Beyond teeming to the gills we’re standing still hinting at the notion of moving forward. It’s a whole weekend of costumes, get-ups and cosplay seeing how long you can shuffle on a mosey before needing to go to the toilet again.
Not sure what the point of the metal detectors are in the Saturday morning crowd. The flow through the bottleneck is a thick syrup left to crystalise and by the time it’s around lunch they waive any and all through. Big bags, no bags, decked in metal and whatever else protrudes in a comic book convention.
Every year brings more floorspace and with it the rookie wranglings of how best to handle that newfound ground.
It’s a mess.
Saturday ends up being a day full of shuffling and waddling and making sure you keep moving forward at all times. At least on the main floor of Heritage Hall. The chokehold of the dark funnel into Rupp Arena is where both the photo sessions and celebrity guests stick out. The ants moving into that hole teeter with a feel of being stuck in a human traffic jam. Nowhere to go fast and wondering if you’ll run out of tank juice before you move another metre in any direction. It doesn’t matter at this point, so long as you feel the wind against the brow sweat.
Sunday fares better. The re-attempt to direct the masses into a single flow direction around the capacity-tilting areas allows for a quicker turn through. Just. At least you can see some of the floor in front of your feet this day. Bolting off the main deck and waltzing on the top level there are more vendors, and actual space to dawdle in front of their wares without the fear of having your back shredded off by the human-lava flow.
Pauly Shore is fresh out of bed from however late the night before at the comedy club. Frank and with no qualms about talking truth and off the cuff about those heydays in the 90s as the Weasel. Jason David Frank and Amy Jo Johnson reminisce about sets and episodes back on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers original flavour. Johnson giving it a heave of the microphone cube, standing up to piff it. John Barrowman sparkles a day with his TARDIS dress and bursts through with passion and wilder and wilder stories. The seats are to the brim and Barrowman commands the mic cube to have people instead line up down the middle to cut out the agony of pauses between people tossing the speaker box about. Capping it with “A Thousand Years”, it’s a panel worth going to again.
With no competing Disney on Ice or Winter Jam concerts to jostle against the comic convention takes up the entire building and its three floors. And the carcasses of the stores that once were are stark. Now shells serving this one weekend in the service of watching on as, you better freaking believe it, escalators are not allowed to be used as stairs. Once more over the landing and they really have a thing about trying to direct people through small channels. One escalator puts on a show of being “broken” by having the bottom flipped up for guts and tools. We get it, you want to see these people walk more.
Another year and another T-shirt as the VIP trinket. It’s actually the only thing in the tote bag. No more discard-ready badges or bookmarks to recycle. This year’s shirt designs are throwback covers to comics that could-be, with some on garish colour choices like whatever hue matches up with pea soup vomit. These shirts dive right into the drawer never to see the flesh of stink on the body. Too many T-shirts from too many places to bother wearing them even as loungewear.
The haul:
- Bookmarks by Tressina Bowling of Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Storm, Rocket & Groot
And that was it. Too much body mass on the main floor to wade through to allow slowing down enough to see what was even on other tables.
Thronging through the latter two thirds of the Lexington Comic & Toy Convention over 9-11 March 2018 at the Lexington Convention Center.
Reviewed on Friday, 23 March 2018