out of here!"

ME: Someone who's six-foot-four, with really nice shoulders and dimples!

VAL: If only such a person were here right now!

Alas, Jared wasn't signing after all, so if I had fainted, he wouldn't have been able to carry me anywhere. Not that I would have objected to being carried by Jensen, mind you. As it was, the crowd sort of shunted us around the back of the booth, so all we really ended up seeing was Jensen's left ear. Which, as Val pointed out, was still hot. We decided to call that a win and went to get Val a copy of Rising Sons #1 with the gorgeous variant cover.


In conclusion: SO. MUCH. SQUEE!!!! Yay Comic Con!!