Location: Direct Energy Centre.
Attendance: unknown at this time.
Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/comichistory/WizardWorldTorontoComicon#
I arrived a bit before when the con opened at 12 noon, the con opened on time and the lineup was all inside in a little over 5 minutes. A number of pro's & media guests were not set up yet. A solid chunk didn't show up at all on Friday. Throughout the day, I noticed some people move/change booths. 1 of the advertised dealers, 3rd Quadrant was not there due to health issues of owner Daryl Collison according to what he wrote online.
The early popular pro with the line up was Dale Keown. Throughout the day lineups developed for a number of other pros including Ken Lashley, Ty Templeton, Cameron Stewart, Phil Jimenez and Adi Granov. There were plenty of pro-wrestlers there which made the con a bit more surreal. Among the things that stuck out was watching Demolition Ax put on his own makeup with a mirror, seeing Scott Steiner's WCW Tag Team belt for sale ($300). Occasionally you'd hear Hacksaw Jim Dugan yell out his trademark "Hooo!" which was loud enough for the entire floor to hear. Kevin Nash appeared to be the most popular wrestler for photographs and typically had a large crowd around him. Iron Sheik gave out one of his trademark interviews to The Score (Canadian Sports Channel) on camera, I hope it airs as it was very funny.
For me personally I did a little back issue buying, but I was done looking by Friday and that was with frequent breaks, but my searching was pretty specific, those looking for Marvel/DC books would have had to do a lot more bin diving than I did. There were not that many people dressed in costumes, but Saturday is the costume contest so I expect them to show up tomorrow. Back to the comic aspect, there was a mix of product available. Mostly back issue bins, but there were many retailers offering Graphic Novels as well. There were a few booths offering Manga and Anime box sets. There were a range of advertised discounts as well, most of it based on US price or way less; the cheapest I recalled seeing was 30% off US cover.
What did make the con unique was the free live pro-wrestling. There was a crew of wrestlers from GCW that spent all day taking turns wrestling. Sometimes they were their normal wrestling characters but most of the time one or two of them were either a comic book or video game character. They would also change their wrestling style/moves to fit the character. Among the characters I saw wrestling was Kraven, Spider-Man, Puck, Deathstroke, Lex Luthor, Mario, Ryu and Scorpion. In between one of the people (often a wrestler) would gab away at the microphone in an entertaining way. They were regularly trying to get people outside on the con floor to come inside to watch them, sometimes even bringing the fighting outside for them to see. During the Lex Luthor match, they managed to get a young woman dressed up as Supergirl involved. They got her in the ring to smack him with a Kendo stick. She struck him several times as first she was timid and hitting him lightly to not hurt him, but with the urging of the crowd, Lex's opponent (and people on the mic) she increased the ferocity of the blows until she hit him pretty good a few times to everybody's delight.
I certainly hope those guys got paid well or are getting a decent quality GCG Amazing Fantasy #15 for their efforts, they worked their asses off wrestling many, many times during the day. The matches weren't as long or hard hitting as you'd normally see either on TV or in a normal arena, the sheer amount of physical work they did over the weekend was pretty amazing. They were also doing it in what was obviously an older ring that had what appeared to be garden hoses for ropes, covered in very ripped and tattered material. A small bit of the wrestling I saw was done on the floor too where there was carpet, but no mats. I mentioned the Kendo stick before, I should also add they were doing occasional matches with a 2 by 4 wrapped in legit barb wire. They also made use of a lighter and flash paper in matches too.
At one point there were some teenage girls in the front row watching the wrestling. It appeared they had never seen live pro-wrestling before. They were visibly entertained by humor, strong play-acting, the men with the good physiques, and how clearly some of the moves had to have taken their toll on the wrestlers' bodies. The entire wrestling organization just began focusing on them, from the wrestlers to the people on the mic, trying to keep them entertained. They eventually did leave, though.
The main event on Friday Night was TNA wrestler Consequence Creed vs. The Hornet, advertised as from Fiji Island and Jimmy "The Superfly" Snuka's protege. Snuka stayed at ring side and gave a bit of an intro but did not get involved in the match. Creed did win the match, but afterwords paid his respects to both The Hornet and Jimmy Snuka. Online over the weekend it was announced that Creed was let go by TNA. Hopefully he finds decent paying work elsewhere soon.
Odd note, Gail Simone's name tag labeled her as Artist. When talking about it with her she told me she hopes nobody asks her for sketches. There was some feuding going on too. Liana K showed up later on Friday and with her was a print out of a negative column about women who dress up in costumes and her naming the person and his booth# who wrote it and an urge to NOT support his work if they didn't agree with his column. The person was Sean Ward, a self publisher and musician. This is a bit of a surprise as at past conventions they would be seen hanging out together and Sean had appeared on Ed & Red's Night Party TV show, which Liana ("Red") co-hosted. I did not see Sean at the convention on Friday or Saturday, he was there briefly on Sunday but I did not see him.
The Convention ended at 8pm but a lot of people (including guests) started leaving at 7.
Saturday morning there was a long lineup to get into the convention. The volunteers did go through the line looking for people who had VIP passes and directing them to the shorter VIP line. People were let in smoothly at 10am. There was a Max Brooks panel at 11am and there was a long lineup to get in. It was very funny, Max is good at talking and answering questions. He was also very aware that he was in Canada and made references to our country (saying World War Zed, not Zee) at many points. At the panel they gave away a free comic book preview of the World War Z book. The room was near full. A recording of the panel is here. A word of warning, Max swears.
The wrestlers were still going at it all day long. Once in a while between matches they would bring in a former WWE wrestler to do a very small Q&A with. This was bit sad as people would leave and often there were very few questions for them. One that I witnessed was an awkward one with Kamala who I think wanted to remain partially in character and not speak English (he even said that to the interviewer on microphone) but they went ahead and asked questions and he attempted to come up with silly 1 word answers. Over all wrestling was much more popular on Saturday and they had the opposite problem on Friday where they had more people than chairs and were constantly trying to get the crowd standing near the doorway to come into the room stand or sit elsewhere to allow even more people in. Had they more chairs this wouldn't have been a problem.
I went to the KickAss Movie panel, it was a showing of all the various trailers, including some that hadn't been seen or are running in other countries. In between there was some joking questions and answers with a people who run a dorkshelf blog that focuses on Toronto area. It was mentioned that the movie was filmed in Toronto and we would see some familiar buildings (including 2 bank buildings). They announced a new MTV contest that would give people a free trip to Wizard World Chicago. There was supposed to be an exclusive Mark Millar interview but the video they had would only play on a computer and they only had a DVD player. The rest of the panel turned into a generic comic book movie Q & A.
I went back in to watch more wrestling but the fire alarm went off at 3:20, people sat around for 5-10 minutes figuring it was a false alarm and would be stopped shortly. Eventually somebody asked and it was clear that nobody knew what caused the alarm to go off so everybody was ordered out. People went out into the hallway just outside the door, at 3:30 a volunteer ordered those people outside so that more could leave the convention floor. Some people left and went home. The fire alarm would go off and on randomly and finally stopped for good at 3:37. A minute later they let the exhibitors back in first to get to their tables, then they let everybody else in just after 3:40. The con extended the show a half hour, closing it at 7:30 to make up for this.
I went back to watch the wrestling again, this time they had a woman wrestling with/against the men in a tag team match. She played Cammy from Street Fighter. Another match had man in a Red Skull mask wearing swastika's on his knee pads and giving the Hitler salute and shouting Seig Heil, which has been famous for getting wrestlers in trouble in the past. The Iron Shiek showed up and watched a match, gave a small rub to wrestler and entertaining mic worker Timothy Dalton. He fought a Luchadore wrestler who called himself Super Lighting (then later Red Lighting). At the end there was a Q&A with the Sheik and he was yelling swear words into the microphone with startled some parents who were there with their young kids.
Speaking of kids there were a whole lot of them at the show. I don't think I've seen quite so many kids at any other convention.
Between 5 and 6pm I watched the Costume Contest. There was quite a large panel of judges. They let in all the costume people first and double checked their info and gave them instructions. They had the coplayers sit at the back and the attendees sit up front. The room quickly filled up and many people had to stand to watch. Often as the cosplayers displayed their costumes the judges would ask questions about them, particularly looking for what was created by the player vs. what was bought. It would have been nice if there was a stage so everybody could see the entire costume. Along the way there was plenty of joking around and nerd culture references. After all the contestants were done they announced there would be a 10 minute intermission and then announce the winners.
I left at just after 6pm.
Sunday morning I was in the con about 10 minutes after it opened. I began asking around about yesterdays' fire alarm, there was suspicions but no solid answers. A security guard for the convention centre said it was a pulled alarm in the Ricoh Colosseum, which is connected to the convention floor and on the same alarm system. He said there was no actual fire. When I went to the Ricoh area, I was told it was a construction zone and hardhats and steal toes were required to get in. There were people openly speculating about another convention organization being behind the fire alarm due to the aggressive tactics they did against the con prior to Wizard purchasing it.
I luckily saw Ty Templeton trying to get into his panel and discovered that the convention has moved the time and location of the panel. The staff did let Ty know and announced the panel over the loud speaker. About 20 some odd people did come in and Ty's panel was a work shop in writing and drawing comic books. Ty gave his speech about how writing and drawing is a learned skill and it's not a magical thing called talent that causes people to be able to write and draw. He talked about writing, genre tropes, getting people to give samples of tropes of sci-fi, western and fantasy stories, then naming how certain movies changed them around or did a twist by removing some of the key tropes. He then handed out paper and some pencils and went into a basic drawing of a human head and went into the proportions of where the eyes, ears, nose and mouth was. After that was done he took questions. At the very end a kid asked him to draw Darth Vader for him, which he did.
At 2pm there was the Kids Costume contest. One by one they came up to pose for a staff photographer. Lots of laughs and oohs and aahs occurred. There was one kid in a Flash costume that really did run quite quickly up to the front and back off again which got a lot of laughs. There was a glittering She-Ra who pulled out her sword and said the "By the Power of Grayskull.." line into the microphone. At the end all the kids got toys for participating, there was a mix of toys from Kung Fu Panda, Dora the Explorer, Superhero Action Figures, Cars for Barbie type Dolls and more. There was also a free giveaway too. The event was about a half hour long. A video of the kids getting their toys at the end is here.
The pro-wrestling had a much delayed start on Sunday, first it was to start at 12pm, then at 1pm, then at 2:30. It did start a bit after that though, the match I saw had two members of the Suicide Girls come out with the good guy tag team and during the match they used this popular bubble shooting gun on the one of the bad guys (Jason from Friday the 13th, he ran back to the "locker room" screaming). On the convention floor I did notice some wrestlers asking people in costumes to do something to participate in a match, in particular I saw a Darth Vader agree to something and go towards the wrestling area.
Around 3:30-4:30pm I asked people about how the show went. For comic dealers there was a mixed reaction. Half the dealers said they had a really good show, the others said it was a little slow and not as good as they expected. I only heard 1 that felt it was just an in between good show. When asked what moved well 3 dealers said Golden Age books did well. Others said either trades, dollar bins, or an even mix of everything. Most of Artists Alley seemed to have an okay to very good show. There was only 1 artist I talked to that had a slow show. I left the con just shortly after 4:30.
The free live pro-wrestling from GCW literally saved the con for me. With little to no comic related panels and really only a days worth of going through the dealers room I would have been dead bored on Saturday and Sunday. If they do this con again next year I hope they bring GCW back. Half way through Saturday I just felt the need to buy something from the wrestling organization for providing me with so much free entertainment. Even though I've got a large and growing stack of unwatched wrestling DVDs I bought one of theirs just to support/thank them. Without the wrestling I'm not so sure I'm going to go for the entire 3 days next year. At least not without increased comic related programming. Outside of buying glossy photographs of a celebrity or pro-wrestler and getting them signed there really wasn't anything else to do.
Regards,
http://www.TheGraphicNovels.com
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