Geekanerd Spotter: Inappropriate Sleeping Beauty Ad

Yeeah. That doesn't look wholesome to me. Maybe I'm still all perv'ed out from the Anime Fest this weekend, but seriously. That blood red background juxtaposed with the tag line "SEE MORE THAN EVER BEFORE" and the the very unwisely cropped picture..could this be intentionally dodgy? It could be a specifically New York market ad, maybe they decided to go for the somnophiliac market as long as they were posting stuff in the childless land of East Midtown Manhattan.

Past Editions of Geekanerd Spotter

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.

Trade Secrets: Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

Because I just can't bring myself to review Teen Titans #47, here's a look at one of my favorite books, Daniel Clowes' Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. People I've met who've read this book seem to either love it or write it off as pretentious bullshit. And it is pretentious and it is bullshitty, but read on to discover why I have so much fun reading my copy over and over again that the pages are falling out.




I should make clear before I start talking about the plot that Velvet Glove is very much a dream narrative. Or maybe more precisely, a nightmare. Much like Sam Keith's The Maxx, the book requires a loosening of one's concept of plot progression and an embrace of dream logic. Meaning that what might at first appear to be lazy storytelling or a gross leap of logic may actually be an attempt to recreate the way a subconscious mind sometimes twists and distorts idle thoughts into a grotesque experience that only superficially resembles a story. Granted, the use of dream logic was much more user friendly in Keith's work. In The Maxx Sam Keith usually told you when he was applying a little dream logic. Velvet Glove doesn't afford you that courtesy.

The story begins with our hero, Clay, sitting down in a porno theater to watch a dirty movie. We don't know how he got here, and he seems out of place in the seedy surroundings. Something Clowes establishes in this first scene is the role of strangers in the world of his story. Almost everyone Clay meets accosts him, demanding something from him that he can't provide. He is continually emasculated and made to feel insufficient as he passes through his dark dreamy world.


As Clay sits in the theater, a new film starts and it is so hypnotic, so bizarre, so perverse that he becomes obsessed with tracking down the creators. Oh, and he may or may not recognize one of the actresses as a past love--identity and memory are hard to pin down in dreams. Things move pretty quickly from here: He gets answers from The Oracle in the Men's Room, borrows a car from a friend who's having his eye sockets cleaned out by Asiatic sea crustaceans and doesn't get far on the open road before he's picked up by a couple of hyper-masculine cops who rape a three-eyed woman (or is it the woman from the film/his lost love?) in the front seat of the squad car while Clay sits cuffed and helpless (re: impotent) in the back.

His quest turns into something of an epic, and every page of it is dense with conspiracy, paranoia, perversion, men who ridicule Clay, women who want him but look like potatoes, and apocalyptic dread. Each turn the story takes heightens the feeling of hopeless inevitability, and each character Clay encounters exploits his inadequacies. And there is often the familiar sense of a great, life-changing Answer right around the corner if only you/Clay could just reach it. But the corner has more twists than you thought it would, and somehow you've taken the wrong turn and attempts at backtracking lead you somewhere else entirely, without a clue as to what you were just doing. Were you looking for something?

NOW who's reading pretentious bullshit?

Yeah, it may be ridiculous. And it may ultimately be pointless. But it sure is fun while it lasts. In that unsettling, apocalyptic dread kind of way.