Rose City Comic Con 2017: The Review

It was fun! The end.

Ok, I'll elaborate. This last weekend I drove down to Portland to attend Rose City Comic Con for my second time. It was a lot of fun. The convention is about half the size of Emerald City Comicon (yes, the two conventions spell the words comic con differently) but half the size is still 40,000 attendees over 3 days. It's a big convention that attracts a good amount of celebrities and comic book professionals. Since it's about a 3 hour drive I spent the night in Portland on Saturday. The original plan was to go down with my wife but something else popped up so I was flying solo.

Did I mention already that I left my pass (ie ticket) at home? Yep, I arrived to the Oregon State Convention Center about 20 minutes after the doors opened Saturday morning to realize that I had left my freaking pass back in Seattle. I'm very lucky that the convention staffers were awesome and my wife was smart texting me a couple pictures of my pass at home and I was able to get a replacement. Man, I don't know what I would have done. Drive back home? Buy tickets at the door and blow my budget? All the options were pretty crappy.

The convention itself was pretty standard RCCC fare. I bought some comics, visited some writers and artists, watched a few panels. More or less the same stuff you can do at Emerald City except there's more space to walk around because the Oregon Convention Center has a great layout. Getting to panels is a bit weird because for some reason RCCC insists on labeling the panel rooms something different than what the convention center does so none of the signage matches. However, once you've found a room they're easy to find again. I didn't catch any of the big celebrity guests this year. Weird Al was there but his panel was on the day before I drove down, William Shatner's was too late on Sunday considering I had to drive back home that night. The rest of the big celebs that actually interested me a bit had conflicts with some smaller panels on comics that I really wanted to see.

I spent about half of what I spend at ECCC, which is good because I'm still broke from plumbing issues last month. The comic book selection was great. Lots and lots of dollar bins. You can always find high priced key issues at a convention but finding really good stuff in the dollar bins is tough. I also bought some prints from a few of my favorite artists and got a couple sketch books. The best part of the whole thing is I got really inspired to produce more art. I've even committed myself to getting a booth at an artist alley in the near future. Not at RCCC or ECCC, those tables costs a ton, but at one of the smaller conventions that have popped up around the region over the last few years. Don't get me wrong most of the artists at RCCC draw circles around me, but there were a couple booths where I was like "eh, I do better work that this". And at a smaller convention the overhead is pretty low... anyway this isn't what I was writing this review.

I'm looking forward to going back to RCCC next year. I'd love to spend the full 3 days but man, getting a hotel was pricey. Also I don't think I want to go by myself next year. If my wife can't come I'm definitely taking my son. Walking around all day looking at cool stuff but not really sharing it with anyone is kinda boring. It's cool for a couple hours but then you find yourself eating dinner alone at the bar and it's like... ugh. Making friends with strangers is a game for 20 year olds, not 40 year olds.

2017 SDCC Cosplay

Our friends at Sneaky Zebra (I say friends because one of them e-mailed me like 3 years ago) posted this cosplay video of last week's big ol San Diego Comic Con. It starts out with a guy firing up his Zune so you know it's going to be good.

Speaking of Zune's did you know Apple officially discontinued the iPod nano and shuffle today? It's tough finding a stand alone mp3 player these days. I know its because the market for them is pretty dried up but it still sucks. I actually prefer using one over just my phone but I know I'm in the super duper minority. The last one I bought was made by some Chinese company I'd never heard of. Maybe I should stock up on them in case they all disappear forever.

Jet City Comic Show is Definitely a Thing I Went To

This last weekend my son and I went to Tacoma's biggest comic book convention, making it something like the 156th biggest in the nation, the Jet City Comic Show. This was my first small comic book convention. I couldn't find an exact number on-line but I'd be surprised if they cracked the 10,000 mark. I went on Sunday afternoon just for a few hours and I'll bet there were probably 1,500 attendees in the building. There were about 200 tables with just a couple celebrity guests, who all fell into that "person who was on a show you've heard of but wasn't the main star of that show". There were plenty of local artists and independent publishers, a couple comic pros that have had work published by the big two and a few authors, local and national, that I hadn't hear of.

It seems like this was a good show to actually pick up comic books. There were about a dozen large vendors and then a few more that had assorted tables of geeky stuff, many of which included at least a couple boxes of comics. I took my son which wasn't ideal for spending an afternoon digging through long boxes but I still walked away with about a dozen old X-Men comics to fill gaps in my collection. We also picked up a TMNT Lego Set that was retired a couple years ago, they were asking retail price so that was a nice find. They had a couple older Star Wars sets that were calling my name but I had already set my son's budget at $20, which was already WAY too high considering it was just his birthday.

Anyway, it was a nice little show. There wasn't a ton of stuff there and it wasn't an experience to itself in the way that ECCC is but it was well worth the $10. Also the Tacoma Convention center is really nice in fact the entire downtown Tacoma corridor is cool. Free parking, free right on the light rail, it didn't smell, what more could you ask for? Next year I might leave the boy at home so I have more time to dig around, maybe I'll try and get there on Saturday to see if there's more hustle and bustle. I'm definitely headed back to Tacoma next summer when they have the Pinball and Arcade Expo. There were a couple guys at Jet City with a couple cabinets hyping the event and it sounds awesome. Hundreds of pinball and old Arcade machines set of free play? Yeah, that sounds like a show I could get into.

Garbage Bags Full of Links

The Best And Worst X-Men Video Games of All Time. This isn't a bad list, there are a couple games I'd place a little higher and I think it's cheating picking Marvel v Capcom 2, but overall not bad. It really makes me want to go back and play X-Men Legends. As long as I'm firing up the N64 for some WCW/NWO Revenge maybe I should plug in my PS2 while I'm at it.

On a slightly related note, I'm worried my PS2 won't stand the test of time. I remember right before I got a 360 it wasn't playing a lot of DVDs and games took an unusually long time to load. I can't imagine it's gotten any better sitting in a box in my garage for the last 10 years. That would be a shame, there were some really great games on that thing. Frankly I'm interested in how all my old machines are going to stand the test of time. I feel pretty confident that my SNES and N64 are made of adamantium but I fear for anything disc based. I might have to have a real funeral if my Dreamcast ever dies.

The Diamond Rio PMP300: Can this classic 18-year-old MP3 player still cut it? Speaking of old technology, the guys at ARS take a look at a nearly 20 year old MP3 player. I'm one of like 10 people that still uses a stand along mp3 player. I like taking it to work and listening to it through a small stereo I have in my office. I also like having it when I'm drawing. Using my phone as an MP3 player is annoying, you have to hit a side button to wake the phone THEN tap something on the screen to skip a song. With the ultra cheap mp3 player I bought on Amazon I just have to hit the forward button and boom I'm on to the next song, I don't even have to look at the thing.

The only thing I don't like about my china direct mp3 player is that it's so incredibly small and light. Like it ways a half an ounce. I'm always misplacing it and because it feels so light I'm always afraid I'm going to crush it in my hands accidentally.

AFFLECK'S BATMAN Solo Movie Title Confirmed. It's THE BATMAN. Now you know.

Stars Getting Rich Off Fan Conventions: How to Take Home "Garbage Bags Full of $20s". Have I talked to you about Comic Book conventions lately? It's interesting I'm part of two convention groups on Facebook, one for Emerald City Comicon and one for Rose City Comic Con. The ECCC one is full of people that are absolutely SALTY over the lack of "quality" stars and last years convention. They want the entire cast of Star Trek, Doctor Who and The Hunger Games there signing autographs and taking pictures. They absolutely can not wait to spend $100 for a picture with Worf and Riker.

But there's a small group of people just under the surface grumbling about how the stars are greedy. $100 for a picture is too much, the convention costs too much because of all of the guest. Then there's vendors at the conventions that are afraid with all the money going to celebs there's not enough going to their tables. The grumbling isn't always loud but it's there.

At a certain point the bubble is going to burst. Soon enough a one day ticket to ECCC is going to cost $100 and people are going to get priced out. Vendors aren't able to get back the cost of their tables the vendors are going to stop paying for those tables. Your large comic book convention is built on a rather unsteady foundation and it wouldn't take much to topple it. Right now the convention scene is still on the grow, but at a certain point just like everything else we're going to see some contraction. It'll be very interesting when that finally happens.

I'm Taking my Talents to Rose City Comic Con

Welp, it finally happened. I just bought tickets to a comic book convention that isn't Emerald City Comicon. Yes, I'm only headed a couple hundred miles south to the fine city of Portland, but this is still sort of a big deal for me. The last year or so I've been thinking about how much fun it would be to travel to a bigger con in some other state. Rose City isn't exactly a bigger con, but I can drive there so my out of pocket cost isn't that crazy. I'd have to check but I'm pretty sure two days at Rose City plus a hotel for a night in Portland was less than I paid for tickets to ECCC this year.

Should be fun, Rose City Comic Con had a partnership with the old owners of Emerald City. The website and logo, even the way they distribute tickets via local comic book shops, is very much what ECCC looked like two years ago before they were bought out by BIG COMIC BOOK CONVENTION.

The convention is about a month away so I have a good amount of time to obsess about driving down there and eating lunch alone. Hopefully its a good time. I've never put a bird on anything, so that will be fun.

San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) Cosplay Music Video 2016

When the posts are few and far between you can pretty much bet I've been on vacation. I've spent the last few days at Great Wolf Lodge doing all kinds of water park stuff like almost drowning and paying WAY too much money for ice cream. The kids had a lot of fun and I feel like I've been run over by a truck so I guess it was a successful trip.

Here's more cosplay from SDCC, Hopefully next week I can get back on track. If I don't hit 30 posts at the end of the month I dock my own pay.

2016 SDCC Cosplay: Cosplay Beyond

Day two of Comic-Con cosplay picture time! I read that it was hot as ball in San Diego last weekend so keep that in mind every time you see a cosplayer in a full armor get up. Walking around in all that foam and plastic would be a great way to make weight if you had a UFC fight later that weekend. Although the overlap of Comic-Con goers and UFC fighters probably isn't that high.

I guess my point is this weekend was really perfect conditions for ladies (or dude) in booty shorts. You might even say we saw THE SEXIEST HOTTEST COSPLAY EVER this weekend. Yes, If you're looking at this google image search I would definitely say we saw THE SEXIEST SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON COSPLAYERS EVER. Boobs.

Again, these are just pictures I found on tumblr, reddit and twitter. If you own any of these or are in any of these and you want credit or links just hit me up and I'll be happy to add them.


Put Kylo in some lifts and this would be perfect.


Harley Quinn is the new Slave Leia. These costumes will be everywhere this year.


Hail Hydra!

The tag said this was Mera but it looks like a rule 63 Aquaman to me.


I actually this this might have been a statue. Oh well too late to remove it!


This is one of the most impressive bat suits I've ever seen at a con.


How easy is it to get off that much body paint? Are you stuck like this for days?

Is that a Vinyl Spider-Man costume? I didn't think they made those anymore.

Great Batgirl Cosplay just reminds me that we'll probably never see a great Batgirl Movie


You think when he's at the gym he tells people he's working on his cosplay?


Hello Nurse.


I'm still convinced this is actually Wesley Snipes.

Dude put on a suit, bought a glove and he has the most impressive cosplay of the group. Well done.

2016 SDCC Cosplay: The Cosplay Awakens

Hey kiddos, you know what time of year it is? It's Comic-Con cosplay picture time! Also known as the time of year when Kevin pads his site visit numbers for the entire year. It's not a huge surprise that my most popular post for the month is still a cosplay gallery from the 2011 SDCC. People (ie bots) love those cosplay posts. I have at least two of these posts lined up for the week, I might even make it three this year.

Just to make sure we cast as wide of a google image search net as we can I'll throw in a couple adjectives, I've found that stupid adjectives really help with the google searches. Sexy, Hot, unbelievable, geeky, hilarious, funny... umm I already said "hot" right? How about Sexy-Hot? How does that sound google image search? Sexy-Hot is just how you like it, right? Oh yeah... boobs.

As expected this year's SDCC had a lot of cool an imaginative cosplay. Here's some of my favorites, or at least some of my favorites that didn't have watermarks on them. If you own any of these or are in any of these and you want credit or links just hit me up and I'll add them.


I expect we're going to see a lot of Suicide Squad cosplay from here on out.


This is even better than that Mad Max Trump I saw everywhere last year.


That's because nobody cares Waldo. Nobody cares...


Sexy Chewbacca? Sure, why not?


There was a lot of Overwatch Cosplay this year. This reinhardt was my fav.


Genius! The kids are cute and they can't use their arms. Perfect Cosplay!


Sweet Fancy Moses, those wings!


Are we sure this is cosplay and not the real GRRM?


It's sad when you realize she dies at the end of the con (JUST KIDDING!)


Is that Enternity the abstract, virtually omnipotent entity representing all time and reality in the background?


Not Technically cosplay but amazing none the less.

Deadpool vs Comic-Con 2016

D-Piddy is a pretty well known cosplayer, he goes to a lot of conventions dressed as Deadpool and acts really silly. Everyone has a good time. Here's 5 minutes of him at this years SDCC. I like the part where he grabbed that one dudes butt. It's funny because butts are funny.

Also, holy crap. Was that actually Wesley Snipes?

Uninhabitable Links

Tara Strong Rocks The Harley Quinn Cosplay At SDCC. This is noteworthy due to the fact that Tara Strong is the voice of Harley Quinn in the Batman: Arkham video games. She also does voices for Teen Titans Go and My Little Pony. It's also noteworthy because she is not unattractive.

More Cosplay for SDCC to come later this week!

Official: Yahoo snapped up by Verizon in $4.8 billion deal. Yikes, it wasn't long ago that Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for like $43 billion and that's down from the nearly $110 Billion it was worth back in 1999. Outside of my parents and my wife's parents and probably your parents, I don't know anyone that uses Yahoo regularly. Wall street sees this as a win for Verizon because they've been able to acquire a bunch of content for not very much (It should be noted that Yahoo paid just over a billion dollars for Tumblr alone two years ago). I sort of see this as a loss for the internet as a whole. It's just another case of an internet provider becoming heavily invested in the content business, which is a blow to net neutrality.

Rio Olympics Athletes' Village Declared "Uninhabitable". These beds are too small! Also the toilets don't work, the power lines are all exposed and the whole place smells like gas. Other than that everything is just fine in Rio!

The Astounding Herrera's magic tricks in S03E15 of King of the Hill ("Sleight of Hank") are animated realistically. The people behind King of the Hill really di put a painstakingly impressive amount of detail in to the Magic tricks performed in the Sleight of Hank episode. Man, King of the Hill was just the best show. I have a couple seasons on DVD. I really should go back and watch those more.

Visual Links

Twitter Permanently Suspends Conservative Writer Milo Yiannopoulos. Man, that guy has a punchable face doesn't he? So the long story short here is that this guy encouraged his followers to tell current SNL actress and Ghostbuster Leslie Jones just how terrible she is. I don't follow either of these two on twitter but a few people I do retweeted some of the stuff that was sent to Leslie Jones and woof, it was horrible. Like Croatian soccer fans throwing bananas at black players horrible. Of course now this Milo guy and his group of asshats is claiming censorship and that the liberal media is intolerant to conservative ideas and blah blah blah.

Worse than his actions are some of the people defending him. I mean his actions are terrible but I get that he's just a hack trying to get attention. There are people out there that legitimately believe it's their god given right to call someone a cunt on the internet. I do not get that.

Rob Liefeld Is Hiding ‘X-Force’ Sketches All Over San Diego Comic-Con. This is a pretty cool little contest from a big name that totally doesn't need to do this. Rob Liefeld gets a lot of crap because he can't draw feet and a lot of his comics just disappear after issue #2 or 3 but he seems like a decent guy. I really wish he'd make his way up to Emerald City Comicon sometime but I think he has a beef with the group that puts it on.

One of these days I'm making my way to SDCC. It looks like a huge expensive pain in the ass and I get that all the cool comics stuff gets totally ignored but still. It's like complaining that the World Cup Final is rarely a good game, you still want to go just to experience it, right?

Cool visual effects in 16bit console games. I love how much Nintendo and to a slightly lesser degree Sega, were able to squeeze out of their 16 bit systems. It's a sort of creativity you don't see (or at least aren't able to recognize) with the current generation of consoles.

"We Were The Best, Richard" 10 Great Moments From Grant Morrison's Batman. I have a lot of Grant Morrison's Batman run and I found a lot of it to be hard to read. He has this habit of just dropping you off in the middle of the action and I'm the kind of reader that can barely remember what happened in the last issue so I was always going back an issue to see if there was something I missed. I'm guessing his run reads a lot better as a trade, or at least it would for me. I should really go back and reread some of those.

Phoenix Comicon 2016 - Cosplay Music Video

Vic Rincon and Katie Owens put together a pretty nice cosplay video for last week's Phoenix Comicon. There's some pretty good costumes in there, my personal favorite is Kip from Napoleon Dynamite. Napoleon Dynamite is cool again, right? I know there was a while there where it was sort of played out but I think it's cool again. It's not like it's been "yeah baby-ed" to death like Austin Powers has. Man if ever there was a case of a movie being crippled by it's own popularity it's Austin Powers.

Anyhoo, Phoenix Comicon looks like a lot of fun. I'd like to go one year. Of course it might be a bit more fun if it was in winter, not the start of summer. Who wants to go to Phoenix in June? It's like 130 degrees down there right now.

2016 Emerald City Comicon: The Recap

Emerald City Comicon is like second Christmas for me. Except that it's twice as expensive and this year it was hot as balls. I actually got sunburned on my walk from work to the light rail station on Thursday. Sunburned! In April. Someone get Al Gore on that.

The convention this year was a blast. A lot of dorks on Facebook were concerned that new ownership for ECCC would mean all sorts of drastic changes but I barely noticed any. Little things get tweeked and moved around every year, frankly the changes from 2013 to 2014 were bigger than they were this year. They added a 4th day this year, which was fine. It was only a half day and since it was on a Thursday it was way less crowded. Next year I might try and take advantage of that and get more signatures and sketchbooks while moving around is a bit easier.

Nathan Fillion's panel was the only one I went too over the weekend. It was pretty fantastic. He was really funny and charming. Most of his time was spent answering questions from the audience and the audience actually brought their A game. Nothing worse than when the audience tries to make the panel all about them and sort of ruins everything in the process. Hopefully next year I'll hit up a few more panels.

I didn't meet or get as many signatures from comic book pros as I have in previous years but I had WAY better interactions. I don't know if it was the pros or if it was me. Either way I had a blast. I also had a lot of fun with the friends I went with. I think drinks at lunch really helps the convention going experience. Even if comics aren't your thing I definitely think it's worth the ticket just to people watch. Heck it's worth it just to meet new people. I didn't make any new friends or anything while I was there but I did talk with a bunch of people and everyone was super cool.

I'm already looking forward to next year. It's the first week of March instead of April so it's only 11 months away! Below is a bunch of links to some picture galleries. If you've got a few minutes to kill they're worth checking out.

Pictures I took of Cosplayers. I made it a point to take more/better pictures this year. I got about a dozen good pictures. That's not terrible, right? Next year I'll either have a new phone or a fancy camera (both are on the 2016 Christmas list) so I'll try and get a few more.

A quick recap of my haul. I was doing really good sticking to my budget this year until I took the family on Sunday and we blew a bunch of cash on T-shirts. Man, the t-shirt racket at ECCC is strong. I didn't even get one for myself it was just shirts for the family and it was still 65 bucks.

Pat Loika's gallery of ECCC Images. Pat Loika is a guy I follow on twitter, he takes great photos of any convention he goes to. He has a lot of pictures of the pros in artist alley, which is cool. Most people just take pictures of the cosplayers.

2016 Emerald City Comicon Costumes from Seattle Refined. A lot of people were bummed when the star of Supergirl, Melissa Benoist, had to cancel at the last minute but this cosplayer was the spiting image of her.

Social Scene: Snapshots from Emerald City Comicon. Dude, this guy's Thanos costume was insane. Even the people working at the con were doing double takes when he walked by. Amazing work.

ECCC 2016: Cosplay Gallery by ComicVine. Learned something new this weekend. My son has a big ol crush on the rabbit from Zootopia. He got so shy and clingy when he saw her. It was hilarious.

Pixlr's 2016 ECCC Gallery. The Pixlr people had a pretty nice booth set up by the entrance where you could get pictures taken in your cosplay. It looked really legit and they have a ton of really good pictures here. If they're there next year maybe I'll throw my son in there.

WonderCon 2016 Cosplay

Here's a cosplay video from our friends at Sneaky Zebra. I hadn't even heard of WonderCon before last year and this year they had 60,000+ show up. That's a pretty big convention. Its held in Anaheim, so maybe some of that success has to do with people either being fed up with SDCC or not being able to get tickets to SDCC. Either way that's a big show. Lots of cool costumes in this video. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts a couple of these people show up at ECCC this week. I always like being that guy who says "hey I recognize you from the internet". No uncomfortable conversation has ever started out that way.

Tweetbot Links

12 of the Saddest Locations and Encounters in Skyrim. Ok, I'm seriously impressed. When I played Skyrim I didn't catch any of these. Sure I've been to some of the locations but I never looked around long enough to figure out the stories behind them. Kind of makes me wonder what else I might have missed or what I might have missed in Fallout 3? I'll bet there was tons of stuff I just blew right by. Oh well, I guess that's what internet lists are for.

The Battle of 2017 Could Be Disney v Comic-Con. This is an interesting story to geeks like me. Basically Disney has scheduled their big D23 convention to happen right around the same week as San Diego Comic-Con (the big Comic-Con). Last year Marvel studios barely sent anyone to SDCC, are they going to snub the biggest comic book convention two years in a row? Probably. If Disney is anything it's insular. Why make a big splash at someone else's convention when you can have your own? Is this some sort of trend? Has SDCC's bubble burt? Who knows?

I pay some attention to the convention scene, mostly just for the blog but it's not something I follow with a passion. I will say that there have been a lot of think pieces about just how big comic book/pop culture conventions have grown all across the country. I can't tell you if that growth is unsustainable or not, but I can say I would mind if ECCC tickets got a bit cheaper.

Shocking: Microsoft's AI Tweetbot Learns How To Be A Racist, Sexist Monster In Less Than 24 Hours. I feel like this is less of an indictment against Microsoft and more of an indictment against twitter and how awful the internet is in general.

The Nintendo NX Is Rumored To Be The Most Powerful Console On The Market. Well here's one for you. Everyone already knows the new Nintendo is right around the corner. Nintendo announced just the other day they were going to stop manufacturing the WiiU later this year and it's not like they're not going to make consoles anymore. In theory they might be in the Sega Genesis sweet spot. The Genesis came out almost a full two years before the SNES and was able to pick up a lot of steam with hardware far superior to the 8-bit NES. In theory the Xbone and PS4 have a lot of life left in them, with no direct replacements in sight. If Nintendo can hit the market later this year with a console that's more powerful (maybe even 4K?) can they match the success of the original Wii?

Man just when you thought the console wars were more or less over, here we go again.