FLAPJACKS: Man, I never knew there was so much shit I didn’t want.
ME: Really.
FLAPJACKS: I assume I wanted most shit. But I don’t want any of this shit. I came here to spend hard-earned money and look at this crap. Who the fuck wants GI Joe Minimates?
ME: People who like GI Joe, but wish it were blockier.
FLAPJACKS: Who the hell are those people?
ME: Cubists?
FLAPJACKS: These are collectibles of collectibles. Look at these things. The giant super-deformed doll things with the enormous round heads.
ME: The Mighty Muggs.
FLAPJACKS: Whatever. You can get the entire cast of Star Wars, Indiana Jones and the whole Marvel universe too. In super-deformed doll form. Who came up with this? Was someone sitting around saying “boy we sure could see more Red Skull toys if only he was shaped kind of like a fatter version of a Troll doll but with no hair?”
ME: Probably, yes. There’s a market for it.
FLAPJACKS: But who?
—
ME: What is that cosplayer’s costume?
FLAPJACKS: Which one?
ME: The girl in the three-piece suit with the fangs, the weird lock of hair shaped like an upright candy cane, and the ginormous rifle.
FLAPJACKS: She is dressed up as Twistlock, the lead character in Vampire Formalwear Gunfighter.
ME: You know, for a second there, I actually thought you were serious.
FLAPJACKS: Yeah, I’m kidding.
ME: Well, of course.
FLAPJACKS: It’s actually called Vampire Pantyhose Formalwear Gunfighter.
—
FLAPJACKS: Oh, dude. Is that guy dressed up as Bloodshot?
ME: You mean Valiant comics Bloodshot? Yeah, looks like.
GUY DRESSED UP AS BLOODSHOT: BLOOOOODSHOOOOT! YEEEEEAAAAAH!
ME: So I take it you like Bloodshot.
GUY DRESSED UP AS BLOODSHOT: Valiant comics were the best comics! They were better than DC! Kicked Marvel’s ass! Vertigo was nothing compared to Valiant!
FLAPJACKS: Fuck YOU, Drawn and Quarterly! Did you come up with Dr. Mirage’s second life? I think not!
ME: How about when Valiant got sold to Acclaim?
GUY DRESSED UP AS BLOODSHOT: Fuck Acclaim! They ruined everything! You know what I’m talking about!
(GUY DRESSED UP AS BLOODSHOT exits.)
ME: Well, at least he paused in his hyperbole to recognize how Valiant got fucked over. That’s a real fan.
FLAPJACKS: The sort of real fan who is willing to paint himself all over in white bodypaint except for a big red dot on his chest, and then explain to everybody that he is cosplaying a briefly popular superhero from fifteen years ago.
ME: The sort of real fan who can say with a straight face “yeah, okay, Sandman revolutionized comics storytelling, but did it have a guy with two guns in it shooting mobsters? I think not.”
FLAPJACKS: The sort of real fan who is willing to spend all day explaining that he is not, in fact, dressed up as an alternate-universe Captain Atom.
—
FLAPJACKS: Do you wanna go to the DC panel?
ME: No, I wanna play boardgames.
FLAPJACKS: But you’re a comics guy.
ME: I like comics. I don’t know that I qualify as a “comics guy.”
FLAPJACKS: Whatever, Mr. I’m Too Good For The DC Comics Panel.
ME: I don’t want to go to the panel. I have better things to do than listen to Dan Didio bullshit for an hour.
FLAPJACKS: The Marvel panel?
ME: …or listen to Joe Quesada bullshit for an hour either. There are two types of people who go to panels like that: the bored and the fanatic. I’m not bored, and I’m not a blind follower.
FLAPJACKS: So you’re saying nerds are blind followers?
ME: What’s the most common costume you’ve seen at this convention?
FLAPJACKS: Imperial Stormtrooper, why?
ME: Exactly. The Imperial Stormtrooper. The rank-and-file bad guy in the Star Wars movies. There’s one guy I’ve seen dressed up as Vader, a couple Jedi, and there’s like a hundred Stormtroopers.
FLAPJACKS: That’s not really a fair comparison. I mean, there are that many Stormtroopers here because there’s a Stormtrooper play-group who are guests.
ME: That doesn’t make it better. Given a chance to assume a role in their favorite movie, all of these people chose, of their own free will and volition, to be the boot stomping on a human face forever.
FLAPJACKS: And possibly missing, because they are Stormtroopers.
ME: That’s disturbing. That’s actually more disturbing than Civil War re-enactors who portray Confederates. At least they’re trying to honor their ancestors or something. The Stormtroopers are honoring what exactly? George Lucas’ taste in flannel shirts?
—
FLAPJACKS: Oh, man, will you look at that knife?
ME: Wow. It has multiple blades sticking out of the hilt.
FLAPJACKS: Exactly. Someone considered the knife and said, “nice, but I think we can make it even more knifey.”
ME: And then they cut themselves when they tried to hold it.
—
FLAPJACKS: The Soup Nazi is here!
ME: That just rubs me the wrong way. That guy has made a career out of being the Soup Nazi. He shows up at conventions because he was the Soup Nazi. He does other commercials as the Soup Nazi. He makes appearances on TV shows as “the guy who was the Soup Nazi.” He was in one frigging episode of Seinfeld. He didn’t come up with the catchphrase or the idea. And people want his autograph. That makes no fucking sense at all. At least the other people here signing things have actually done more than, say, five minutes of screentime to make themselves famous.
FLAPJACKS: Hey, he gives away autographed ladles!
ME: Arrgrgrgggggggh.
—
FLAPJACKS: So you only came to this convention to play board games?
ME: Pretty much. I’ll do some shopping, but I came to play games.
FLAPJACKS: That’s really stupid.
ME: Why? I like board games. And there’s a prize if I win the tournament.
FLAPJACKS: Are you going to win the tournament?
ME: Probably not.
FLAPJACKS: How much is the prize?
ME: Fifty dollars in store credit at the sponsor’s store.
FLAPJACKS: How much did you pay to get in here?
ME: Fifty dollars.
FLAPJACKS: So even if you won, you would be breaking even.
ME: But I get to have fun playing board games.
FLAPJACKS: Don’t you own most of these board games?
ME: …not all of them.
FLAPJACKS: So you could have stayed home and played board games with friends, for nothing, but instead you paid to come here. That’s quality thinking. I think you need to go apologize to the Stormtroopers.
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Now I know why I cannot tolerate the people who dress up as Sturmtruppten, uh I mean Stromtroopers. Of their own choosing, they dress up as freaking space Nazi infantry, who also cannot hit anything they fire at. Also it warms my heart to know that I am not the only who hates the Soup Nazi guy. The people who want has autograph should be forcibly prevented from ever breeding. Maybe at the next convention he can hire the Stormtroopers as his security, after all they are the same pathetic people.
Hey…I like Mighty Muggs…
I too was at Fan Expo. It was hectic.
Think of the Stormtrooper guys (apparently they are called the “501st Legion”) as the equivalent of waiters in costumes, like in Party Down. They’re not there exactly as “fans” — they are sort of space opera window-dressing. The people who benefit from seeing the comically inept space nazis of the future (or distant past, as the Crawl suggests) are not the people wearing all the plastic. They are uncomfortable and have limited visibility. It’s the crowd attending the convention who otherwise would just see a bunch of cartoon color-spatters from the latest unintelligible anime that they don’t recognize. They find the presence of familiar characters comforting.
Even if they are plastic space nazis.
Though I will point out that it’s Ralph McQuarrie who designed the look of the Stormtroopers. You know, the NASA illustrator who made all the technology in the original Star Wars movies look cool, back when you liked them? Back when almost everyone did? He designed a consistent Imperial aesthetic, part of which are their comically-inept troopers.
So they look cool, the OTHER fans enjoy that there’s at least some futuristic ambiance at what is otherwise a somewhat dreary trade show. I’m pretty sure the guys in the costumes are attending not as fans, but for their benefit.
And doing a bit of research, they don’t just show up. Somebody requested them.
http://www.501stlegion.org/request.php
I personally prefer the flocks of Hogwarts students when it comes to my cookie-cutter cosplayers, but what do I know?
(Of course, nothing is as neat as the large groups of people who agree on a theme and all design individual costumes to fit that theme. There is a total frission of “cool” that comes from seeing the entire Legion of Super-Heroes walking down the halls at DragonCon.)
I thought very deeply about Han’s spirited defense of stormtroopers.I weighed all the pros and cons. I factored in the P.R. and the joy it brings some and I came to the conclusion that Star Wars is still lame.
I think MGK can prove Flapjacks wrong on his last point by asking him if he and 2-3 other of their friends would be willing to spend a weekend playing boardgames…
If forty different people showed up dressed as Darth Vader, or as a bunch of variations of someone with the last name Skywalker, even they would admit it’s mega lame.
You can’t have a giant crowd of one-off characters. That would be like walking into a crowded room full of Batmans. Just… kinda awkward.
But storm troopers! There’s the sort of thing you can do where, if you and ten of your friends show up as storm troopers, and you run into ten more storm troopers, you can all just be – like – Hey! Wassup! And, if you’re really lucky, you can find some guy dressed like Han Solo and chase him down a hallway.
I mean, I admit, I wouldn’t mind seeing a bunch of folks show up as Rebel commandos, as it doesn’t have quite the same negative connotation. But the Rebellion didn’t have a whole lot in the way of uniforms. So I can understand the Empirical default.
Hey, I saw the Bloodshot guy too. He kept pointing his toy gun at everybody, making me vaguely uncomfortable.
The girl in the three-piece suit with the fangs, the weird lock of hair shaped like an upright candy cane, and the ginormous rifle.
Rip van Winkle from Hellsing. Just so you know.
Shit. My Rip van Winkle fighting the supernatural story is taken. Eh, I’m relatively certain there are enough differences.
MGK, how did you do in the competition?
Is it just me, or is Flapjacks getting smarter? Or at least more self-aware?
I’m trying to decide just how much geeky I want to put in this post, and the answer is “not too much”, so…
Written by Timothy Zahn, stormtroopers are unspeakably badass. I mean, the Hand of Judgement? So awesome. And then you have the 501st Legion of the Empire of the Hand, who… I would totally cosplay as a stormtrooper from Aurek-Seven. In a heartbeat. They are awesome.
And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
bwahaha, I’ve never heard of Bloodshot before, but I’m loving his wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodshot_%28comics%29
Considering I’m about to fly to seattle for PAX and am largely looking forward to playing boardgames (most of which I already own…), that last exchange hits a little close to home for me.
Stormtroopers also have an advantage in that you don’t have to be good-looking to look good in the costume. In fact, all you have to be is not-obsese. Trust me, that’s a big factor when it comes to cosplay.
>>In fact, all you have to be is not-obsese.
Still eliminates 90% of con attendees from cosplaying…
I loved the post, but I was surprised to see it after I read this other one:
http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2008/07/23/why-i-dont-go-to-cons/
What made you decide to go to this one?
Mostly the big boardgame tournament. I like going to gaming cons (smell aside). That, for me, was a reason to go. Like I said: I don’t go to panels. I don’t buy tschotkes. I don’t bother with the corporate booths. I don’t get stuff signed for the most part.
(I did find a copy of the Absolute Edition New Frontier for about $40, and I got that signed with a small sketch by Darwyn Cooke, but that was because the line was really short and because, come on, Absolute Edition with Darwyn Cooke sketch? I like sketches. I just wish I had asked for a Rex The Wonder Dog sketch, but he looked busy and tired, so I didn’t and instead got a nifty profile of Hal Jordan. Which – yeah, Hal Jordan, but at least Darwyn Cooke’s Hal Jordan.)