Leave Before the Questions, and the Other Lessons of C2E2

People always come to iFanboy for convention advice, so here’s a piece you may not have heard before: if it’s close enough, take a train.

As I write these words, I’m reflecting on this weekend’s C2E2 convention in Chicago from a cushy, reclined business-class seat next to the dining car. (When this reporter rides the rails, he only looks like a hobo.) I feel like I pushed past the coats in the old professor’s wardrobe and discovered a magical new world of transportation, where kindly men in quaint little hats don’t even look at your ticket until you’re already moving. I thought the conductor was going to offer me a hard candy and tell me a story about the War. At one point, we found out that some people had missed their connection, and the train stopped and went backwards to pick them up. Tell that story to the next TSA worker you meet. I can’t believe I almost chose five hours of white-knuckling my steering wheel instead of this.

The No-Hassle Express set the tone for the entire convention. For anyone who’s ever been at a con that the fire marshall had to shut down to prevent a stampede and/or sweat-drowning; for anyone who’s ever lived in a Hooverville lean-to while waiting for the day you’d finally get into a panel in San Diego; for anyone who ever stayed home after hearing stories about anything like the above, there is C2E2. I have never said, “Well, that was easy” or “Wow, that went remarkably well” so many times in one weekend in my life.

Conventions like C2E2 hit the sweet spot: they draw top notch creators while at the same time being just the right size to actually talk to those people without standing in line for two hours. I was able to have actual conversations with the likes of Ryan Stegman and Fred van Lente even without tagging along behind Josh, Ron and Conor like a stray mutt one of them had accidentally fed. (Mind you, I did still tag along behind Josh, Ron and Conor like a stray mutt one of them had accidentally fed. That camera bag is like some kind of enchanted door-opening talisman.) My friend Kelly went over to see Janet Lee’s original wood “pages” from Return of the Dapper Men on display at her Artists’ Alley table, and by the end of the weekend I thought they were going to exchange phone numbers.

Pictured: harnessing the power of Asgard, Ali and I took over the Marvel booth until security harnessed the power of tasing me.

Even if I had never approached any creators, the show still would have been a blast. The people watching alone is worth the price of admission. Yes, there are your prime, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God specimens of Comic Book Guy, but there are also hot ladies and old guys with ponytails and surprisingly ripped Quidditch teams and cutely excited kids and miserable younger kids who are their dad’s prisoners. (I saw an eight-year-old immaculately dressed as Johnny Depp from Alice in Wonderland who I swear mouthed “call the police” as his dad dragged him into the main hall.)

That’s before you even address the cosplay. Although Hawkman With an Atom Action Figure in His Belt had put in the work, and Jessica Jones/Jewel was just workin’ it, I think my two cosplay MVPs this weekend would have to be Cross-Dressing Sailor Moon and the Kingpin. The latter in particular gets props for owning his body type, which more people everywhere could stand to do. Other notables included—but were not limited to—Specifically Videogame Harley Quinn, Specifically Manga Phoenix, and Woman Who Obviously Put a Lot of Time Into That Costume Which She Should Not Be Wearing Under Any Circumstances.

After a few years covering them from afar, I even sat in on a couple of panels. Well, actually I stood in the back of a few panels. I stayed at the Fear Itself panel until the questions started and caught only the questions at the DC panel, all of which gave me a valuable insight: do not stay for the questions at a panel. A woman who gets her Marvel comics by subscription got up to heatedly complain that Fear Itself was being published as a self-contained miniseries rather than hijacking and weaving itself through the books she already reads. The panelists spent valuable time answering her, time which I spent locating my brain and scooping it back into my head after hearing the question. I finished just in time to hear the gentleman who wanted to know if we would see how Fear Itself impacted Power Pack. That guy did not have a great afternoon, but it was better than the guy who waited his turn to deliver a scathing rebuke to the DC panelists about what was being done to Swamp Thing continuity, during which my soul briefly left my body. It should be noted that these panels, as it turns out, are conducted in rooms that are lit like romantic Italian restaurants, making the whole exchange feel like being on a date with Orson from Ork.

Pictured: This is the night. It’s a beautiful night, and they call it “bella notte.”

Archaia’s Jim Henson panel was one of the brightest highlights of the trip. They announced that Henson’s and Jerry Juhl’s only completed unproduced screenplay, A Tale of Sand, will be printed as a graphic novel this September. We were also the first public audience for a lost Henson short film, Alexander the Grape. The hour flew by and did everything a panel aspires to do: everyone in the room had a shared experience that you couldn’t get any other way. (That having been said, the whole panel was filmed for Archaia’s web site. Watch it to see me, the guy who sat directly in front of the Q&A microphone. I am sure my facial expressions will be a delight.)

Other highlights:

• Meeting Brian Bendis after years of writing about him without making an entire horse’s ass of myself. The line between iFanboy and actual fanboy is a tightrope.
• Talking about digital comics with the Graphic.ly representative and the manager of my local comic book store, only for all of us to realize our roles mid-conversation. Thankfully, they did not spontaneously start rumbling like Sharks and Jets.
• Getting to see (intra-site spoiler warning!) Molly do her first on-camera interview for the video show.
• Noticing that the program listed a “Tom Vs.” booth in Podcast Alley, even though Tom Katers was not at the show. I spent half an hour on Saturday sitting there pretending to be him, making up Aqualad trivia and challenging people to arm-wrestle me in a slurred drawl. (Parts of this may not have, in the strictest sense, happened.)
• Funniest thing I saw all weekend: I was sitting alone at the iFanboy table. A guy saw the banner above the booth and visibly lit up; his eyes said, “Oh, wow! iFanboy! I love it! Which of the guys is here?” His eyes traveled down from the banner to my face. He made the “ugh” face and passed the booth without breaking stride.

Regrets? I have a few. I forgot to go thank Paul Cornell and Skottie Young. I missed John Siuntres despite my best efforts. I forgot to go back for that Ryan Stegman print. I never quite pulled the trigger on getting a sketch. (Sorry! Feels weird. I know it’s why they’re there, but I still can’t bring myself to say, “I’m going to go have fun at this party; you sit in a folding chair in the corner and draw me a ROM. Draw it, I said! You work for me now!”)

All in all, though, this was the kind of con that makes you want to go to another con. If you’re a long-term planner, get this one on the 2012 calendar now. I’ll meet you in the dining car.

Jim Mroczkowski has just noticed that the afterparty seems to be at the Hyatt bar no matter which city the con is in. For a more random account of C2E2, pore over the last three days of his Twitter account.