Ok, so: this IS
(technically) an Examples of Crap I Waste My Money on post (because I’m too
mentally lazy to write anything else at the moment) but be warned from the
start that I am just using it as a vehicle for me to complain about a
convention. You have been warned.
At one point, while waiting
for the Docklands Light Railway to appear through the heat haze, I was so hot I
thought I was going to suffocate, I can’t remember the last time England had
heat that felt oppressive, it was thick heat,
like Florida or, I dunno, the inside of my oven when I’m doing a roast.
Anyway this weekend was the
first two conventions of the season for us Londoners, yes, two: Heroes & Villains Fan Fest in Olympia in Kensington and MCM Comic Con London at the ExCel Centre. The latter is a
long-running convention held roughly twice a year and they’re the biggest cons
of the calendar, the former is…not. I ended up spending a day in each.
Fuck doing that again.
Not because its knackering
– though it is, MCM is exhausting by itself without tacking on another
convention in front of it – but because Heroes and Villains is…pathetic, but
we’ll get to that. Sticking to format, here’s my haul photo:
It may seem like I didn’t
have a lot to show for 2 days of convention but that’s because my family had me
do that thing they do where they give me money, tell me buy presents for my
birthday, then take them and wrap them to give to me on my birthday. So all the nice, shiny new carded toys and posh
DC and Marvel trades aren’t technically ‘mine’ yet to photograph and talk about
online. Plus I’d decided to make myself spend a little more per item and get
some things I really wanted – of course the only thing in that photo that cost
over a score was the Sentinel and he’s three X-Men figures high - Even when I
splash out I’m a tight bastard, ok?
Rolling Stones Stickers!
40p (53) for both
I’d like to amend my
previous statement, it should have said ‘Plus I’d decided to make myself spend
a little more per item and get some things I really wanted… and puffy stickers,
because no one can resist puffy stickers can they? Can you? If you can you’re a
better man (or woman, or non-binary sixth dimensional construct) than me. If you
look around the pictures for this post you’ll see King Nolaf standing on a pile
of Dick Tracy trading cards, that’s because some bloke had big crates of shitty
trading cards at five for a pound (ish, they counted them in the vaguest of
senses) and amongst them were these utterly horrendous, completely unofficial Rolling
Stones puffy stickers. Ain’t they great? I now feel like I’ve always needed to have semi-amateur
pictures of Mick Jagger mid-movement stuck to my ring binders. They’re from 1989 and look like the sort of
thing you’d exchange your tickets for or find in one of those all-purpose cheap
shops at the seaside. Gawd knows why they were with a pile of old trading
cards, in fact god knows why they were
but I’m glad they are.
Defenders of the Planets!
Roughly £10 ($13.31) each
If you’re sitting there
thinking ‘I don’t remember these characters in He-Man, are they from Snake’s
Revenge?’, nah don’t worry they’re from one of the myriad He-Man knock off
lines, in this case they’re from Defenders
of the Planets from Sparkle Toys. These are Zardoom or ‘what if Vincent
Price played Darth Vader’, Strongarm of ‘what
if Trap Jaw was a hero, and also tried to kill the Boys from the ‘Dwarf’, Canis
Major or ‘ohmygodsocooool’ and Weaponsmaster or ‘what if someone had a better helmet
than you’. These were just lying around in a box of regular (very regular, like Skeletor, He-Man and
Ram Man regular) Masters of the Universe figures and I completely broke
composure and got very excited and garbled enquires about prices and declarations
of how much I want my own version of Weaponsmaster’s hat, the poor bastard who owned
the stall was very confused and very scared, he was right too, it was one of my
most socially inept moments this year. Technically they should have been between
10 and 15 quid each but he ended up letting me have the lot, plus all three of
those Warrior Trolls, for £50, he transparently did this just to get rid of the
scary bald man who was getting excited about figures he’d never seen before nor
cared about in the slightest, he was right too.
The Dragon and the Newt
£9 ($11.98)
These two were the only
things I bought at Heroes and Villains, that’s because Heroes & Villains is a bit pathetic, now if you leave a place with Ricky Steamboat it's hard to truly piss of that place but my first time at Heroes and Villains left me with some things to say:
*takes deep breath*
Now you might be asking (if
you existed) “why would someone decide to put a new convention on the same week
as another, long-established convention aimed at the same people, effectively
trying to compete against the English version of NYCC or Wizard World Chicago
back in it’s heyday?” My reply would beeeee “Fucked if I know”. Arrogance
and/or stupidity are my only theories, there’s only so many nerds to go around.
It just seems completely illogical, nerds love conventions, they’re always
happy to go to one, even one as pathetically small as Heroes and Villains, on a
weekend with no competition you could be enjoying a much better attendance just
through the virtue of there being on when nothing else is. H&V was offering
a buy 1 get 3 free deal for their tickets and yet I was there at lunchtime on
Saturday and Olympia was decidedly empty feeling, it wasn’t quite dead but if
was definitely on life support and if you can’t half-fill your hall by giving
away that many free tickets then it’s time to take
the championship off Diesel sit down and have a rethink. Actually that’s not
fully accurate; they couldn’t half-fill their hall even by offering that many
free tickets and promising the chance to
touch John Barrowman.
There were more people
milling around outside at lunchtime at MCM on a Sunday than was at Heroes &
Villains at peak time on Saturday:
Now H&V purports to
offer a slightly different experience to MCM (they do, but not the way they
want), an experience focusing on guests. This is a cool idea, MCM has never
been packed with people signing and having a stellar line-up could and should
draw away the autograph hunters BUT H&V guests are drawn almost entirely
from the Arrowverse, Marvel Cinematic Universe and other DC & Marvel film
and TV projects (like Gotham or
whatever horrible things Fox is doing the X-Men at the moment, is Gifted still a thing?) which first
limits the amount of people interested but leaves ME with questions to ask: 1)
what happens when the Arrowverse ends and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is over
or when both loose the huge popularity they’re currently enjoying, sure they’ll
retain a fanbase and pop cultural relevance the way Buffy or Ghostbusters has
but you can’t fill Olympia at the moment and 2) what happens when the guests
realise they can make more money by being guests at the larger, better attended
convention down the road? Now some of them might prefer the more relaxed
atmosphere and smaller workload (fanload?) but given that the woman who plays
Felicity Smoak was charging sixty sodding
quid for a selfie with her - money is clearly of importance to some of
them, and they could be making a lot more at MCM. Now if you were holding it on
a different weekend then this wouldn’t be an issue, the greedy bastards could
do both, but you’re not.
H&V's 'focus' also means that if you’re not that into
autograph hunting, or just don’t want to fork out over £50 for supporting cast
signatures there’s bugger all to do, my first thought upon entering (this was my
first time at the con)? “You booked Olympia for this?”, there was a small amount of dealers stuffed into the far end of this big ol’ hall with this huge empty space in the middle that had in it only a
bucking bronco in it and what looked like four toys from some kid’s back garden - you could have fit everything at Heroes & Villains into a bingo
hall. Still, holding your con at Olympia
probably looks better to both guests and fans, rent prices be damned (I have no
idea how/if they made their money back…unless they were taking a cut of
Felicity Smoak’s takings) but it was the convention equivalent of putting a small
meal on a big plate and just as depressing.
Oh yeah, their site says
they offer ‘immersive experiences like safe archery’, wanna know what that is?
That’s a literal carnival sideshow that some chancer has called ‘Green Arrow
Archery’, it’s just a wooden box with targets and superhero soft toys hung up
around it! I mean yes it’s safe and it’s archery but it’s about as immersive as
it is a driving lesson and it’s also a pound an arrow, that’s between two and
four times more expensive than playing the same thing on Clacton Pier, and I
bet Clacton Pier has frog bog, you don’t have frog bog Heroes & Villains,
in fact that may be your biggest crime. You could paint them red and say they
were Spider-Man; it’d be no less shady than Green Arrow Archery.
MCM isn’t the best
convention of the year (that’s LFCC) but by contrast this year it offered two
ExCel Centre halls, each half filled with dealers, half a hall of (admittedly
less popular) guests signing, a food court, official stalls by major stores and
companies like Funko, Bandai, Forbidden Planet, Build-A-Bear Workshop and DC
Comics and filled what empty space it still had with awesome things like the
Incredible Moving Cinema (a giant circus wagon containing a cinema) this:
This is (part of) their
beanbag relaxation area, I sat there and ate Japanese food, it was superb. This
is what Heroes & Villains is trying to directly compete against with a
bucking bronco, a large tattoo stall (which WAS pretty damn neat), some ice
cream vans, 25 dealers, a couple of carnival sideshows (I think there was a
bungee thing there this year? I didn’t see it but it’s mentioned on their site)
and the cast of Arrow. But I wouldn’t feel the need to compare them –
sure Heroes & Villains would still be saddening and disappointing but I
would be fully in the ‘tis unfair to compare a new, smaller scale con with the
huge, long running cons’ camp if they didn’t put it on the same weekend as
one and in the same building as another. Fan Fest clearly think that you
should be going to their convention instead of MCM, that their con is as good
if not better, they’re inviting comparisons they can’t hope to win in because either they don't know what to do or can't do what they need to.
The con’s site claims to be revolutionising the way conventions are done, I hate to break it to ya guys but
shitty little cons with a few big name signings have been around since the
sixties. The whole con felt like a kid
trying really hard at something but lacking the everything necessary to pull it off, I felt bad for the
convention.
Ok, ok I’m done, let’s talk
about comics.
Comics!
£15 ($19.96) for Necropolis, I forget how much Cyber
Force was, about a fiver ($6.65)
MCM has a huge Artist’s
Alley (or whatever they call it, Comic Zone or something) and Destiny Blue is one of the loveliest human beings on the planet. Destiny Blue didn’t draw these,
she was just in Artists Alley also and I like taking ANY CHANCE to say nice
things about her. There’s a lot of people there selling prints (like Destiny
Blue, who’s lovely) or their own indie comics and I partake in them on
occasion. Necropolis: The Unusual Death of Elliot Finch is
great fun, it’s about a bloke who ends up in the underworld (which looks a bit
like London) – imagine if Coco and Blade Runner were combined. I only
really picked it up because I instantly fell in love with the character on the
front of issue 2 (the one I put RIGHT IN
THE MIDDLE of that shot) but the art and writing are top notch for a small-time
indie book and it’s got a good sense of humour to it. I read all three issues
on the way home while sweating my cobs off on the Central Line; I’d like to
thank TFL Rail for shutting down its train lines for ‘planned works’ on a bank
holiday when two conventions were on – dicks.
As for Cyber Force? I have
impulse control issues, you imaginary readers know this. There was a bloke with
boxes and boxes of old out-of-print trade paperbacks, I got some really sweet
ones for my birthday…and this one, which I couldn’t take money from anyone for
- it reprints the original four issues or Cyber Force. While it wasn’t the
worst of Image’s ‘launch titles’ (Youngblood, Spawn, Savage Dragon, ShadowHawk,
WildC.A.T.S. and Cyber Force) it certainly wasn’t the best, 'cyborg X-Men' is a good summary, but I saw it, got
all nostalgic and shit and at that moment needed to read about Velocity and
Ripclaw more than anything else in the word so now I’m one of the three people who
remember they own Cyber Force: The Tin
Men of War.
I’m hot, I’m tried, I think
I have heat rash and want to curl up and watch Star Wars with 10 fans on me and
bottles of Fanta in each hands so I’m off now. Thanks for wasting time on this
shit, you’re awesome.
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