WizardWorld L.A. The Con Experience ...
Long ole' weekend, where to start ...
Well, this weekend I went to WizardWorld Los Angeles, the granddaddy of something ... cons wouldn't be it, unless we mean literally. No, I kid. Really, Wizardworld L.A. was a decent convention. Not great, not good, but an indoor swap meet with misc. entertainment. Here's a recap:
So Saturday, I woke up at 7 am, after a great night watching Wonderfalls -- Wonderfalls is the best show on TV. Wonderfalls is great. Watch Wonderfalls. It's great. Anyway, I woke up, went to The Comic Cult, hooked up with Jim, Darrell, Mark, Matt, John and Tim. We just did the usual fanboy bash on the genre thing for an hour, then we split off into caravans for heading to WizardWorld L.A. I took Tim and Darrell and we found parking behind The Pike, a shopping mall built in front of the Convention Center. Through luck, the lot was all but abandoned that weekend, so schwing! free parking! This, coupled with the pass I had for Saturday admission created a completely free con experience for me.
So we walk the 3 blocks to the Con and see the line extends around the building. Yeah ... this was one of the most disorganized cons I'd ever been to in terms of check-in. It was like showing up to an airport like 5 minutes before takeoff and trying to check in. Yeah, tis' lame. John ... poor John ... actually had to pay to get in. This after we actually found a free pass for him after being there for 5 minutes. Paper was the keyword Saturday. If you couldn't get into Wizardworld for free, you must have been retarded, it's that simple.
So we get in there and INSTANTLY we're confronted with Wiz Kids monopoly of the nerd franchise.
A brief summary:
Wiz Kids is a CCG company. They make a game called HeroClix which combines table top games [think D and D] with collectible figures [think McFarlane Toys]. Put those together and you have the toy collector version of crack cocaine. You have collectible figures which are worth hundreds of dollars as collectible game pieces. Sick is the operative word. Wiz Kids created a whole new category of eBay suckers -- people willing to compete with others in a different hobby for something they both need:
1) a crucial game piece for their strategy game
2) a well sculpted figure of a popular character who has enver had one.
Now imagine lacing crack with speed.
There you have what Wiz Kids had at WW LA: a piece that combined BOTH of those above ingredients and then was LIMITED to 200 PIECES
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you WW LA's Convention Exclusive Galactus. Galactus was limited to 75 sales a day. There were at least 2 - 3000 people there to buy him. To say the least, there;s something to be said about nerd fights, but this was like wow people are literally fighting over who gets the right o spend 75 dollars. Once word spread, scalpers began to try to get line space -- in essence to try and buy the piece to sell for a 200% markup. If Galactus was a person, we'd call that ransom. Wiz Kids exacerbated this by playing to the paranoia, creating lines that circled the con and selling pieces under the table. The whole thing tainted the whole con. I'm not even into this shit, but it affected me because people were throwing money around to try and get pieces all over the place it was sick.
In the meanwhile, I managed to get Mark and Matt tons of prizes through my ingenuity and I kept ending up with raffle tickets for some damn reason. Gah, lame.
I did manage to see some nice new Diamond Select Toys stuff. The White Queen statues just fucking owned. I dug them tremendously. I won't ever own them, but they were nice eye candy.
By 4, after walking a couple miles away to get overpriced Subway sandwiches for lunch and after out crew, which was joined by our buddy Jerry showed, we all managed to get outside only to see a faux protest staged by Revolution to pimp the Hellboy movie. I went up to this girl and asked her what was up and she was a stupid "in character" dunce who was all like "Oh, Hellboy's real .. he's mah boyfriend .." Ugh, lame.
Plus, way too many big girls who shouldn't be dressed like Lara Croft, or Black Widow or wear lingerie in public.
So we all were outside and decided to bail and saw Dawn of the Dead.
Dawn of the Dead fucking owns. Oh man, that is an awesome movie. The soundtrack killed me, Any movie that plays The Man Comes Around by Johnny Cash during a montage of zombie attacks earns my respect for creativity alone. Tom Savini's cameo was funny as hell too "oh man, that girl's a twitcher ... shoot her in the head!" Plus having Jim Carroll playing during the credits was great fun too.
To break up the monotony, I'll post the 2nd day account later on, this is a super brief surmise of day one. I have some photos too, I may post those later.
Posted by Vic at March 21, 2004 08:39 AM