So what con costume will you choose? There are so many options. And with options, come mistakes. Avoid any of the following:

Just about anything from Lord of the Rings. If you and three friends decide that you will altogether march around in costume as the Witch-King riding his giant evil lizard dragon thingy, that is about the only thing that is not played out from this franchise.¹ Do not go as Legolas or Aragorn or Third Hobbit On The Left or one of the zombie kings or an orc or an Fightin’ Uruk-Hai or any of the wizards. All the con people will be all “oh, Lord of the Rings, that is SOOOOOO 2006″ and then you will not get nerd-laid, which is mostly the point of going in costume to begin with, right? See also: Jack Sparrow, Ben Affleck Daredevil, Xena, anybody from that show with Hercules where they were in space. I think it was called Hercules In Space.

A really, really obscure superhero. When you are leafing through your comics encylopedias and mint copies of The Complete Handbook To The Marvel Universe and wondering if you will ever find love, ask yourself a simple question: will somebody only kinda interested in comics recognize your costume? There’s a reason you see so many people dressed up as mid-90s X-Men at cons. The yellow-and-green Rogue costume hasn’t been in use for years now but you always see thirty or forty yellow-and-green Rogues at a con cause that is when that girl thought Jim Lee was really cool. If you have to explain that you are Lamprey from the Squadron Supreme to everybody, you are already That Guy. Do not be That Guy.

You can make an exception for guys who are obscure but really funny looking. Like Hypno Hustler, for example. People might think you are one of the Fat Albert kids instead of Hypno Hustler, but you will have a giant Afro either way and they will think that it is awesome.

Razor Fist. Or anybody else who does not have hands, or has replaced their hands with thingies. You know what sucks? Not having hands. Me, I like not having to ask people to help me pee. Maybe you can deal with that. If so, then Razor Fist away! But make sure your razor fists aren’t too sharp or you will probably hurt people other than yourself. Actually you’ll probably poke somebody’s eye out no matter how blunt you make the razor fists. Actually I take it back, you should probably just avoid Razor Fist altogether.

Anybody with an eyepatch. Yeah I get that Nick Fury is awesome and everything, but depth perspective is surprisingly important when you are navigating crowds. You are bobbing and weaving along and then a Wolverine is in front of you but you don’t know how far away his crappy looking fake claws are, and how come every Wolverine costume has the claws popped anyhow? I mean, aren’t the weird muttonchops and maybe a cigar enough to say “I AM WOLVERINE”? If I were Wolverine I’d be totally depressed because everybody thinks it’s all about the claws. I bet he has dreams of things other than clawing. Maybe he wants to open up a traveling sushi restaurant. You don’t know him!

Anybody with a moustache. I’ll just break it to you right now: you can’t pull it off. Goatees are okay. But your traditional pencil-thin moustache, or your handlebar moustache, or your Tom Selleck moustache…? These are a recipe for disaster. The bad kind of disaster. I want you to do me a favour, you go look at your high school yearbooks right now. Find the picture of you when you were sixteen and tried to grow a moustache. It will never get any better than that. At least then you didn’t know better!

The Joker from The Dark Knight. Because you will look like a douchebag.

So, with these guidelines in mind, what is the bestest costume ever?

Obvious!

1. Okay, maybe you could go as the giant flaming eyeball on top of the tower, but that’s one very blocky costume.

But that having been said, I absolutely adore this bit from Prince of Power #4, a scene that is so totally comics that it really couldn’t have originated anywhere else:

2.) Of course, it would be really nice if the con organizers would act like they know they have a rapidly exploding convention on their hands, as opposed to, and I am just saying, a bunch of irresponsible idiots. Last year’s FanExpo had major crowding issues in the larger, southern half of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, so bad that they had to stop selling tickets. This year FanExpo couldn’t get the southern building for the con and, instead of purchasing the reservation from the organization which bought it (something other major cons have done in the past), settled for the smaller northern building. The main hall of the northern building is about half the size of the southern building. When they reached building capacity on Saturday (which happened at around noon), they didn’t tell anybody but let people exit (because there isn’t anywhere worthwhile inside the con to get good) and then didn’t let them back in. If the FanExpo organizers don’t get their heads out of their asses and make sure to get both buildings next year, they’ll have overcrowding issues that’ll probably make this year look wonderful in comparison.

3.) That having been said, the gaming area – off to one side, treated like the idiot stepchild of the nerd community – was full but pleasantly so. Justin Mohareb worked his ass off to provide a solid little gaming convention tacked onto the enormous behemoth groaning beneath its own weight that is FanExpo. It was a lovely experience, especially since I was volunteering and therefore did not have to pay for stuff. Well, if I had wanted to eat breakfast with James Marsters, that would have been extra. But I do not think eggs and bacon become better when you eat them with Spike.

4.) Because I was mostly not doing stuff other than helping people play board games, I didn’t do much con stuff. I generally never do. I made an exception this time and went to the DC Comics “how to get into comics” seminar, which was originally supposed to be Joey DeCavileri’s gig but ended up being Dan Didio’s instead. I want to make something clear before I go any further: whatever my beliefs about Didio’s creative tendencies as an editor, I’m a professional and I know a professional when I see one, and Didio was the consumnate professional. He was polite, honest, friendly, and tried to be as supportive of the attendees as possible without failing to be realistic.

5.) Which is important to note because I didn’t really go to the panel to learn how to get into comics, because frankly I did the research on that years ago and know the score. I went because I wanted to see the competition – this is perhaps not the nicest of reasons, but it’s the truth. The good news, from my perspective, is that a lot of people in that room aren’t interested in writing except on their terms, which is stupid: you have to start compromising to write professionally practically from the first word. You have to cut back against your own indulgences. Somebody commented a while back that one page in Al’Rashad contained the first sentence they considered “Birdian,” and that was entirely on purpose from my perspective; I know my tics better than anybody and I know when not to use them.

6.) A pause from this discussion about writing to say that I saw more people dressed up as the Doctor at this con than I have ever seen anywhere, which is good because the Doctor is a good costume: you get to wear nice clothes and most of them are relatively easy to put together. Only the Third Doctor (lace shirt and archaic jacket), Fifth (cricketer’s dress) and especially Sixth (ugly what-the-hell coat plus whiteboy afro) are a bit hard to manage. Heck, you can convert your Harry Potter costume into a Fourth Doctor easily enough: just don’t put on the glasses and fake scar, and cram jellybabies in your pocket.

7.) Also a good costume: Deadpool. This is because no matter how terrible your Deadpool costume is, people love Deadpool and will say “hey! Deadpool!” at you. If you are very fat and dress up as Deadpool, people might even not call you “Fatpool.”

8.) But I digress back to my original point. Of course, there were the usual band of “my question is HOW DARE YOU SIR” types, but Didio shut them down quite excellently by being both respectful and saying over and over again that their issues weren’t the point of the seminar. The point of the seminar was how to get work for DC in any of the major disciplines. He stressed the often low-paying nature of the gig frequently because he wanted to be honest; he explained to people, patiently, what editors looked for in art submissions multiple times. He said, straight-up, that writers looking to get work at the big two have to basically steal somebody else’s job, which means the bar is higher. Much higher. And of course people got offended by this, because people are stupid.

9.) Writing isn’t a zero-sum game, of course. But publishing, to an extent, is. That’s how things go: there isn’t enough paying work for everybody who wants to get paid to get paid, and if you don’t know that, grow up. Didio was patient with the people who didn’t understand that, as he was patient with the dreamers who want to change the business or grow the field. Dreams like that are great, but they don’t get you hired.

10.) And he was patient with the people who obviously didn’t understand the point of a pitch. Multiple people tried to debate Didio when he brought up “the gun pitch.” I’d heard about the gun pitch before (from Paul Levitz, actually, years ago). The gun pitch is “I want to tell the story of the gun that killed Batman’s parents.” And Didio explained that the problem with the pitch is that it’s not a Batman story, which is of course obviously true: if you’re telling the story of the gun that killed Batman’s parents, it ends when the Waynes get shot, which means it could be a story about any old gun.

11.) The debaters didn’t get it, of course. “Well, I’d like to read a story about the gun that killed Batman’s parents.” But the point of getting hired in any freelance industry is not “I can do this well,” because lots of people can do that. It’s “I can make your life easier if you give me work.” Pitching the gun story doesn’t make anybody’s life easier, because you’re not gonna give that story to somebody you don’t already know and trust.

12.) Another aside: the shopping at this con was miserably bad. When people are essentially paying a premium to get in the door to buy stuff, there should be, and I am just suggesting this, something resembling a sale price. If I can get it significantly cheaper at Amazon, your sale price is probably not very good. This goes for guy selling the Justin Bieber standups too. Especially the guy selling the Justin Bieber standups.

13.) One more thing: if you want to argue with Dan Didio about the gun pitch, it’s really easy. The trick is to make it a Batman story. You can do it in one sentence.

14. “Somebody is killing people with the gun that killed Batman’s parents.” That one’s for free.

Bree and Edgar: dancehall. Second week Bree and Edgar have gotten an urban style, second week it’s been very good, second week Bree has gotten a lot of praise for being merely solid. (Then again, “solid” on this version of SYTYCD is generally better than any other iteration’s “good,” so.) I didn’t quite like this Jaeblaze dancehall as much as the one she choreo’d last year, but this was very enjoyable and a good opener to the show.

Amanda and Denys: contemporary. Perfectly decent routine which was elevated by the dancers’ performances; Denys and Amanda have really good chemistry, and Denys’ stoneface evaporates when he dances in a way that’s really interesting to see. Even though Denys has contemporary training, his extensions are a bit… odd? Not in a bad way, but you can definitely see the ballroominess of his movements, I think. But whatever, this was really impressive.

Kirsten and Jera: paso doble. Oh, dear, Jera’s scowlyface. Francis and Natalli had some really spectacular paso choreography – I mean, seriously great stuff – and the dancing, while not world-class, was certainly very decent, especially considering the difficulty level involved. (That final lift into a backbreaker – what the hell.) But Jera’s scowlyface was so ridiculous-looking as to be parodic, and that’s distracting.

Natalie and Mackenzie: hip-hop. This actually felt like a bit of a house-style crossover, which given that it’s Sho-Tyme choreo isn’t surprising. This was really difficult choreo – and obviously difficult choreo – and Natalie and Mackenzie didn’t quite make it look effortless but they looked good doing the steps and more importantly looked like hip-hop dancers rather than contemporary dancers. Mackenzie was perhaps a bit more comfortable with the footwork than Natalie was, but both were strong.

Claudia and Yonni: foxtrot. This was a daring experiment that went horribly wrong: a slow, dreamy foxtrot set to “Telephone” by Lady Gaga, which is an upbeat song and thus made the entire dance look five times slower than it in fact was (and it was already a slow foxtrot). Naturally, Mia blames the dancers, including Yonni, who has never danced foxtrot in his entire life but hey salsa and foxtrot are both “ballroom” (even though Latin dance and competitive ballroom have very little in common) so he should know how to do that, right? Shut up, Mia. Yonni and Claudia were both perfectly okay dancing this bad idea.

Charmaine and Jeff: contemporary. Your standard Stacey Tookey moment of brilliance with Jeff and Charlene in their element. That is all.

Julia and Jesse: samba. I think I know why TonyNMelanie keeping getting to do choreo for this show despite usually being boring as all hell: they’re very good at isolating the various elements of a Latin dance, which makes it easier to judge a dancer on their merits at performing those various elements. Julia: of course very strong. Jesse: good hip action, but still stiff in the upper body and his work in the paired samba roll was dreadful. Overall routine: boring, as expected.

Danielle and Sebastian: theatre. The judges loved this and I… did not. I thought Sean Cheeseman’s choreography was great (which makes me sound like a judge! “It wasn’t the choreographer’s fault!”), but Sebastian and Danielle both looked clumsy to me: he was falling out of his pirouettes ahead of beat, she stumbled more than a couple of times, and the unison sections were frequently, well, non-united. I thought Danielle’s performance quality in terms of embodying the character was strong, Sebastian less so. Jean-Marc busts out “VID” again because it is the Worst Catchphrase In The World.

Janick and Shevar: krump. L’il C calls himself a “warriographer” about a dozen times (claiming that he just came up with it, uh huh sure whatever L’il C). Janick was very bad in this, I mean holy crap levels of bad. After seeing all the other contemporary dancers tonight nail their hip-hop numbers, Janick was just not up to snuff by any reasonable standard; the force behind her moves was not there and there was no swag in her step at all. Shevar was good. Not great, but certainly capable, and he had the attitude at least.

Kloe and Jonathan: jazz. In the video package Kloe reveals that her nickname is “Orangina” because she routinely wears too much bronzer, and it’s like piercing the veil because, as a guy, now that she has pointed it out I cannot stop noticing it and the entire routine was “god, she’s so orange.” I was lukewarm on Blake’s choreo here; it just felt very standard, somehow. But Kloe and Jonathan danced it well enough and should be safe.

Probable bottom three: Claudia and Yonni, Julia and Jesse, Kirsten and Jera.
Should go home: Kirsten and Jesse.
Will go home: Claudia and Yonni.