By MATT KALASKY
Posted: 6/10/11
"My rapport with Matt Kalasky, contributor of the Comic Con’s companion essay, numbers one of the discerning few that flourishes not by tending the ellipses of previous encounters, but by foraging a new alliance authenticated by the laws of our present game world. Writing dual accounts of a singular experience proffers the Library of Babel with exponential volumes exercising the coordinates at which our realities diverge and intersect. Documenting our experiences in a public medium proved a cardinal gesture begetting game worlds all its own. That is, after all, how Generation F does Comic Con."
-KENDALL GRADY
A PROGRESSION OF THOUGHTS:
The first thing: “Holy shit, that’s Lois Lane.”
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I am less taken aback by Margot Kidder; bespectacled and exhausted, slumped in one of those canvas director chairs. She is greeting and briefly conversing with fan, after man, after fan, after man. She is side-cared by a 21 year-old assistant who is tweeting something for someone somewhere.
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Here is what the tweet reads (plausibly):
Marge meets philly supergeeks @cityofjedilove
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The crowd is definitely the best part.
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No one cares about you Ford FOCUS. Your presences here is unwelcome.
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Halloween.
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Where did all these people come from, and where did they get these amazing costumes?
From an uncited Wiki soure:
"In the practice of Cosplay (COSTUME +PLAY), participants negotiate the actualization of a specific character, persona, or idea through the use of pageantry, cameraderie, costumery, accessorizationery, and/or haberdashery. It is most often associated with the canons of manga, anime, Tokusatsu, Hentai, video and computer games, graphic novels, comics, cinema, television as well as expansive subgenres of Epic Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Marxian Bangsian Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Retro Gaslamp Gothic Revival Fantasy, Cyberpunk, Steampunk (in conjunction with burgeoning Decopunk movements), Court Intrigue, Dying Earth Medieval, Mythic Speculative Fiction, First-person Arcanepunk Introspective, Socio-historic Paranormal Wuxia Meditative, and
almost negligible factions of RPG influenced Futrio-spaghetti-western tending Operatic Magic Realists."
Are the costumes amazing, or are the people wearing them amazing?
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Man, celebrities can look sad and bored. The ones signing autographs sit within booths, similar to Lucy van Pelt’s psychiatric practice or horse stalls in a 4-H barn. Above each waning star, as if for comparison, reference, or both, is an impossibly beautiful headshot. Brian O'Halloran looks positively stately. It is a picture of their alter ego. These pictures have super powers that the celebrities do not.
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Ford FOCUS did you see the DeLorean? It can (theoretically) travel backwards and forwards in time, run on Budweiser and banana peels, fly/hover, and (philanthropically) combat Parkinson’s disease. Ford FOCUS you seem just tinny, commercial, and un-magic.
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Those pictures of celebrities always make them look sexy and/or fierce. I am afraid of/attracted to Brian O'Halloran
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Do I {$20} want my picture taken inside the DeLorean?
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It’s for Parkinson’s disease Matt. Come on…
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I am cheap.
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The fans are definitely the best part.
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I know a thing or two about comic books.
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I know nothing about comic books.
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I am a cheap poser fan.
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I am a cheap poser fan.
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I am a cheap poser fan.
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The celebrity canon is nebulous. It has lesser and major constellations of stars. Its parameter is as permeable as definitions of The Force or ontology.
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For every celebrity I don’t care about, there are probably 40 people who care profoundly and deeply.
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Yes. I see them. They are over there waiting patiently in a double-file line to meet Alaina Huffman.
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In the fashion that dog owners aesthetically echo their pets (or perhaps vice-versa), Chewbacca and Peter Mayhew (the actor who was inside Chewbacca) seem to harmonize both physically and spiritually. That is the only way to put it.
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But do I {$10} want my picture taken with Peter Mayhew…
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I am a cheap poser fan.
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There are conversations going on, right now, that have never seen the light of oral articulation. I mean, me and Seven of Nine have spoke. We have shared deep, velvety thoughts on lunar grass and talked-shop in shuttle bays. But Jeri Ryan and I have never met.
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Maybe it’s better this way.
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How normal this all feels.
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There is really only one sci-fi universe. And it is overripe with inbreeding, hybridization, cross-pollination, and chimeras.
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There is Boba Fett Robo-Hulk.
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That is what a zombie unicorn looks like.
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Batman is everybody’s favorite.
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While young, imagining you’re Batman seems healthy and productive. Now, dressing up like Batman is an undeniable act of eroticism.
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No one knows who you are or what you look like if your SWAT team costume covers every inch of your body.
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And you don’t talk but only gesture with your toy gun.
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Is there a difference between a SWAT team costume and a SWAT team uniform?
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Yes. Toy gun v. Real gun.
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Wait. Is that a toy gun?
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Cosplay contains an element of danger.
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A list of the coolest applications of artistic skill when I was 17. (In order of coolness)
1. Drawing tits.
2. Drawing hand-guns.
3. Drawing Wolverine.
ERGO
An art school holding a booth here is brilliant. No one goes to art school to do performance art; they really don’t. It just sort of happens.
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Cosplay contains an element of performance art.
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My hobbies do not hold any sort of candle to a person who constructs cinema-grade, esoterically-detailed, and rhetorically-functioning Ghostbuster outfits and accessories.
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A book club will never hold any sort of candle to a club of people united by a passion for constructing cinema-grade, esoterically-detailed, and rhetorically-functioning Ghostbuster outfits and accessories.
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Who is more out of place: A herd of giraffes living naturally in a reconstructed sub-Saharan wildlife park.
OR
A visiting tourist taking video with his iPhone.
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Are these people really that nerdy?
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This is what a celebration looks like.
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These booths don’t need to be here.
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The crowd is definitely the best part.
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There is a man dressed as Clark Kent.
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Is that weird?
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Is that a costume?
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His superpower is being normal. His power is the power of potential.
An excerpt from Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes (Dial Press, 1965)
“The advent of the super-hero was a bizarre comeuppance for the American dream. Horatio Alger could no longer make it on his own. He needed “Shazam!” Here was fantasy with a cynically realistic base: one the odds were appraised honestly it was apparent you had to be super to get on in this world.
The particular brilliance of Superman lay not only in the fact that he was the first of the super-heroes, but in the concept of his alter ego. What made Superman different from the legion of imitators to follow was not that when he took off is clothes he could beat up everybody—they all did that. What made Superman extraordinary was his point of origin: Clark Kent
Remember, Kent was not Superman’s true identity as Bruce Wayne was the Batman’s or (on radio) Lamont Cranston, the Shadow’s. Just the opposite. Clark Kent was the fiction. Previous heroes, the Shadow, the Green Hornet, the Lone Ranger were not only more vulnerable, they were fakes. I don’t mean to criticize, it’s just a statement of fact. The Shadow had to cloud men’s minds to be in business. The Green Hornet had to through the fetishist fol-de-rol of donning costume, floppy hat, black mask, gas gun, menacing automobile, and insect sound effects before he was even ready to go out in the street. The Lone Ranger needed an accoutremental white horse, an Indian, and an establishing cry of Hi-Yo Silver to separate him from all those other masked men running around the West in day so of yesteryear.
But Superman had only to wake up in the morning to be Superman. In his case, Clark Kent was the put on. The fellow the eyeglasses and the acne and the walk girls laughed at wasn’t real, didn’t exist, was a sacrificial disguise, an act odd discreet martyrdom. Had they but known!
…The truth may be that Kent existed not for the purpose of the story but the reader. He is Superman’s opinion of the rest of us, a pointed caricature of what we, the non-criminal element, were really like. His fake identity was our real one. That’s why we loved him so. For if that wasn’t really us; if there were no Clark Kents, only of glasses and cheap suits which, when removed, revealed all of us in our true identities—what a hell of an improved world it would have been!”
While writing this essay I learn from an uncited Wiki source that there is now an amendment to Feiffer’s dualistic account. There has been a fracture in the Superman v. Clark Kent plurality, positing room for what many now believe is a more accurate trinitarian model of the Superman psyche. The three vectors are, one: the extra-terrestrial, demi-god Superman; two: the flaccid, earthling caricature Clark Kent; third, and finally, what most consider his truest self, as neither Man of Steel nor Man of Rubber--the persona in between. The one that is only revealed when he is safe at home in the Midwest or in Lois Lane’s loving company. Just a normal (but not too normal) guy with superpowers and no need for a cape. In this school of understanding, both Superman and Clark Kent are in equal parts costumes.
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This man’s Clark Kent costume is fantastic.
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I wonder how he feels when he puts on his Clark Kent costume.
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Does he feel powerful?
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Or does he have the power to feel pathetic?
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Correction: The power to feel pathetic by choice?
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I wonder how he feels when he takes off his Clark Kent costume.
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Does he feel like Superman?
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OR
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Does he feel like the guy with Lois Lane?
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As we leave, I command the automatic doors open with my Jedi mind power.
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By KENDALL GRADY
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