Two weeks ago, Toronto was host to Fan-Expo Canada. Over 100,000 fans of comic books, movies, comic book movies, TV shows, sci-fi, fantasy, anime, gaming, and horror congregate to share their fan-dom, meet their idols, dress in crazy costumes and generally geek out.
Meg's sister and a bunch of her friends were all going for the whole weekend and invited me to tag along and join in the fan-friendly fun. Now, I've always thought of myself as fairly geeky. I know that Han shot first. I had at one point (very briefly) read all the Discworld novels. I know Dumbledore's full name. I once dressed as Ash from the Evil Dead. I get most of the references in Spaced. All in all, I thought I could handle a day amongst my peers,so I bought a ticket for the Saturday and began thinking about costume ideas.
As the day approached, I started to get nervous. I was receiving emails and schedules full of events and schedules for things I'd never heard of. I started to see people posting about how many weeks or months their costume had taken to make. One of the group that I was gate-crashing had previously dressed as Ghost Rider: -
How am I going to compete with that? I'd decided to go as Doctor Who; partly to capitalise on having a British accent, but mostly because I realised that, bar the bow-tie, I had everything I needed for the costume in my wardrobe. (It turns out I dress as the Doctor everyday at work!). I had under-estimated the effort that people put into this. There was no way I could show my face next to a Ghost Rider of this quality. And to make matters worse, this year he was going as one of the X-Men I'd never even heard of. I had to wikipedia 'Cable' to find out who he was and learn his back-story. If you've never had to look up a comic book character before, I can tell you that it's a very confusing experience. There are so many different variations, story-lines, iterations and complex backgrounds that it's impossible to sum them up in a few words. For example;
With the aid of Domino, Cable reorganized the New Mutants into X-Force.[10] The New Mutants ended with issue #100, with Cable and other characters then appearing the following month in X-Force #1.[10] The X-Force series provided further detail for the character's back story revealing that he was from the future and that he had traveled to the past with the aim of stopping Stryfe's plans as well as preventing Apocalypse's rise to power. Cable traveled between the 1990s and his future with his ship Graymalkin, which contained a sentient computer program called Professor, the future version of the program built into X-Factor's Ship."
Not exactly as simple as "Bitten by radioactive spider. Climbs things." I was beginning to worry that I would be found out as a fraud as soon as I got there. What if people started asking me questions about Doctor Who? I didn't really know much about it. I started feverishly watching episodes of Doctor Who as research to ensure that I knew who River Song was or how to defeat a weeping angel.
Anyway, all my worrying and anxiety was for naught. The event itself was great fun. It was absolutely huge and had every kind of fanaticism imaginable. I started off the day at a screening of a series of horror movie shorts, explored artists alley (where comic book artists ply their trade), enviously browsed the merchandise stalls, tried out some of the latest video-game releases and saw a sneak-preview of J.J. Abram's new TV show, "Almost Human" (Blade Runner meets i robot meets Space Precinct. Do you remember
Space Precinct? Brilliant show. See, I had no reason to worry about being geeky enough really).
So what did I learn at Fan-Expo? Firtsly, Doctor Who is massively popular over here. I would say that the most popular costume by far was people dressed as Daleks, closely followed by people dressed as the TARDIS. They were everywhere, enough so to make a new world record for the number of Daleks in one place: 160.
Secondly, dressing up as fictional characters creates a bond of camaraderie. Everyone at the Expo was friendly, enthusiastic and very supportive of everyone else. Every single Doctor that I passed would say a friendly 'hello' or a very formal 'Doctor!', people would compliment me on my costume or even ask to have their photo taken with me. It's very hard to be cynical and aloof (as much as I enjoy doing that) when you're surrounded by so many people who are clearly enjoying themselves so much. This community truly was very welcoming, accepting, supportive and positive. In such a busy, crowded place you would expect to see lots of harried, stressed or even irritable people, but I didn't see one person who wasn't enjoying his or herself enormously.
Thirdly, some people look good in spandex. Some people really don't.
Fourthly, the bemused look on a supervising parent's face as they escort their fully costumed teenager around the exhibition hall is absolutely priceless.
Finally, this guy, for me, wins the costume prize hands-down. Amazing.
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| Dark Helmet from the movie Spaceballs. |
See below for a selection of pictures from the event. Tune in next time to hear about how I got on at the Toronto International Film Festival.
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| KITT from Knightrider |
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| The Doctor. Not looking very happy. |
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| Feisty one, you are. |
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| Wolverine on the phone |
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| This is an intimidating man to pee next to. |
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| Jubilee and Cable |
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| No idea. Answers on a postcard please. |
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| Steampunk muppets. I want one. |
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We're knights of the round table,
We dance whenever we're able |
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| You shall not play! |
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| Thorin Plasticshield |
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| Ooops, I'm in the wrong film. |
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| I told you that these'd be worth something someday, Mum. Bet you feel silly for throwing them out now. |
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| I bet he's too warm in that coat. |
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| "You've not washed behind your ears." |
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| No idea. |
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| Also no idea. |
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| Looks cuddly. |
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| Standard family day out. |
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| I'm sure there'd be room for Catwoman to sit on the car too if they all squashed together a bit. Poor Catwoman. |
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| These things followed me about for a bit. Quite embarrassing really. |
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| Vigo the Carpathian. Also known as Vigo the Cruel, Vigo the Torturer, Vigo the Despised and Vigo the Unholy. (Wasn't he also known as Vigo the Butch?) |
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