I Survived Orlando Megacon 2024

You regular readers know I indulge in attending the local (Central Florida) comic cons as I grew up on science fiction, comic books superheroes, anime, and general geekery.

This year for some reason, Orlando hosted their MegaCon in early February (they've usually been in May). While I missed attending last year's, I decided to attend this year as there were a couple of celebrities I hoped to see during the Q&A sessions and because I am trying to get into Magic The Gathering gaming and was hoping there would be an open table session for beginners to attend.

So I braved the I-4 Saturday traffic in relatively cool weather - yes, it drops below 60 F in Florida - and made reasonable time to get to the South Concourse parking lot to get on a shuttle bus to circle five blocks over to the West Concourse (the LOOOOOONG part of the Orange County Convention Center) and begin my day's journey.

This is actually the South Convention Center Concourse, where most of the
day parking is located. There are buses running shuttle service all
comiccon long. Seriously though, Orange County needs
to build an elevated rail between the Concourses to free up the
regular traffic on International Drive.

Getting into a comic con nowadays is a convoluted affair.
They give you a badge with a microchip in it, so you
HAVE to "activate" the card using the con's App. It takes forever
if you're not tech-savvy, and about 10 minutes if you ARE.

And this was the badge they gave me. Chewie Einstein.

This is the part of walking through a massive empty space
to get to the part of the West Concourse where the vendors set up.

Once you get inside, you then have to find your events between
three (or in some places four) levels. This was still early in the morning
before noontime as more people got inside Megacon.

At least I found the LEGO Club display room!!! Thank you
Greater Florida Lego Users Group!

Give me a minute or twelve to upload video of a working
LEGO City!

I showed up for Paul Bettany's Q&A session on the 
slight possibility his wife Jennifer Connelly would show up
and keep him in line. Alas.

This is in the Chapin Theater, an auditorium where the comic con
holds a number of A-lister interviews. I was last in here for
Hayley Atwell's appearance, if I recall it properly.

You'd be amazed how many of the fans gushed over
Bettany's work in A Knight's Tale instead of his work as
The MCU's Vision.

This was around 2:00 PM as the crowds were clearly
packing the main floor.

It's R2D2, rolling like a boss!!!

Got to sit in on a panel for Frank Cho, one of the better-known
"Good Girl" artists in the comics industry. It's more than just fanservice though, as
Cho is regarded as one of the best illustrators, period.
I got into him through his Liberty Meadows work (a cartoon strip in the vein of
Bloom County but with more gratuitous sex and violence as part of the absurdist humor).

They had a camera set up to focus on Cho's penciling as
he demonstrated the illustrator's work creating a comic book scene.

Cho took suggestions from the room, which bounced between
Wolverine to Wonder Woman to dinosaurs. I suggested "Wolverine
dancing with Wonder Woman with a T-Rex playing bass guitar
in the background" and Cho immediately called for security
to escort me out.

So as you can see he's drawing Wolverine.

Cho is using the mid-90s outfit that was more dark browns
and more shading than the famous bright yellow uniform
of the 70s-80s.

So it looks like Wolverine is punching somebody.
'Cause that's what Wolverine DOES...

Hey wait a second...

Is that...?

Oh no...

WOLVERINE JUST GUTTED HOWARD THE DUCK!!!
AAAAAAaaaaaaaa!

This is one of the prints I bought from Cho at his artist's booth, to give you an idea of what he draws. I also bought a Liberty Meadows and a Batman/Catwoman prints.

Speaking of artists, a number of famous comics artists were in Artist' Alley this MegaCon,
including a rare visit from Frank Miller, one of the creative forces from the late 1970s-
early 1980s who contributed to the massive culture boom - The Dark Knight Returns - of graphic narratives/superhero stories in the mainstream.
I took this picture late in the day to demonstrate the line that had been ongoing since 11:00AM...
which stretched across the open footpath to another line you can kind of see stretching off
to the right of the photo. If I had joined that line at 11, I would have arguably gotten to 
meet Mr. Miller and get an autographed poster or some such... in about two hours of waiting!
I'd have missed half of everything else I wanted to do at the con. NONE of the other
major artists had a waiting line that long. 

Speaking of long lines, THIS awaited me as I walked over to the Chapin Theater part
of the complex in hopes of attending the big celebrity draw of the day:
Ewan McGregor (Obi Wan) and Hayden Christensen (Anakin), both insanely hot Star Wars
fandom draws due to their return in popular Disney-Plus series. 

This is the Fourth floor entrance to Chapin Theater... packed wall to wall with fans many of
whom started forming the line at 2:00PM (!). I got there about 5:15PM... only to get the 
word from the con's security handlers announcing to the whole floor that they've already
reached max capacity for the auditorium and the cutoff was... can you see that one white hat
to the middle left of the photo? Yeah. That was the cutoff. Everybody else between that hat
and me were doomed. DOOMED I SAY.
That was kind of the last thing on my to-do list, and unable to do that I headed to the shuttle buses...

Except when I got to the buses they were coded by color routes instead of parking lots, and I had
no idea which color route went back to the South parking lot! /rage
Instead of waiting for the bus, I dared to walk back across a sky bridge between the Concourses
(See? The county at least did THAT! They should put in rail lines instead...). On the way back
I decided to get a photo of the Orlando Eye that's up the road on International Drive.

And here's a closer shot of it at a traffic stop as I drove to where all the restaurants are north
of the convention center. 'Cause after a full day of walking, I earned that pizza for dinner!

It took another three hours to get back home - an hour and an half getting off a packed
International Drive coping with merging traffic, escapees from the MegaCon, and idiot drivers, THIS
is why I scream about Orlando/Orange County needing an elevated rail system - 
just so I could get in a head rub with Mal the Panfurr who turns 10 years old this weekend!

And so that was my comic con adventure. I've gotten a little weary of attending these things - yes, I am getting too old to walk across half the landscape, and there aren't enough chairs and benches to go around - unless I can scare up any friends or family who might want to attend any cons in the future, this might be my last one. Who knows? A future MegaCon may entice with a can't miss celebrity (but it would involve me risking the entire day getting in line and waiting, sigh).

I Survived Orlando MegaCon 2022, I Hope

It's been awhile since I've done one of these blog reports from the cosplay front lines, hasn't it?

A major reason has been, well, from 2020 until now it's been insanely unsafe to host a massive crowded shindig due to this little thing called the COVID-19 GLOBAL PANDEMIC. Skipping 2019 may have been by choice - I recall that year there were no major celebrities that interested me to attend - but 2020 and 2021 were not.

Even going to THIS year's MegaCon ran the risks because 1) Not everyone is yet vaccinated, especially in Florida and 2) There is yet another uptick in COVID cases due to a new variant spawning again.

And yet, even with the vax and the boosts, even with some assurance that if I do catch COVID it - knock on wood - won't be dangerous to me (I have several health risks, I decided this year to go.

So hold onto yer steampunk hats, kiddos, there's a ton of photos and videos to document the atrocities!

Just because 90 percent of the attendees weren't masked,
didn't mean I had go unmasked. I'm still trying to observe
the niceties, thank you.

 This year's MegaCon was not at the West Concourse but the North/South building. It made for an odd alignment of space - the middle area for the vendors and artists/celebrities, the North Concourse for certain events and promotions, and the South Concourse for cosplaying and other events - meant you had to run back and forth if you wanted to partake of one event and then another.

The line to get in, after the outdoor line to get tickets, which
this year involved getting a sensor badge for some reason, and involved
jumping through 5-8 more hoops than usual to get things verified.

Always taking pictures of the escalator lines to show the variety
of cosplay at work. Saturdays are the big costume contest days,
so LOTS of cosplay...

It's R2-D2!
Always rolling the comic con like a pimp.

The local Lego fan club setup with their models and
cityscapes, complete with working trains!

The cosplay area on the Third Floor of the South Concourse.
One of the hardest parts of the con to reach, and difficult
to walk through once it got packed with cosplayers.

One of the many cosplay groups - this one the DC villains
(with maybe Beast Boy?).

The Lego room got busier as the day progressed.

One of the big draws of any Con: The celebrity autographs
and photo lines. It's difficult to even get close enough in these lines
to see who the celebrity is, for this line it's Dante Brasco!
(pause) Zuko. (pause) You never watched Avatar? NO, NOT 
THE ONE WITH THE GIANT CAT SMURF ALIENS.
(sigh) Rufio from that Robin Williams
Hook movie, okay?

 This was around 12:00 PM. Saturdays are usually the busiest of any weekend Comic Con.

In a nice personal surprise, I had found out my nephews
Tommy (right) and Drew (middle) had gotten their own tickets to attend MegaCon
on their own (they are now in college!!!) (Guy on the left is Drew's friend Garrett).
I had worried that I had dragged them to the Tampa Bay Con years ago,
but it turns out they liked the experience and wanted to visit the Orlando
one. Nephew Drew (middle) is even in cosplay this time, can you guess
which character/movie he's cosplaying?

Back up at the Third Floor Cosplay Zone,
this time all the Scarlet Witches are gathered
to promote THE MULTIVERSE!!!

You don't see that many winged cosplay, so when I saw that
redbird outfit I rushed to get a picture from the escalator.
I should have gone back around to get a closer pic.

All that walking since 8:30AM and by 2:30PM I was a mess.
Dammit, MegaCon, where are the benches
to help a tired old fart rest???

There weren't that many Q+A sessions this year, so this one by
Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti was a treat!

Taken by 6:30PM, as I was waiting for the
Jay and Silent Bob show at 7:30PM.
This is where most of the Con begins to shut down
for the day... and half of everybody was
heading out before the thunderstorms rolled in!

One of the draws this year was an evening performance by Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes, better known as Jay (Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith). It's something my brother Phil enjoys, so I offered to buy him a ticket for the evening event. There were headaches involving the reality the special event was separate from the comic con, but I got them straightened out by the time Phil showed up at the door. Still this was more complicated than it needed to be, con organizers... 

Brother Phil, proof of life that he was here for
the chronicles of Bluntman and Chronic!

One of the pains of any comic con: The waiting is the hardest part. Coordinating scheduled events to cope with any emergencies - or the overwhelming size of crowds that packed MegaCon as a return to post-pandemic normalcy - meant the scheduled start of the show (7:30PM) didn't happen. The autograph lines for the View Askew 'Verse cast - especially for Smith and Mewes - were longer than expected, so they were caught wrapping that up so as not to offend those fans. But that meant the fans at the show were stuck.

This was actually the cleanest the restless crowd had gotten during
the hour-long wait. When you got a crowd that grew up on 30 years
of dick and pot jokes, some of the antics could get pretty risque.

The MegaCon organizers did what they could to appease the masses, with a couple of giveaway contests and a brief trivia quiz that surprisingly stumped a lot of people. But finally, after the autographs were done... Jason had to go pee and Kevin had to go unwind (let's just say it was a herbal relaxant and keep it at that, trust me it was for medicinal purposes!). THEN, we finally got the show we waited for.

Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith!
(pause) OH CMON YOU HAD TO HAVE SEEN
MALLRATS BY NOW!!!

As always, it was Kevin spending half the night extolling his fellow Hollywood celebs and being a genius storyteller (some people have a fcking knack for it), with the second half of the show turned into a Jay and Silent Bob script read for a comic short story, where they brought up volunteers to use weird-ass voice impressions. All I can tell about that is one guy voiced his character like Forrest Gump to huge laughs, the woman voice did a decent Southern drawl, a second guy did a brilliant Scottish brogue, and then they called up a third guy who, Gods help us, nailed a Walken impression for the ages. IT BETTER BE ON THE DAMN PODCAST, KEVIN.

By then, it was 10:30PM, long fcking day, I dropped Brother Phil off at the hotel - he was sticking around for a Sunday breakfast with the nephews - and I braved the I-4 traffic to make it home and feed the kittehs.

Actually surviving the whole day, getting home by 12:05AM
just so Mal could hit me in the face with his tail.

There ye have it, fair mortals. What do ye think?

Should I brave the Tampa Bay Comic Con later this August (That is, if I haven't caught COVID at this one? We'll see in 5-12 days...)?