Better late than never, (well maybe you had best read the post before deciding that).
As promised last week here is a run down of Wellington’s Armageddon expo. Now please remember that we only went on the Saturday and only for a few hours. As such I was unable to photograph as many freaks as I wanted to. If you are one of the freaks who I did manage to capture then please feel very lucky.
Here is the official review (just scroll down a bit). The first line is: “Well we survived Armageddon Wellington 2005, I feel like I endured a Klingon pain ritual to get there…” Why do they always have to mention Klingons?
[With regular dial-up web-surfers in mind, I will link to the photos rather than having them in the actual post, so please do follow the links]
José and I paid our $14 entry fee, for this we received a ticket; we turned 180° and handed our ticket straight to a waiting volunteer. We then passed people giving out bags of freebees (and advertising) as we reached out the ladies laughed and said these are for kids only. We didn’t laugh. José made the joke (gesturing towards me): “He has the mind of a child”. I still didn’t laugh.
Back when Armageddon was first starting in Auckland the entry fee would net everyone a bag of goodies including: a random six month old comic, a lollipop, vouchers and five kilograms of advertising. Now only the kids get it, it made feel very old (sniff), I’m not even worth being marketed to anymore.
We passed the display of “fan art” being shown. There was a whole lot of “Furry” art. These are anthropomorphic animals, usually portrayed in skimpy outfits as either barbarians or gun-totting warriors. It is quite weird.
I poked my head into the main auditorium and saw that Ray Park (Darth Maul and Toad in X-Men) was doing a sword fighting demo with audience members. Ray Park should not be confused with Ray Parker Jr who performed the Ghostbusters theme song. The light was poor and so the pictures are slightly blurry. Sorry.
In these photos Ray is battling a girl who is wielding a neon-lit, life size Count Dooku lightsaber. Ray himself only had a little tiddler of a saber, but it’s not the size that matters…
We moved on before he had finished. We went to a stand being run by (what they claimed were) NZ’s only all female comic publishers. They published a book called Tour Girls (by the way do NOT type that into a search engine to find a copy just contact me instead, I’ll tell where you can find it). They were running a special so I bought a couple of issues (actually there have only been two issues). The girls were likable and very enthusiastic (one remembered us later on and said hello which was nice) but I found the comic kind of haphazard and un-funny. The art was ok, but confusing at times as well. Also it seemed that they were trying for the fan-boy audience as the two main characters are of the long-legged, large-chested variety (you may remember there was a drive recently to get more women into the graphic arts so that there would be more “real” looking women). Sorry girls.
Moving our way past Japanese stuff, pewter dragon statues and kids high on P, DBZ and YGO (that’s Pokemon, Dragonball Z and YuGiOh) we found pourselves at the NZ comic area. Yay! There are some brilliant NZ comics around, there are also craptastic ones. The last Armageddon went to I was browsing the NZ comics and had just put down the worst illustrated badly written piece of crap and was walking to one of the other tables when the author of said crap yelled at me: “Hey why don’t you buy some NZ comics!” I turned, and there were a few people watching because of the loudmouth, I informed him that I had, in my bag, a copy of Pirate Technics, a copy of Chopper Chick and a copy of Killer Robots Will Smash the World (The website for these brilliant titles is here).
Oh that reminds me, I also (finally) got my hands on a copy of Pirate Technics II. For those of you out of the loop, the story revolves around rock and roll pirate robots that have to team up with the robot forces of dance music to battle evil pop-music zombies (who are also robots). It is a much better read than I have described.
José got to talk to his comic hero Dylan Horrocks again. I snapped this photo while they discussed stuff.
Photo 4
And then I saw these guys.
Photo 5
The girls will like you now you’ve got a little wooden sword. It’ll add heaps of Charisma points.
Dylan Horrocks is a nice enough fellow and we chatted for a while. Strangely the topic turned to pornography after I purchased a set of Dylan’s Tijuana Bibles (which are only slightly dirty). Dylan said that he was interested in the idea of porn, the idea that pencil drawings could stir primal emotions in people and really get inside them. He told us about a new project he is working on that follow this idea. José was supposed to ask him about it later at a talk he was giving at a gallery in the Aro valley–Dylan asked him to because he thought “it’s an interesting topic and I want to discuss it more”–but he couldn’t because there wasn’t a chance to ask in the end.
Further down from the NZ Comics (which I didn’t buy) were the guys from Bro’Town (the only link I could find). I got José to take a photo of us.
Photo 6
I’m the un-cool white dude (coloured red) in the middle; Jose is the reason the photo is blurry. I thanked them heaps and as we walked away some guy asked me: “Did you just get a photo with them?” “yeah” “oh”. I didn’t realise what I had done. On the way back past there was a large group gathering around the Naked Samoans getting photos taken. Sorry guys that was me who started that.
The rest of the expo was a little disappointing. I still didn’t find Gen13 #8 (the only one I don’t have) if you have it and want to sell it to me please contact me. And these were the only people I saw in any kind of costume.
Picture 7
Picture 8
I think that the guy in the Darth Vader was asking his girlfriend if he could buy it (it altered your voice too).
Well that’s it. It was quite disappointing in the end. It probably needs to be bigger or something.
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