Hi everyone. It has been a while since I actually typed a blog, Lately it's all been Facebook Live videos, but somehow, on my way home, I visualized myself typing it more than speaking it.
If you have been folowine me on Faceboook or are on one or more of my mailing lists, you know that I have been pro-actively seeking speaking and perfroming engagements at conventions outside the city. I booked DerpyCon in the spring and it almost escaped me. Fortunately, it came up on an alert I had set, and I was able to plan for it and arrange things to be there.
I did not manage to get a table, nor did I get a musical booking. All I got was a panel lot at the very end of the very last day of this three-day show on Halloweekend.
Awkwardly, I also had gotten booked doing a haunted house in Prospect Park, Brooklyn this same weekend (my first PAYING acting gig this year), and Mike Carbonaro of the Big Apple Comic Con wanted me to hep him promote his upcoming show at the Chiller Theater convention this same weekend.
I wound up not doing Chiller at all. I did the haunted house Friday and Saturday (and the eight previous days) but took its final day off to go to DerpyCon.
DerpyCon bills itself as "New Jersey's Anime, Gaming, Sci-Fi & Comic Convention." It was heavy on the anime/manga-inspired cosplay, and I saw very little about comic books in general. Accordiing to their website there was a lot of activity in the evening, including acolplay formal ball, and "Idol" competition. Unfortunately (with regards to being any part of that) I was back in Brooklyun scaring people in an "elevator" wearing a rubber mask of a head with no flesh over the skull and muscles. So when I got there on Sunday, it was mostly panels, workshops, the dealer and artist room, and kareoke.
What with the busyness of my life in the month of October, from the NY Comic Con to the Haunted House to all the business with moving my mom's stuff out of her apartment, I had not allowed myself the time to inventory my Captain Marvel Culture booklets and flyers and pre-pack for the event. So I packed the morning of the event, and found that I had fewer flyers and copies of the second and third of the booklets than I wanted, and the Staples in my neighborhood closed down last month (my mom had gotten a postcard from a real estate agent who said that whole section of the block was available for development). A little Google-fu showed me that there were three copy shops within a brief walk of the convention center (the Hyatt Regency hotel in new Brunswick).
So after checking in at the convention, I tried to call the closest copy shop. They didn't answer, so I thred emailing, but thorguh a comedic inadvertant misdirection play, I did not get the password for the hotel's Wi-fi for my computer to sent the the file of the flyer to print, so I walked there myself.
Now, that particular section of New Brunswick (Near Rutgers University) has a quaint, New England sort of feel, like you are walking past buildings and houses that have been there since the Revoution. Hoever, at one particular street there is a brand new office building going up that just cuts acress the area like some sort of dystopian border wall. It realy ruins the "quaintness" if the vibe in that area.
That being said, the first place I checked, a local business,was closed (despite Google's declaration of it being open).
The next on the list indicated "closed," and the third place was open. The young lady there was kind enough to talk me through the password for that store's Wifi, then run 150 copies of the flyer for me (after we figured our how to print on both sides flipped on the short edge, not the long edge, so that the page became the book, and wasn't upsidedown on the opposite side.
By the time I got back to the convention, the line of people checking in at the registration desk had disappeared. I had hoped that these flyers would get people to come to my lecture. The folks working the registration desk did not expect many more people to come, so left a few flyers there and went to explore the event.
There was a nice selection of dealers and artist there, though, interestingly, not a single dealer of comics or independent comic creator in sight. There was a small collective of professional writers of fantasy and science fiction and a bunch of creators of jewelry, plushies, clothing, and art. Also dealers of toys, leather coods, gaming accessories, and oither things. The dealer room was not terribly large, but the quality of good was high.
There was a kareoke room, and I considered stopping in and doing a song, but I did not know how long I would have to wait, and I wanted to get through more of the convention.
The largest section of celebrities was that of voice actors for animation. There were also tables for a cosplay burlesque group and a Star Wars lightsaber group. The burleque group was the same one that had performed at Thy Geekdom Con in May, and a fellow who I had talked to back then was there. I reprised my comliments of his performance to share them with the rest of the group. He was very much a young-middle-aged dad-type, but his embracing of the medium and the genre of burlesque was so joyous and complete that it was truly inspiring. I said that he was like the middle class dad who told his wife he would come to bed after wathcing Johnny Carson, but when the wife had gone to bed he would take his costumes out from under the couch and sneak out to do his burlesque dance. He appreciated that.
Before long it was time to do my panel. Unlike the previous two conventions, where there were very few or no attendees to my Captain Marvel lecture when it began, this time there were about a half-sozen butts inthe seats when it wa time to begin.
The lecture this time had a new focus. It was bout diversity in the many Captain AMrvels and what that told us about diversity in comics and America. I aksed the peole before I began why they had come to the lecture, and here was abot an even split between people who were curious about the Captain MArvels, and those who were interested in learning abotu diversity in comics.
Irattled through the boilerplate of the history of who was Captain marvel when, but rather focused on the particular demogrpchics of each of them and severa key storyines in comics and movies that featureed non-majority demographic characters and issues regarding them.
One interesting thing about being a straight, white, Nordic/Germanic/Celtic presenting, cis-male, atheist talking about diversity is that I have not experienced any of the issues that whose who are not any of those things (except for Christians) have experience that make their presence in a superhero comic book what we call "Diversity." So there is a very heavy risk of saying things that could be anything from awkward to insulting.
The language we have to descibe minority groups is loaded with words that have been used in hate speech, and to us epolitically-correct terms can sometimed be grammatically awkward and work against giving asn accurete improssion of attitudes of the times. I tied to be very careful not to sound presumtuous about how people in marginalized monoriteis felt about certain things, although such feelings are a clear part of history.
At one point I found myself expressing an opinion about the social impact of a trend in media towards a certain lifestyle and I was feeling how I was leaning towards an opinion some might disagree with. At that point I just asaid the I would stop talking about it right there because I only needed to identify a popular trent without analyzing that trend too deeply for the purpose of this lecture.
Several people came and went during the course of the lecture. I think at it's maximum there were about a dozen people in the room, which was slightly more than the number of people in the previous program, a trivia quiz about Star Trek, though maybe fewer than a lecure in another room about helping people with neurodivergence. But the five people still there at the end all said, when asked at my conlcusion, if they had learned something and enjoyed the experience, and I was being my best self, they all said yes.
And two people bought my Captain Marvel booklet sets and joined my mailing list.
After the panel I was disappointed to find out that the karaoke ended at the same time as my panel. So I wandered a short distance until I found a young couple and asked if they would mind if I sang them a song. They welcomed me to do so, and really enjoyed my Jedi love song, "Come on, Lady Jedi."
We talked a bit, and the fellow there borrowed my guiitar to try playing it. He definitly had better skils than I did, but he said that he had not played an acoustic guitar in a long time. He was intrigued by my Washburn, with its mother-of-pearl inlay around the edge. I am quite proud of that guitar since it as is good or better sounding than others that are much more expensive.
We joined voices for a rendition of weird Al Yankovic's "The Saga Begins" (my voice was a total wreck for that one), and that pretty much wrapped the convention. All the rooms and tables were closed or closing, and the event had come down to the post-show milling about, talking ans shmoozing, and cosplayers taking photos.
I passed out a bunch of flyers for the Big Apple Comic Con, inviting cosplayers to my costume contest, and they all seemed rather enthused about it.
So I headed out. The train station oas a medium-walk away from the event site, and I slept through most of the train ride home. I have spent most of my productivity time since then writing this report, and found it slightly diagnostc and somehat theraputic to do so. I needed to get my writing muscles back and it feels good to have done so.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading, and I hope to do a lot more writing in the very near future.
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