New York Comic Con: Is Joss Whedon the New Merchant/Ivory? Also, Sunday Photos!

On Sunday at Comic Con, I so desperately wanted to see the Dollhouse preview screening, but missed it due to a prior commitment. But with a little help from my press pass, I made it inside for the following Q&A, and even got to ask The Man Himself a question. Here is a clip of his answer from Cinema Blend (they cut out my stuttering faux-professional questioning, THANK GOD).



To summarize, I asked what genre he most like to work in next, and his response was a "frilly costume drama" in either the Elizabethan era or the end of the 19th century. He noted the similarities between Costume Drama and Sci-Fi, because they exist in strange, unfamiliar worlds. "Also, heh, pretty dresses."

In other news, yes on Doctor Horrible sequel (who knows when), no on Serenity 2, no on a Dollhouse comic, and kind of on a Dollhouse Musical (Eliza sings in ep 3, but it's cause she's a backup signer). And Joss is a big Battlestar nerd, and said The Sarah Chronicles was his "second favorite drama on television.". Dollhouse premieres Friday night.

Okay! Now leaving the Whedonverse. Here's a photo random for Sunday, starting with actual factual Watchmen Babies!

These kids rule all. Homemade outfits for the win. Median age: 15. The reps at DC liked their costumes so much they enlisted them to help hand out their Watchmen swag. I hope they invited them to the premiere or something. These kids are fandom personified.

A Zoey/Hunter team! Awesome. Great makeup on the hunter, and Zoey found a fantastic jacket (though she said she wasn't crazy bout the "clown sleeves"). Excellent pose here.

Have you ever heard of Mana energy potion? It's an energy drink for gamers that supposedly contains the power of two redbulls in one of those little bottles. Ee-yikes! This lady was giving up tiny shots of Mana (blue) and the new Health potion (red). They both taste like death, blue slightly less so than heath. But I suppose that's how you know it's working. And I did manage to prowl the con for seven hours on no food on Sunday, so maybe these shots were the only thing keeping me standing.

2-D stormtrooper made of cardboard! Now that's what I'm talking bout.

This Scorpion was really awesome. You could walk up and challange him, and he would fight you. Like, seriously. With flying kicks and stuff. I mean, these guys were pulling punches, but not by much. Hence the crowd. Some times the best events at these cons don't happen in panel rooms, they happen on the floor. It's a comic con miraicle.

Doc Horrible was a really popular costume, and why not? Here's a Captain Hammer/Doctor Horrible twosome.

Great costumes here. That burlap sack mask is damn effective.

And finally.....Sunday was kids day, and there were actually a whole lot of kids there, in adorable muscled out storebought costumes. But the coolest kid I saw all day was this little Spidey, who was practicing his crawling on Marvel's red carpet. That's some good crawlin, son!

See all these photos (and bonus pics) at the Geekanerd Flickr.

Photos: New York Comic Con 2009 - Saturday

Day two at New York Comic Con, and the cosplayers were out in force. AHR took most of these, so I don't know the story behind all of them, but this scary Joker sneaking up on Dr. Horrible is probably my favorite pic of the day. There's many more after the jump, including a cameo appearance from AHR herself!
The lovable Shin Chan...

AHR UPDATE: It doesn't come up on this site very much, but I am a HUGE Shin Chan dub fan. But the award for biggest Shin Fan of the day goes to the boy who saw this Shin Chan costume from across the room and shouted, "OH MY GOD!" so loud that Degan could hear it on the other end of my cellphone conversation.

Hm... Spider-Man, obviously, but something is wrong. Marvel Zombie Spider-Man? He doesn't appear quite zombied enough for that... Maybe just "Beat Up Spidey?"

AHR Update: It's zombie Spidey! He said his costume was falling apart by the time I took it...but it looked good to me. You're missing the detail of the Yellow Eye contact lens..
Hushhhhhh. AHR UPDATE: I had to check with this guy to see if maybe he was supposed to be the invisible man. But nope, he's Hush, the best new character ever. Glad he's getting some love.
Batgirl and the Huntress taking some time out in the cafeteria.

How do so many people have such perfect Boba Fett costumes? Are there communities dedicated to the fabrication of these things? Can you order parts from a bounty hunter supply depot? I'm always impressed...

AHR and Degan passed this in a parking lot on the way out there. Degan made a joke about Imperial blockades that I would like to steal, but I respect the man too darn much. Also note this is an Ohio license plate, and the van looks like it may have encounted some dust storms along the way...hooray for fandom!

Beyond! What a great pose, he really knows how to work that costume.

"Oh my God he's eating them all!"

Kyle Rayner is grabbing some Doritos across the room with a giant green mousetrap.

Every stormtrooper has a mommy.

Batman's lady rogues are looking good.

Princess Peach kidnapping some poor child.

These are pretty awesome Pokemon costumes. I love the intepretive aspect, supercute hoodies and little claw toed slippers. I don't know my Pokemon like AHR, but if I think the one on the left is calle Charizard, and the one on the right is probably called Batsoise or something.

I'm digging Leela's new hairdo.

Geekanerd's own AHR lookin' sharp as Zoey from Left 4 Dead. You can't really see her awesome medpack in this pic...

She's grabbin' peelz...

and protecting con-goers from pesky hunters.

Photos: New York Anime Fest 2008 Cosplay

For last year's Anime Fest, I tried really hard to catch up on my anime fandom. I haven't regularly watched anime since high school, so I tried to cram my brain with Bleach and Claymore and all that mess, and I still felt totally lost once I got to the con.

So this year, I just said, sca-rew it, I'm just going to take pictures whether I know who these people are supposed to be or not. And the results were about the same. If any actual anime fans are reading this, feel free to let me know who's who in the comments. And non-anime Gnerd fans will find a lot of videogame costumes as well, so stick around.

Since there are Stormtroopers at every convention anywhere, let's get that out of the way first.

Video game costumes, perv costumes, and so much more, after the jump...


Saw tons of these screw-head guys, this guy wore it pretty well.

Here's the kendo battle area, where participants were assigned random matches. Pretty cool. I wish they did this sort of thing at Star Wars conventions.

This is pretty awesome and expensive looking.

I recognize these guys, but I don't know from where. Someone help me out. UPDATE: Reader arashi points out the cardboard guy is Danbo from Yatsubato.

Monkey from One Piece. Gnerd contributor Bishop told me that.

Very impressive Robot Chicken costume. Despite not being anime-themed, this was a big hit on the floor.

Fantastic 2-D Mr. Game & Watch.

There were tons of Links, but this was the only one from Smash Brothers, as signified by the Player 1.

Team Fortress 2 costumes seem to be a go-to for any convention these days, but I only saw one at Anime Fest - this Blue Solider.

Bishop told me to get a photo of these guys, but I forgot who they are. Can you tell why I'm not the usual gamer correspondent at Gnerd? Shaddup.

I really like costumes that create an outfit based on a character, instead of just a big plush or cardboard suit. This kid has a pretty good look based on Sonic, right down to the red sneaks.

Here's that weird Negaverse Pikachu and um....I want to say Lapras or like, Celadon...I fail at Pokemon. Sorry everyone. Who is it? UPDATE: Reader hermitx kindly points out this is actually Umbreon and Glaceon, the Dark and Ice evolutions of Eevee. Just for the record, I knew that. I did. On the tip of my godddamn tongue.

A very bashful looking Peach, with Luigi and V lurking in the background.

Girl Luigi and Girl Mario, taking a breather.

Hey look, something else from an anime movie! A gigantic No Face!

Uh oh, Pedobear alert. And this brings us to the "perv" section of our photo essay...


Tons of free hugs guys all over the floor, with frequent success.


The most popular event I saw all day wasn't an officially sanctioned con event; it was this studly cosplayer, standing in the middle of a crowd, posing amorously with other people in costume. That's it, all it takes is one slashy photo op to gather a huge crowd for hours on end. I saw this at the beginning of my day on Saturday, and when I came back about three hours later, the crowd was STILL THERE. However, they were right in the midst of a fake(?) blow-job photo op, and security finally broke it up. Good times!

Just when you thought it was safe to ever leave the house...sexy cubone cosplay. Yeah, so this is blurry, but maybe it's for the best. Once you see something, you can never unsee it.

Belated San Diego Comic Con Pics!

Ok, so I'm a terrible guerrilla e-journalist. I know this damn thing happened over a week ago, but I accidentally shipped the camera these photos lived in back to NYC before uploading them. Pretty stupid. Anyhow, better late than never.

Anywho, Comic Con. Pretty awesome. Though word to the wise: plan ahead. We managed to score tickets at the last possible moment and ending up going down for Saturday evening and Sunday. By that point, pretty much all of the cool exciting stuff had already been announced and we missed a ton of great panels. The only panel we got to was actually one of the very last panels of the whole damn thing-but I'll get to that later...

Above is the fabled Owl Ship from The Watchmen. Or is it Owl Pod? Whatever the kids are calling it these days, its pretty damn cool... even the innards are all aglow with science. Probably all for show-but there's no doubt in my mind that any one of those buttons could have killed hundreds.

Follow the jump for more pics!

Here's a Cylon and the bizarre SciFi booth. I thought at first it was supposed to be like the interior of a Cylon Basestar or something... nope. Just a color changing globular thing. Also, SciFi had very little to offer Battlestar Galactica wise... (that awesome Cylon was from another exhibitor) so I wasn't too interested in staying too long to figure out just what that thing was supposed to be.

Obviously there was tons of Star Wars junk. Tons. Especially given the upcoming release of Clone Wars. But you know what, it's Comic Con-I imagine you'd be hard pressed to find a year where there wasn't tons of star wars shit. Anyway, here are some cool jedi posing it up for some girl with a pink iPhone. Also, there was a startling surplus of Boba Fetts roaming the floor-I heard a rumor they were security-but I'm not sure how believable that is... I just think there was a sale somewhere on Boba Fett helmets. Though cool-I'd prefer the menacing uniformity of stormtrooper security anyway-Fett loses something when there are hundreds of him. Oh, and here's a gross, to-scale Jabba... for the record, his lips weren't that bright-he was just too accurately portrayed and the gross slime on his lips caught my flash and glowed a bit.


Here's the first Iron Man suit from the movie. Pretty impressive up close.


Pretty awesome Destro and Cobra Commander in front of some sort of evil Cobra drilling ship-you just know a bunch of Cobra grunts died in the testing phase of that death trap.

Lego Batman! I'll take this opportunity to talk about the one panel we did get to. It featured Grant Morrison and Deepak Chopra discussing the "soul of the superhero" and "modern mythology." Pretty heady stuff-but very fascinating. Lots of meanderings on human potential and how science fiction can get us there... and Grant had a pretty cool bit on the need for a new kind of storytelling. In response to a question on Orwell's 1984, he talked about how that kind of bleak distopian future-somewhat a standard convention in current comics-was originally meant to serve as a sort of warning of "what could be." However, he argued, its becoming more like a self fulfilling prophecy. Therefore he called for artists to tell a new kind of story-one that focuses on human potential and all that. Not sure how creepy labcoat joker fits into his theory though...

And finally-some cool costumes. I learned that apparently you can make ANYthing out of duct tape. I was shocked at how many costumes were made entirely out of duct tape-even skirts and capes... which I think are probably much easier to manage as, you know, actual fabrics. I didn't take too many pics of awesome costumes though-there were almost too many that I was overwhelmed and could never get my camera out in time. But I couldn't resist taking a shot with this awesome Bender. Unfortunately the poor guy had been terrorized by some sticker weilding hooligans the day before so he asked me do a sticker sweep on his back-he was clean! Also, side note: I thought I was all cool wearing that Galactus tshirt from R. Stevens... apparently so did 12% of the people at comic con... and it didn't help that he was there selling the damn things. Curse our free market!


And to end it, this was by far the coolest costume I saw there. It's completely homemade and to startling detail. It comes with an articulated tail made out of what appeared to be a bicycle tire. This geek really went all out. Kudos to you sir (or madam... it's hard to tell under all that plastic, rubber, and duct tape).

So I got there a bit too late for some serious in depth coverage-but hopefully this satisfies some of your Comic Con lust. There's always next year.