On Sunday we headed over to the ExCeL centre in London to take a look at the MCM Comic Con, billed as 'the UK's biggest modern popular culture show' and my first ever trip to an official comics convention!
No dressing up for me, but we did get a cute Ewok costume for the little man:
This event was *huge*, encompassing every fandom you can think of and covering the whole geek spectrum from anime to steampunk. As our priority tickets got us in early we headed straight for the ‘comic village’ section while everything was still (relatively) quiet.
My husband is a massive comic fan and he was super excited to meet his absolute favourite artist John McCrea, who drew DC’s Hitman series. Here he is signing a page of original artwork which I’m sure will be adorning one of our walls in the near future:
He was such a lovely, friendly man and took the time to talk to us about his art when he could easily have just signed the page and moved on.
We also found some volumes in the Twisted Dark series that my husband hadn’t been able to get hold of at the T Pub stand (we’re about 20 minutes in at this point and the purchases are already racking up!) Whilst there we met the writer, Neil Gibson, who was kind enough to sign them all and say how much he really appreciated the support of readers.
There was a lot of amazing artwork on show in the comic village, but my favourite stall belonged to the Island of Doctor Geof where there were displays of brilliant, funny steampunk artwork.
Everyone on the stall was very friendly, including Geof himself, who was intent on trying to get us to take away their sandwiches. This lead to a conversation on how many times you can offer someone a sandwich before it moves from kindly to creepy. Sooner than you’d think, we decided!
They were selling artwork and these cute patches (pictured along with a cute bag that I picked up from the Tofu Cute stand - I hope the Japanese doesn't say anything offensive!!):
Most of the panels we’d have wanted to see were on the Friday or Saturday (like Sherlock or Doctor Who), so we spent the rest of our convention time wandering around the many, many shops. Having a pushchair with us made it a bit awkward in the increasingly packed hall, but that’s to be expected really!
There were some great board games stalls amongst the shops - Pandemic: Legacy was everywhere and at one point I did have T.I.M.E Stories in my hand - but I was a brave, sensible person and held back for the time being!
We did buy a lot of art prints (mostly Star Wars based) so there's lots of framing in our future at the moment. I'll have to put some pictures up when we find somewhere to hang it all - although I think we're going to be short of wall space!
Loads of people had dressed up for the occasion (putting us to shame!) and their costumes were really amazing. The work that goes into some of these is staggering, and in a lot of cases they looked like a lot of effort to wear, too! Here are some obligatory convention-blog-post-cosplay-shots of the people I accosted for photos:
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| Lego Batman and Robin... and their backpack? |
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| Vault Boy bobbleheads! |
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| Katamari cousins - Ichigo is my favourite! |
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| We are not prepared! |
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| Pretty Warcraft-ness (I think!) |
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| Amazing Bioshock: Infinite motorised patriot |
We had an amazing day seeing friends and exploring the convention, so we'll definitely be back for the next one - although next time we really need to plan ahead better and make sure we look at what panels are on, as we missed out a bit on this part of the experience.
We'll have to wait until 27th-29th May 2016 for the next MCM Comic Con in London, but in the meantime I’ll be back at the ExCeL in November for the Doctor Who Festival 2015 – happy times!
