Remember those kids who used to get picked on in high school by the football team? The guys and gals who sat in the back of the cafeteria dressed in one shade of black or another depending on the season? The ones who were always playing some sort of card game that wasn’t any sort of poker you’d ever seen? Those kids who were always scribbling something in their notebooks?
Well those guys are all grown now and they’ve decided to all gather once a year in the middle of the Big Apple. And I having been one of those kids all those years ago, I decided to see what was going on.
11:30 AM– New York Comic Con 2009 is fully underway before I get off the Staten Island Ferry. Kids and adults are headed over to the show. Some are carrying comic books and wearing Punisher hats.
The walk over from the 1 train to the Jacob Javits center is just a warm-up to what attendees may expect from the main event. Green spandex wrapped around a woman’s legs peek through the edge of her overcoat.
The crowd is what I expected. A lot of dudes, not so many women and the women I do see are usually holding their male counterpart’s Mountain Dew and nachos.
Noon– As I walk into the Javits Center, I know I’m out of my element. Though I am taken back to my junior-high days of comic book collecting and toy collecting, I realize that while I may have grown out of the hobby year ago, many of my former fanboy-peers have grown a full blown obsession.
12:30 PM - My first walk through the exhibition I run into the Joker a about a half-dozen times. The only thing is that every time I see him, he manages to change his clothes. At first he looks like Cesar Romero from the 60’s, then he’s dressed as a nurse and then he looks like the Heath Ledger from “The Dark Knight.” Only this version of Heath is barely over 5 feet tall.
1:00 PM – MattyCollector.com is a website from toy maker Mattel makes limited edition action figures ranging in price from $20 to $60.
They are at the Con to announce new editions to their various lines of toys. First up is the new Justice League Unlimited toyline. The crowd erupts at the mere sight of the cartoon’s logo projected up on the PowerPoint screen in anticipation of what’s to be revealed.
The emcee of the panel, the Toy Guru (who also goes by the name Scott Neitletch), first unveils a new Shazam Family pack-of-four elicits “oohs”, “aahs”, and “whoas” from the easily excitable crowd. Next is another four pack of figures (I dare not call them dolls, mind you), the futuristic Legion of Superheroes
The JL was apparently just an appetizer. Masters of the Universe or He-Man as I knew it more completely in my formative years, was the main course. As we all see photos of characters named Stratos, Zodak, Hordak and Tri-Clops among others, I could almost taste the endorphins beings released into the air.
The loudest reaction of the session comes when Mr. Guru tells the mostly male crowd that a character named Mer-Man will come with two separate and interchangeable heads and another named Man-at-Arms will also come with two different noggins - one with a mustache and one clean shaved. Huge news.
2:00 PM – After the Mattel panel concluded, I am taking a walk around the convention floor. Here I find homemade “Best of” fill-the-blank wrestler DVD’s for 10 bucks a pop, $4 or 3 for $10 Star Wars “loosies,” computer emulators that hold the entire game collections of Sega Genesis, Super and regular Nintendo 50% percent off trade paper comics, $1 comics and a bunch of other little knick-knacks.
3:00 PM – An epic battle has broken put pitting the good vs. the evil. Luckily I have my mini video recorder handy to capture the devastation.
3:45PM – All this super-stuff suffocating my senses has made me forget to eat. In an effort to escape the fantasyland and briefly return to the realm of the real, I need a McDonalds extra value meal. But alas, the magic has stretched its arms from the Javits Center all the way to 10 Ave. Even fictional characters need high quantities of fat in their dinner too.
5:25 PM – After an extended dinner break, I once again enter the forest of mystical creatures –err- the Comic Con I mean – for one last look around. As I look at toys and comics I once had in my possession fetching hundreds of dollars I realize the nature of the people who have filled the Javits Center this weekend. They are the Peter Pans of the world. They are the one’s who refused to “grow up” as I’m sure they had been told countless times. They were the ones with the courage to grow up how they saw fit, the ones who dared to be a little bit different.
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