The second day at Wondercon started out with fighting traffic only to find out we had to turn around and go to the overflow parking and then walk to the convention. Not the most fun way to start the day. Add to that, when we got up to the “Adventure Time” panel, the line was across half the hall and since they weren’t clearing out rooms, it was already filled up. Last year, we arrived late (after getting rained on by a torrential downpour) and still found seats inside. This is how much the crowds grew from last year. You could really feel it on the Exhibition floor. While the halls the con had to fill were bigger, they really felt smaller with the layout and crowds. But this is where we spent the majority of the day, searching for a booth my kids had found the day before and had some Team Fortress 2 figures they wanted. We finally found it at the end of the day.
Wandering the Exhibition floor wasn’t the only way we spent the day. The cosplay really doubled on Saturday, including my youngest daughter who dressed up as Jade Harley, a human from the webcomic Homestuck. Sometime in the afternoon, she suggested we go check to see if there were any meetups going on. We first check the places we had seen Homestuck players hanging out before, but found that following the small groups we saw walking lead us to meetup that was taking place in front of the Arena. We let the kids loose, and they wandered and talked with the fellow fans. There were at least one of every troll and human, and I had to quiz my oldest daughter often to either verify or identify who some of them were. There were leaders of the meetup, but dealing with teens and young adults is often like herding cats. One male who had a booming voice was starting to lose it by the end of the meetup. They did a photo shoot arranged by character, which they wanted centered around on of the light poles. But every time a group came up, they posed between the poles, even after being told “The pole is your friend.” They were also instructed to come in from one direction and exit in the other, which was promptly ignored for most of the shoot. But the kids still had a good time, and my husband got to take lots of pictures. My daughter is the Jade in the middle in the white skirt and blue bec insignia on her shirt.
The last panel of the day for us was the “Elfquest 35th Anniversary” panel with Wendy Pini and Stephanie Thorpe and Paula Rhodes, producers who have optioned the film/TV rights for the series. These are the same women who created the trailer “Elfquest: A Fan Imagining.” They showed images of Wendy’s earliest drawings of elves, to her workspace at WARP Graphics, to the latest convention appearance before Wondercon. Wendy provided commentary for all the images. And since Richard wasn’t there, they took a look at the elves fashions from the beginning of the series in the 70s, to the mid-80s, to the 90s, ending on the fashions in the latest series, The Final Quest. A new page of this has been going up every week at Boing Boing, while Wendy didn’t want to spoil anything, she did say that the latest story would last 4 years, and would have a lot of characters doing surprising things. It sounds like a lot of fun, and it makes me want to dig out my Elfquest books and read them again! Like I don’t have enough to read now. They will also be releasing the original series back into print as well as two art books of Wendy’s work, both Elfquest and non-elves. There wasn’t much said about the progress of the film, or even if it was going to be a film or TV series, only that they were in talks to find a director. Of course, the first name to come up from the audience was Joss Whedon, but he’s a little busy.
Tomorrow, we make the trek for the last day. There are only two panels we are going to, Boom! Comics’ all ages imprint KaBoom! and IDW Publishing’s Hasbro Titles. I will be doing full coverage of these on Good Comics for Kids, but I’ll have something here about it. And then there is all the swag I’ve bought. I did manage to find a few things to purchase.
