WonderCon 2009

I had been to large conferences, but never anything with thousands and thousands of attendees. I braved rain and a scary highway, driving about 2.5 hours (I got lost) to get to San Francisco to attend. I loved WonderCon. There was a sense of geeky, committed joy that was great after hearing people complaining about the economy. Besides, at a conference, it’s like everyone has escaped from the same asylum. I enjoyed that, even though that was only the beginning of my comics immersion.

Zillions of comics and comics-related merchandise for sale, artists’ and publisher’s booths, video-game booths, all in one enormous space. There were actors who had had single lines in famous movies, like the man who said, “These are not the droids we’re looking for,” in Star Wars IV or actors who had been guests in the original Star Trek series from the 1960s. There was even a band that played comics- and gaming-inspired music (www.kirbykracklemusic.com). It was interesting, too, to see a Christian comics booth with a mostly-nude female superhero on one side and something scary and violent on the other. I saw the actors from one of my favorite TV shows, “Chuck,” as well as Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill (Princess Leia and Luke SkyWalker) from the original Star Wars.

I saw some amazingly skilled and talented artists just casually sketching during various talks, people who were in art school. I hope they are programmers as well because programmers for video games are in high demand---there are games with individual target markets ranging from housewives to geeks, games meant to be played for hours at a time, and games intended for waiting lines at Starbucks.

There were people in costume everywhere and they were very hard-core. Two men standing behind me in line to attend a lecture called “The Anthropology of Star Trek” talked about their next costumes for a solid 30 minutes. They were dressed as Agent Smith from “The Matrix.” The short Hispanic one didn’t look as convincing.