Tag: WonderCon

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Muppets Cosplay: Yip! Yip! Yip!Continuing the write-up of our late-February vacation and trip to WonderCon in San Francisco, we left off with Friday at the con.

Note: If you want to skip straight to the photos, head over to my Wondercon 2009 Photo Set on Flickr.

WonderCon 2009Originally we’d planned to only go to the convention on Saturday, and pre-ordered one-day tickets. Then WonderCon published their schedule, and most of the stuff we wanted to see turned out to be on Friday. So we juggled our schedule around, and bought a second set of one-day tickets.

On the plus side, it ended up being slightly cheaper than getting three-day tickets and not using them all three days (which is what we did last year). On the minus side, it meant we had to pick up our badges twice. (I asked on Friday whether we could pick up both badges at once. We couldn’t.)

Day 5 (Feb 28): Saturday at WonderCon

BSG Cosplay: Starbuck, Caprica Six, and Boomer

The crowds outside were slightly bigger, but I don’t think we had much of a line, since we arrived about an hour after the floor opened. The first real hint of fandom was a group of people dressed as Jedi and a pair of life-sized R2D2 robots on the mezzanine. Then another group of people dressed based on what I assume was an anime or video game. Then we were down the escalator, across the hall, and walking to pick up our badges again.

Costumes

Watchmen Cosplay: Silk Spectre and Doc ManhattanWhile we were still getting our badges ready, we spotted a trio of women in Battlestar Galactica costumes. Katie leaned over to me and said, “Isn’t that a Six?” and then one of us realized that the two with her were dressed as Starbuck and Boomer/Athena.

There were a lot more people in costumes on Saturday. If last year’s big theme was G.I. Joe, this year it was clearly Watchmen. I remember seeing the occasional Rorschach at cons a few years ago, but this year they seemed to be all over the place. I saw at least two Sally Jupiter/Silk Spectres as well (one with a somewhat more modest costume), at least one Comedian, a Laurie Silk Spectre and even a Doctor Manhattan (a brave soul who had painted himself blue and walked around in a bald cap and a speedo). The weird (or perhaps not so weird when you think about it) thing is: They were all based on the movie versions of the costumes.

I have a lot more cosplay photos up at my Wondercon 2009 Photo Set.

The Main Floor

Actually, there were a lot more people on Saturday, period. I ended up skipping the DC booth swag line, because it was at least four times as long and not noticeably moving when I walked by. It was made worse by running past the gaming area and, as near as I could tell, through an area where the 501st Legion (or perhaps another Star Wars fan group) seemed to be doing photo ops. Speaking of which, it’s weird: 10 years ago, someone with a Star Wars Stormtrooper costume was impressive. These days, they’re so common that I hardly even notice them.

Autograph crowdThe autograph area in particular was very crowded, partly because they had big names like Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher. I don’t think I ever had to resort to shuffling on Friday, but it happened a lot on Saturday.

In many ways, WonderCon resembles San Diego Comic-Con before it went insane. Actually, I’d recommend it for anyone who wants to attend a comic/pop culture convention in California, but has gotten sick of the crowds and the hotel rush and the lines and not being able to get into the events you want and everything that has made Comic-Con International so frustrating over the last few years.

What I did find frustrating about this year’s WonderCon, though, was that several people I would have liked to meet (or at least hear speak at a panel) ended up not coming because MegaCon was the same weekend. I’m not sure, but I suspect there was a regional divide, with most west-coast people going to San Francisco, and most east-coast people heading to Orlando, Florida instead. Ultimately I only added two signatures to Comic Book Tattoo, and no one involved with Flash: Rebirth was there at all.

Panels

DC Universe PanelThe only panel I really wanted to make sure I attended was the DC Universe panel, though it was more a matter of obligation (Speed Force). It turned out to be mostly rehashing the previous day’s DC Nation panel. I will say one thing for Dan Didio: he certainly brings energy to the room for his panels. I expect I probably would have paid a lot more attention instead of using my phone to read about the scans_daily meltdown.

Katie caught a writing workshop run by David Gerrold, which she found quite helpful, and got into the giant room for Star Trek.

Star Trek Panel: Zoe Saldana, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Roberto OrciNow, the Esplanade Ballroom never managed to be as tough as the infamous Hall H in San Diego…but Star Trek was absolutely packed. Everyone’s seen the latest trailer by now, but it premiered at this panel, and Katie remarked afterward that it was the first trailer that made the movie actually look interesting, like it had an actual story and not just a bunch of ships blowing up. On the downside, no one asked Zoe Saldana any questions during the Q&A period — they were all directed to Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto.

Star Trek ExodusThe plan, originally, was for me to catch up with the panel for 9 in the same room. I made it about halfway through, because of the crowd issue. It wasn’t that there were no seats. It was that five million people (well, it seemed like it) left the room after Star Trek, and after crossing that torrent, I had to ind the line…and trace the line to the end. That turned out to be out the front door and down along the entire side of the convention center almost to the very back. It stayed still for a few minutes, then started moving more-or-less smoothly. As I made it up to the doors, a woman handling crowd control assured us, “There’s plenty of room, they all left after Star Trek because they’re crazy.” There was no hope of figuring out where Katie was sitting (quite near the front, as it turned out, since she got to move up when so many people left between panels), so I just grabbed an empty chair near the end of an aisle.

Joe Ksander and Elijah Wood at the 9 panelAnyway, Nine was just Elijah Wood and animation director Joe Ksander talking about making the film and occasionally showing clips. Someone asked Elijah Wood to compare his character to Frodo Baggins, and he remarked something along the lines of, “I’m going to be hearing this for the rest of my life, aren’t I?”

Wrapping Up

After 9, we met up again and did a final circuit of the floor, checking for anything either of us wanted to show the other, or anything one of us might want to pick up. We ended up at the SLG booth examining The Map of Humanity for something like 20 minutes, trying to spot all the real-life and fanciful place names and where they were located. (Hollywood showed up in about 5 places.) We bought a copy.

Then it was back to the hotel to drop off all our stuff and get ready to meet up with my brother and his fiancee for dinner. They took us to a fantastic Indian restaurant called Mehfil that was somewhat off the beaten path as far as the convention was concerned. Afterward we tried to go to a nearby pub, but it was really crowded (it was Saturday night, after all), so we started looking for another place to go. We ended up walking through the area where Wikimedia has its offices. Eventually we ended up back at a frozen yogurt place in Metreon, a shopping mall across the street from the Moscone convention center, and we hung out there until closing.

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WonderCon 2009Continuing the tale of our late-February vacation (starting with Cambria and Hearst Castle and moving on to Monterey and Carmel, we catch up to San Francisco itself and two days at WonderCon.

Note: If you want to skip straight to the photos, head over to my Wondercon 2009 Photo Set on Flickr.

We’d been to WonderCon once in 2008 and had a great time, and while we weren’t planning to make it an annual trip, the timing worked out such that we’d be in San Francisco the right weekend anyway.

Staying in San Francisco: The Mosser

View from the Mosser Hotel.Last year we stayed at the Mark Twain, which was okay, but this year on my brother’s recommendation we stayed at the Mosser Hotel. It was quite nice, although the rooms were still extremely small by modern standards — small enough that instead of an actual desk, there’s a fold-out desk on the armchair. There’s also a flatscreen TV with both pay-per-view and video game rentals, and an AT&T wireless hotspot accessible from the room. The staff was nice, and the location was perfect. We were in a decent area of town, near restaurants, 5 minutes from the Moscone Convention Center one way, 5 minutes from a BART, MUNI & cable car station the other way, and right across the street from the official convention hotel.

Day 4: Friday (Feb 27) at WonderCon

After Thursday’s long drive, we slept in Friday morning and made our way to the convention center around 11:00. The “line” to get to the registration area moved quickly enough that it might as well not have been a line, and there were only a few people in front of us at the badge pick-up windows, so we made it through the whole process in only a few minutes. Then we stood in line for 45 minutes waiting for the hall to open at noon. Oh, well!

We started by making a beeline to the BOOM! Studios booth to pick up several copies of the Farscape #1 WonderCon exclusive variant — one for us, and several more for people at the Terra Firma message board. Series writer Keith R.A. DeCandido was there signing them, and we chatted a bit with him and with another Farscape fan. After that I got in line for the DC booth, and Katie went off to explore. I picked up a bunch of random swag from DC, some of which I want to keep and some of which I’ll probably offer to people on Speed Force.

Cowboy Bebop: Faye Valentine and JuliaNext I headed over to Artist’s Alley to track down some of the artists connected with Comic Book Tattoo for signatures. I’d gotten a few of them (including Tori Amos herself!) at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, but took the massively heavy lead weight book back to my hotel room at the first opportunity, not thinking that I could catch up with more of the creators. So now I’m trying to fix that.

I found David Mack first, and he had a whole spread of Kabuki material. As we talked, I admitted that I’d never read any of it, and he not only offered me a few issues of the latest series for free, he signed them!

I wandered the floor a lot, picked up some cheap trades, scarfed down a small pizza and eventually went up to a panel on “The Real Archeology Behind Indiana Jones.” It was run by an archeology professor from some college out near Lake Tahoe, and he had this talk about the major artifacts in the four films — what is known about the Ark of the Covenant, where people are looking for it, (or in some cases, claim they’ve found it but won’t let anyone see) — the actual stories behind the Sankara stones and the Thugee cult — legends around the history of the Holy Grail, and where people think it might be — the history and legends of the various crystal skulls, none of which can be verifiably traced to an actual excavation.

Batman asks a question at DC Nation.Then I hit DC Nation, Katie hit panels on 2D visual effects and the shift from a cowboy metaphor to a super-hero metaphor in US Politics (all those Obama-as-Superman images), we met up at the BOOM! panel, and finally went to the Wonder Woman screening.

Friday was, overall, really laid-back. The crowds were light, people in line were patient, and there weren’t even too many people in costumes. Even DC Nation was relaxed, though that’s probably in large part because Dan Didio was at Megacon and Ian Sattler was running the panel.

Wonder Woman

We had no trouble getting into the Wonder Woman screening, and managed to get seats maybe 10 rows back. I noticed a woman I recognized in a WW outfit (someone I’d seen as WW at other cons). Oddly, they kept calling it the movie’s premiere, even though it had premiered at New York Comic-Con a few weeks earlier, so at best this was the west coast premiere. Still, the movie was very good and amazingly epic for a 90-minute animated film. (Reviews are all over the place now that the DVD is out, so I’ll skip the details.)

Wonder Woman Discussion Panel.

After the screening there was a discussion panel with producer Bruce Timm, screenwriter Michael Jelenic, actress Virginia Madsen (Hippolyta), director Lauren Montgomery, and executive producer Gregory Noveck. They talked about making the film for quite a while, then took audience questions until their time was almost up.

Then they ran the trailer for the next DC animated project: Green Lantern: First Flight. I’m not a huge Green Lantern fan, but this looks suitably cosmic in scope and sci-fi in tone, and frankly, that’s the way I prefer the character, so it looks promising!

Evening

Shh... The con is sleeping!After the discussion, we cleared out. Neither of us wanted to watch a bunch of Star Wars fan films at this point (I would have 10 years ago, but these days? Not a priority.), and we were hungry. So we headed back to the hotel to change and went out to look for someplace to eat dinner. We ended up at a very good steak restaurant in the Marriott, then went back to the hotel where stayed up way too late uploading photos and dashed off a first impressions post of the con.

Update: On the way out, though, we stopped at the mezzanine walkway, which has a long glass-enclosed view into the main floor. It was eerie to see all the booths set up, fully lit, but with covers thrown over tables, and the aisles empty except for (as far as I could see) one person.

Continued in Saturday at WonderCon.

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Possibly jumping the gun, but last night I reserved a backup hotel for next year’s Comic-Con. Although considering that most of the big-name hotels right by the convention center are already booked (though I’m sure they’ve set aside blocks for the convention already) or want incredible amounts of money per night, perhaps it’s not that crazy an idea.

The price and distance are just good enough that I’d be willing to skip the insane reservation crunch when the convention block goes on sale next year, though I’ll probably give it a shot to see if I can get something closer.

Meanwhile, we’re seriously considering hitting WonderCon again next year, which will also give us another excuse to visit people up in the Bay Area. (Not that we should need an excuse, but it seems like we do.)

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You may have noticed I’ve been thinking about fan conventions lately. 🙂

It started after last year’s Comic-Con, when I decided I wanted to go to something a bit less…intense. 😯 Last year’s Wizard World LA was nice, but a bit sparse, so I went looking for more comic and general sci-fi/fantasy cons within driving distance of the LA/OC area. Surprisingly, I didn’t find much. Gaming conventions, costuming conventions, Anime Expo, sure, but sci-fi? Pretty much just Loscon, which we both gave up on after 2002 (and from what I’ve heard, hasn’t picked up again). I asked around a bit on some forums, and someone on either the Comic Bloc or Newsarama forums suggested WonderCon, and suggested considering the city as a vacation destination, not just a place to find a hotel for the con.

Since WonderCon worked out so well, I’m looking at what else might be fun. That’s part of why I did my price comparison last month, and Kevin Standlee’s comments got me looking at WorldCons and the like again. Not for this year, but maybe a few years out.

Looking at all these cons, I realized that beyond a certain threshold, distance doesn’t matter. Only the destination. If it’s far enough away that you have to fly, the only thing that distance impacts is the cost of your plane ticket. Whether your flight is 5 hours or 10 hours*, it’s still going to take up most of a day or night when you factor in dealing with the airports. Everything else, from hotel prices to whether you need a passport, a phrasebook, or currency exchange, is a factor of the destination.

WonderCon, I think, was at the boundary of driving distance from here. We could make the trip out in one day, but it was a lot more fun to break it into stages and make it a road trip. San Diego is at the boundary of commuting distance. We could drive out there in the morning and drive back at night (and I did that with my parents for over a decade), but it’s not practical to do for more than one day. Whereas if I wanted to, I could easily commute to Wizard World Los Angeles 2 or even 3 days. (As it was, we only went for Saturday.)

With two cons in Q1, and San Diego coming up in July, any traveling we do later this year is probably not going to be convention-related. As it is, we’ve talked seriously about three possible non-con vacation spots. But it might be worth casting a wider net for cons in 2009 or 2010.

*Katie and I were talking about this, and realized that it’s probably different if you have kids. In that case, a 5-hour flight probably would be significantly harder to manage than a 3-hour flight.

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I’ve been trying to decide whether to go to Wizard World Los Angeles this year. On one hand, it’s close. On the other hand, I just went to WonderCon last month. The astonishing thing is that a one-day ticket for WWLA costs almost as much as a 3-day membership to WonderCon. This got me thinking about comparing convention prices.

So I looked up the comic conventions in the area, plus the other two Wizard World cons that have prices up.

Convention Thu Fri Sat Sun Full
LA Comic/SciFi (a.k.a. The Shrine) $8 N/A
WonderCon (advance) $12 $12 $10 $30 = $10/day
WonderCon (onsite) $15 $15 $10 $40 ≈ $13/day
Wizard World LA, Philadelphia $25 $25 $25 $45 = $15/day
Wizard World Chicago $25 $25 $25 $50 ≈ $17/day
Comic-Con Intl. (way ahead)* $60 = $15/day
Comic-Con Intl. (advance) $25 $30 $35 $20 $75 ≈ $19/day
Comic-Con Intl. (onsite) none

And to compare to some non-comic-focused conventions, some nearby, some just big:

Convention Thu Fri Sat Sun Full
ConDor (advance) $25 ≈  $8/day
ConDor (onsite) $20 $25 $15 $50 ≈ $17/day
Loscon (advance) $35 ≈ $12/day
Westercon 61 (advance) $60 = $15/day
Gen Con Indy (advance) $35 $35 $35 $35 $60 = $15/day
Gen Con Indy (onsite) $45 $45 $45 $45 $75 ≈ $19/day
Dragon*Con (advance) $65 ≈ $16/day
Dragon*Con (onsite) $90 ≈ $22/day
Worldcon/Denvention 3 (advance) $200 = $40/day

It’s interesting to note that WonderCon (San Francisco) and ConDor (San Diego) are extremely cheap if you sign up far enough in advance. Also, when you expand to more general cons, San Diego Comic-Con is right in the middle of the range, with several conventions being more expensive. I’d guess that the more volunteer-based cons like Westercon and Worldcon probably don’t bring in as much money from exhibitors, so they’d be more dependent on memberships to keep afloat.

In compiling this, I discovered that this year, Comic-Con International isn’t going to be selling any memberships on-site. It’s going to be pre-registration only.

I guess they’re expecting it to sell out again like last year, and don’t want people to count on something they won’t be able to deliver. Plus I’m sure it’ll simplify matters for the con, since they won’t need to deal with taking money for registration.

Update: Added Loscon for nostalgia’s sake. Also fixed some links; GenCon rearranged their website sometime in the last 4 days, and I somehow typed in the wrong domain name for ConDor.

Note: These are the 2008 prices, except for the ConDor advance price, which is for 2009. All prices were obtained from the events’ websites except for the way-advance price for San Diego Comic-Con, which is simply the price I paid last summer for this year’s con. For shows with multiple membership packages, such as Wizard World, I selected the most basic package that lets you walk in the door.

*CCI always has a booth selling pre-registration for the following year’s convention at an even lower price.