I Almost Croaked At Comic Con, 2024

Reposted from my wordpress (Original: 3/4/24)

On the light rail there were men with gigantic swords and fursuits. You may be tempted to think this is an ordinary day in Seattle. For the man tweaking on the sidewalk and using with impunity, perhaps it was. But for us it was Emerald City Comic Con 2024.

A lesbian with knee tattoos and a yellow baseball bat. A tradwife in a white bandana and elf ears. A man who looked like Chris Farley in a yellow muumuu (Chris-chan Farley?) slamming back a golden monster energy can. Where are we all going? Emerald City Comic Con 2024.

I saw it all today. It was like going back to my fourteen year old self’s brain, splayed out across six stories of a convention center. I’ve changed a lot in ten, fifteen years… and they haven’t. The artists, the games, the costumes, the merch, the panels everything that occupied my tumblr in 2011 was… pretty much all still there. Maybe fewer Homestucks than if I had bothered to go as a teenager (I should have!), and more Hazbin Hotel wearers. Whatever. It’s the same people. There was even a guy dressed as a Raptor Jesus. People haven’t even left the 00s.

The point is, I saw it all. And if you were there, you saw it all.

A black hobbit lady. An albino rainbow dash. An asian schoolgirl dressed as the Witch King of Angmar. Rows of tattoo artists imprinting baby yodas forever on pale asteroid-like skin. Mountains of Funko Pops. Multiple Master Chiefs who had pudgy bellies pudging out under their armor. A dude dressed as Tifa.

Everywhere I go I see Suki from Avatar. Dozens of Sukis. Hundreds. Thin women. Suki. Fat women. Suki. Old Sukis. Young Sukis. Men dressed as Suki. Why?

And a lot of mexican Trafalgar Laws. More Trafalgar Laws than Luffys. Why?

Things I overheard:

“I am so overstimmed right now”

“mom doesn’t like it super violent”

“You never see people dressed as HIS doctor”

“…which unfortunately is endemic to a lot of Dark Souls II bosses…”

I met an older woman, 60s, in a wheelchair, dressed as Ash Ketchum, with a Pikachu plushie at her immobile feet. She had a breathing tube that she was adjusting under her nostrils.

Big Pokemon fan? I asked.

No, she said. I’m here with him. And she pointed back to man in a gigantic squirtle mascot costume, wielding a saxophone.

I’ve been doing this for years, she said.

I saw a six foot four man dressed as minnie mouse.

I saw a girl dressed as a Mandalorian but the armor was entirely bedazzled with pink rhinestones.

Many Ghibli girls. More Kikis than Mononokes at first, but then later I felt like I was seeing more Mononokes than Kikis. Hard to say. In between them, a couple Chihiros.

There were maybe twenty Percy Jacksons trickling towards the Percy Jackson meet-up, wearing orange Camp Halfblood t-shirts and a few wielding cardboard bronze swords.

For lunch, we walked ten minutes away to a Moroccan restaurant that had concrete chickens hanging from the ceiling and terrariums with tiny polar bears inside. A gorgeous musclegirl waitress served us, with a sweet delicate voice that instantly dispelled the slight tingle of doubt (based on her incredibly sculpted arms) that she may be MtF. Coastal urban specimens really are more exotic than what you find in the heartland. The selection pressures must be enormously complicated.

I only saw about one buttcrack the whole day, and the smell was pretty much fine — maybe a little stringently lysol’d in a few of the meeting rooms I stepped inside. There were some weirdos and deformed people and total subterranean nerds as you might expect, but also just a lot of egirls and cosplayers and just normal Seattle people, even elegant urbanites.

Are they gentrifying nerddom? Not really. There just was every shape and size and color of person you could imagine, even more than normal given the facepaint and pageantry. There were willowy elf maidens and ogrelike creatures and you and me and everyone in between. The human race is really dazzling in its variety and in the variety of anime characters it can dress in if it so chooses. Personally, I like the willowy elf maidens.

It feels good to have pageantry. We don’t really have it in our culture apart from fleeting moments at Halloween as a kid. Pageantry really makes you imagine alternate worlds, worlds that — for all their aesthetic faults — are far from the greige banality of the modern city, insert some pablum here about capitalism realism and why queer communist tumblr fanart somehow liberates us from this…

The queer communist tumblr fanart was out in full force, and it was wretched. Just rows and rows of some of the worst artists I’ve ever seen crammed in together. Maybe half-a-dozen homely hapa girls had actually clever sticker, pin, and t-shirt designs at their booths, but the rest of the Artist’s Alley was just awful. It’s not just the audience’s fault. The artists could be orders of magnitude more interesting in their aesthetic design choices, and the audience would buy the cooler artwork. A big part of being a nerd is having terrible taste, I guess. And having no classical formal training. Learning to draw from tumblr. It shows. It’s embedded deep, and it’s icky. You can just see the pungent cotton candy eroticism melting off of the slick shiny cartoon characters faces even when they aren’t deliberately trying to be sexual. This is art by people who base their art off of cartoons instead of the natural world. This is art by people who masturbate to cartoons instead of other people. I hate it, hate it, hate it.

It was interesting to see the geological layers of art styles present, too, some retro comics types, a smattering of 90s style illustrators still grinding away, some 00s webcomic people, and the 10s tumblr gals still doing the exact same thing they’ve always been doing. You can tell there was a three year range in some past decade when someone’s fandom of choice reached its fever pitch. I mean, mine was thirteen years ago. Today I was wearing a Game Bro t-shirt and orange sleeves in a half-hearted attempt to evoke the niche character Lil Cal from Homestuck circa 2011. A few people recognized my relic and gave me props — more than anyone else, the hapa artist girls with better taste than the rest at their booths recognized this, and a few odd scruffy people who I only caught a glimpse of in the crowd before they vanished right after deploying their regards. I tried to take a selfie with every Vriska or Gamzee I saw. “Mom, Dad, I want to paint myself grey and dress like dead teenagers.” They were there. And they were my people, whether they knew it or not.

The only scheduled event I really cared to step into was the Jhonen Vasquez Q&A. We were packed so tight in there that the supervisors murmured it was a fire hazard, but did nothing about it. The heat started to prickle, and a wave of rank sweat hung in the air like the most malodorous of marijuana strains. For the first time I felt a bit nauseated. An Aerith sat down next to me and we made small talk.

I even got the chance to ask Jhonen a question. His personality presence was very impressive. He is clearly a remarkably talented and energetic individual, who has always been committed to a very particular aesthetic vision and had few obstacles in his path to success (per his own account). In just a few minutes it becomes obvious that the bizarre energy that infests the Invader Zim cartoon is still actively and powerfully at work in this man’s brain, twenty years later. He just is the extreme version of himself, and wildly successful in his creative work. It’s rare to encounter someone so actualized, even if it is in a sort of funky and weird and gross way, it’s undeniably powerful, enviable, especially in our age of doubt, half-measures, and soft hands. I wish I could burst with personality as loudly. Sometimes, I think I have a chance at it… maybe I could have my own booth here, with more interesting fanart and memes and styles than all the rest, maybe I could make waves, maybe I could be beloved by these pitiful anime people.

One thing that he said that stuck with me as he answered my question was that he made the crappy future depicted in Zim the way it was because he wanted to make fun of the worst parts of America, but America today has truly become the full form of what he was mocking. The show wouldn’t be a shocking exaggeration anymore, unless they included genital mutilation. I laugh.

Near the end of the day I go to the arcade zone and play Monkey Ball and beat the first ten courses on the first try, no falls. I’m an expert banana handler.

Today I’ve seen some of the most beautiful and some of the most ugly people I’ve ever seen.

I feel like human congregations are like big macro-organisms. A storm body assembling from thousands of signals. But a convention of nerds is utterly unlike a normal event. Is it really that different from, say, a host gathering for the latest Big Sport?

So much so. All the constituent elements are different. Comic conventions are like when a special breed of insects gather, ones that spend most of the time underground and in solitary but suddenly, once a year, all come together in a massive swarm of thousands upon thousands where they perform strange dances and build weird termite nest structures. Their resplendent exoskeletons are all different from the normal bugs attending normal, day to day swarms. They move in concert totally differently, make different noises, could almost be another form of life entirely. You get the idea.

A thousand souls are drifting by like glowing motes of a screen saver. You grab one, a zelda in a shoulderless dress, and you scream “hold me for forty, fifty years or more — this will make a difference! it will!’

Who are all these beautiful talented people? The shy and lonely? The cool and the uncool ones? The queers and the straights? How could I make any of them a part of my life? I wish I could get a video tape documentary with the highlights and drama of each of their lives rendered into a few hours, to sort through at leisure. Is this what people like about city life? The ability to summon thousands of unique radiant bugs to one spot based on a shared interest? If my soul mate was wandering these halls dressed as a character of oriental origin, would I even know it? I wish I could live a thousand lives to be a friend to all here, or at least… at least the pretty and talented ones. The most exciting specimens. To get to know their minds about things. Or I think I do. Maybe they would all become impossible to be friends with. Maybe we’re not already friends for a reason. Maybe the ugly ones would turn out to have beautiful souls, and the beautiful to have ugly souls. Maybe.

I dream of some day attending a comic-con in a bright white suit and anime hair and dragging a fifteen foot crucifix. And I’ll stand on the street corner and preach to them, preach that the end of the world is coming, and that they need to repent. Because it is. And they do.

Do I want to have sex with any of them? I don’t know. I guess so. At this point I’m not even sure anymore. Mostly I just want one of the princesses to hold me.