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Goth Chick News: Cool Stuff from the Chicago Comic-Con

Goth Chick News: Cool Stuff from the Chicago Comic-Con

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image004Ah, August in Chicago.

Bicyclists along the lake front, street festivals, the Navy Pier Ferris Wheel… and so many guys dressed like storm troopers you can’t spit a piece of gum without hitting one.

It’s once again Comic-Con time in the city.

Each year, following the bacchanalia in San Diego in July, the less manic, more edgy and far more spandex-laden version makes its way to my favorite city and thanks to my Black Gate creds, I get VIP access every August. The big Hollywood bunny-huggers in California can keep their con. Give me the artsier, indy-er and far more laid back Midwest version where you can still hobnob with the entertainment industry; but instead of seeing them from behind black draped partitions, you walk right up, shake hands and have a chat.

Amazing cartoonists, emerging authors, small-movie moguls and performance artists all mix with Iron Man-costumed day traders and slightly overweight Batmen.

A better afternoon you couldn’t hope to spend.

In the coming weeks it will be my distinct pleasure to bring you in-depth looks at some of my absolute favorite finds from the 2011 show. But being one of those “open at least one present on Christmas Eve” kind of girls, I couldn’t wait for the interviews to start taking shape.

So, here are a few of the most unique sights that caught my attention, in a good way. Believe me, there were a lot of sights that caught my attention in an entirely different way altogether, but I’ll stow my snark and stick to the cool stuff, listed in no particular order.

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Gen Con 2011: Day 2 Recap – Revenge of the Sith

Gen Con 2011: Day 2 Recap – Revenge of the Sith

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darthelijahThe force is strong with this one, it seems. Yes, that’s my beloved son, taking his first steps toward a larger, more gamer-filled world, as he becomes a temporary apprentice to Lord Vader. (Don’t ask me why the Rebel Alliance officer is standing near them. It just doesn’t fit continuity!)

The second day of Gen Con was our family day, as I took my son and wife to the convention with me. This day is was lot more leisurely paced than yesterday, because we spent more time being selective and sitting down to demo games, because with a six-year-old, you really have to be a bit more picky. He’ll lose patience if you’re chatting up designers about setting specifics. He wants some action, and if he doesn’t get it, there will eventually be a meltdown. With summer ending, we’ve been in meltdown territory for the last couple of weeks anyway, so it was touch and go, but we found enough games for him to get up to speed on quickly that it kept him highly engaged.

One game that we found very interesting, though not particularly fantastic (in the narrative sense of being fantasy-driven) was Bears! from Fireside Games. This dice-based game aims to simulate a bear attack during a camping trip … so, you know, it teaches helpful life lessons, as well. Depending on different die combinations, the players are able to escape the rampaging bears by shooting them, running away, or sleeping contentedly in their tents. However, if there are more bears left over when this is all done, then those sleeping in tents get eaten and lose points instead of gaining them.

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Gen Con 2011: Day 1 Recap

Gen Con 2011: Day 1 Recap

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Did I say I was an unapologetic geek? My wife, Amber, offered our son to a dragon at GenCon!
Did I say I was an unapologetic geek? My wife, Amber, offered our son to a dragon at GenCon!

It’s that time of the year again, when all the good little gamers gather in Indianapolis to explores the exhibitor’s booths and discover treasures, new and old. I speak, of course, of Gen Con Indianapolis, the “Best Four Days in Gaming.”

If you recall from last year’s report (see Gen Con 2010 Reflections if you don’t recall), I had a lot of fun last year, mostly because I now have a family to take and with whom I could share the experience.

They also prove useful bait for dragons. (Just kidding. No infants were harmed in the making of this blog!)

Today, however, was all about me. I trekked into Indianapolis to experience the first day of the convention on my own, basically blasting through the Exhibit Hall and trying to look at every booth to find if there was anything interesting for me to report back on.
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Art of the Genre: Cosplay

Art of the Genre: Cosplay

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There are two incredible things in this picture, and they aren't the outfits
There are two incredible things in this picture, and they aren't the outfits

I live in L.A., Tinseltown, Hollywood, the City of Dreams, and you’d think that being here would overwhelm me with fantasy, but in reality it’s never that way. Sure, now and then you’re someplace ordinary and run into a ‘star’, but seeing the reality of that always seems a letdown as well.

I think that’s why having an office next to Ryan Harvey is so special, because he’s even more a Peter Pan than I am, and his creative vision is always spilling out into the reception area. Kandline, or Kandy as I call her, helps too, her ‘I’m going to make it’ and goth-prep style always bringing a smile to my face when I roll in late from a long line at Starbucks.

Still, I live a pretty mundane life if you don’t include trips on the BG Zeppelin. I have a wife, a son, and bills to pay just like most folk in the world, but there are those moments in time when even I dream about what could have been if time worked a bit differently.

What do I mean? Well, I’m talking about those crazy kids today and their ‘Cosplay’. You see, I’m a Halloween junky, like last year I dressed up in full costume each Friday of October to pick up my son from pre-school. That being said, however, I end my persona-swaps after All Hallows’ Eve, but if life were different, if I were younger, and if Cosplay had existed in 1990 I’m pretty sure my life would have been drastically different.

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Readercon 22: Meeting Mark Twain, Winning a Rhysling, and Sundry

Readercon 22: Meeting Mark Twain, Winning a Rhysling, and Sundry

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PART II.

(Part I can be found here.)

Readercon 22: Saturday

Now. Where was I, where was I?

Ah, yes. Readercon.

Me, Gwynne Garfinkle and My Sinister Puppet Hand
Me, Gwynne Garfinkle and My Sinister Puppet Hand

Think back. Stretch your minds back. It’s Saturday, July 16th. Where are you? Sipping ice tea on your veranda while the dog pants at your feet and the cicadas whine and the barbecue sizzles — and it’s a summery summertime stretch of summeriness — and you’ve even remembered to put on your sunblock? GOOD FOR YOU!

Me, I hardly saw the sun that weekend. I was in the Boston Merriot Burlington, where the air conditioning was fierce and the convention programming intense!

Julia Rios Makes Every Hotel Room a Castle!
Julia Rios Makes Every Hotel Room a Castle!

In the morning, Erik Amundsen and Patty Templeton and I stole away to Panera Bread, to consume an inexpensive breakfast of sandwiches and rubbery room-temperature soufflés. I was back to the hotel in time for my 11 o’ clock interview with Julia Rios.

Ha.

An interview!!!

That makes me sound VERY POSH AND IMPORTANT, doesn’t it? Only it wasn’t like that, really, because the interview was recorded as a podcast for Broad Universe (called “The Broad Pod“), and it was to involve me and Gwynne Garfinkle and Mary Robinette Kowal, and if you think that I’M the posh and important one in that group, then I don’t know which current affairs rack you’ve been hanging your hats on lately, misters and mistresses!

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Readercon 22: In Which the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (well, some of them) Encounters Cannibal Towns, Dirty Limericks and Googly Eyeballs

Readercon 22: In Which the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (well, some of them) Encounters Cannibal Towns, Dirty Limericks and Googly Eyeballs

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Cannibal Country. (AKA Guilderland, New York)
Cannibal Country. (AKA Guilderland, New York)

The thought that preoccupies me is, “How the heck am I going to find enough pictures to go with this post?”

Unlike that one time when we crashed a Zeppelin into Madison, we did not document our epic journey across America with anything so practical as a camera. No!

Instead, we marked the miles in the bellowing of bawdy (need I say, alternate?) lyrics to “There’s a Hole in My Bucket, Dear Liza,” the scrawling of character notes, place names and plot devices for a story about a stolen moon, the counting of times the word “Beloit” was mentioned in the back seat (Brendan Detzner being an alum and S. Brackett Robertson, or “Brackett,” a current student), in Billy Joel sing-alongs and idle speculations about the nature of certain malevolently leaning shacks in Guilderland, New York.

The B-Train. (AKA, writer Brendan Detzner)
The B-Train. (AKA, writer Brendan Detzner)

“Meth shed?” Patty postulated.

“Cannibals?” I countered.

“CANNIBAL METH SHEDS!” we roared together, with, perhaps, more delighted gusto than was strictly necessary.

“So… Do the cannibals eat the meth heads?” Brendan asked. “Or are the cannibals themselves meth heads?”

The conversation went on. I will not trouble you with further details. By this time we had been driving approximately ten hours and still had nine to go.

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Goth Chick News: Zombie Contamination and Other Stuff You’ll Only Find Here

Goth Chick News: Zombie Contamination and Other Stuff You’ll Only Find Here

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image0021Fresh from their final exams and smelling strongly of AXE body spray, the new batch of summer interns creeps tentatively down the stone steps into the underground offices of Goth Chick News. After orientation, which in this case includes a thorough hosing off, they are scurrying around collecting information for their first assignment.

Akin to the pleasure of taking the Margarita salt out from its long winter storage is the joy of taking on twice as many interns as necessary and making them fight each other to the death in their first week, to remain one of the chosen few.

“Bring me pop horror culture!” I shout; frothy frozen cocktail in one hand and riding crop in the other. “And make sure it’s fresh! We’re not running some crappy Ryan-Seacrest-production here!”

C.S.E. Cooney laughs maniacally from the corner and asks if she can have a go with the riding crop.

Summer is definitely in the air at Black Gate headquarters.

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WISCON SUNDAY: In Which Goblins, Floomps, Flying Spaghetti Monsters and Ice Cream Robot Kings Abound

WISCON SUNDAY: In Which Goblins, Floomps, Flying Spaghetti Monsters and Ice Cream Robot Kings Abound

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"Like FIRE, HellFIRE, this FIRE in my skin!"
"Like FIRE, HellFIRE, this FIRE in my skin!"

It was a stormy Sunday morning in Wisconsin. Guests of the Madison Concourse startled awake to the tune of “Hellfire,” from Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, floating in from a nearby hotel room.

The voices were tuneful (well, mostly — given the amount of sleep the singers were operating on) and vigorous (especially for that hour of the morning), and, after all, who could resist lines like:

Voice 1: It’s not my fault!

Voice 2: MEA CULPA!

Voice 1: I’m not to blame!

Voice 2: MEA CULPA!

Voice 1: It is the gypsy girl, the witch who sent this flame!

Voice 2: MEA MAXIMA CULPA!

The guests, satisfied that no poor soul was being murdered and flung from a bell tower in a righteous rage — that, after all, it was only Ms. El-Mohtar and myself greeting the morning in our usual way — rolled back over and went to sleep…

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WISCON SATURDAY: In Which We Encounter Monsters, Tacos, Traveling Fates & Faerieland

WISCON SATURDAY: In Which We Encounter Monsters, Tacos, Traveling Fates & Faerieland

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Terrifying banana of later acquaintance.

The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood woke with much gusto. A puppy pile was had, as was a deliciously free, Con-Suite breakfast. There was a random, rather interruptive child building a trebuchet at the table. Sadly, the trebuchet didn’t work.

[The Critic suggests that you never attempt to give C.S.E. Cooney a banana at breakfast or otherwise. She has a mild anger at bananas.]

Overlord O’Neill went down to the dealers’ room. His Saturday activities included zapping book mites with a nano-taser, shouting to all and any of the merits of Black Gate and entertaining Bradley P. Beaulieu, the author of The Winds of Khalakovo. Yes, dear reader, there were so many authors at WisCon you couldn’t itch your back without knocking one off your shoulder.

O'Neill and Beaulieu
O’Neill and Beaulieu

While O’Neill was go-go dancing and having the Drexler-Smalley debate with those that walked by, C.S.E. Cooney and I attended Monsters!, a panel exploring the fascination of anomalous villains, led by David Peterson, P.C. Hodgell, Richard S. Russell and Tuppence.

What is the definition of a monster and how has it changed throughout history? The general consensus was that a monster is that which is unexplainable, unnatural, uncontrollable and has no culture.

frankensteinToday’s monsters usually cause psychological discomfort, whereas Medieval monsters were more of a spiritual bane.

Extending the question to who can be a monster, the experiments of Stanley Milgram and Solomon Asch were examined. Two continually referenced texts were On Monsters by Stephen T. Asma and The Monsters by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler.

milgram-experimentMeanwhile, Katie Redding attended the Human, Cyborg or Just Another Robot? panel that, well, I refuse to talk about. We are not convinced that our Ms. K. is all that she used to be. In fact, we think she is more. There was a mech-hole in her noggin, (think Terminator 2 where they unscrew the back of Arnold’s head) and now she can lift mid-sized sedans and calculate large sums quicker than Rain Man.

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WISCON FRIDAY: In Which the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood Crashes A Zeppelin Into the State Capital

WISCON FRIDAY: In Which the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood Crashes A Zeppelin Into the State Capital

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The Harold Lamb Comes to East Dundee
The Harold Lamb Comes to East Dundee

It was a partly cloudy day in East Dundee, IL.

There we were, three youngish women, frolicking in the flower garden, drinking tea and entertaining toddlers, when all of a sudden, a shadow moved over the sun.

It was Black Gate’s zeppelin, the Harold Lamb, on the descent.

“Ef!” Ms. Templeton twirled her stealth parasol in alarm. “The Gee-Dee thing’s coming down on the roof!”

“Not my roof!” Ms. Redding shouted, a baby on one stylishly jutted hip and a chaenomeles speciosa (a nasty and ubiquitous shrubbery, recently uprooted by dint of chain and pickup truck from her front garden) brandished high in her free arm.

For myself, I was convinced Ms. Redding was set to hurl the shrub (or, at the very least, the baby) at the Harold Lamb in an effort to knock it off its fatal course. Thankfully, at the last moment, the zeppelin veered, mooring itself between two surviving elms. A rope ladder unfurled. A familiar voice over the loudspeaker boomed down:

“Will the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood please climb aboard?”

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