My Viking and I have attended a fair number of comic book conventions over the span of several decades, from WonderCon in Oakland/San Francisco to the Anaheim/San Diego ComiCon to the latest additions of Silicon Valley ComiCon, ComicFest, or BigWow!
However, this year was our very first year to Emerald City ComiCon in Seattle, Washington. A few of our friends attend, and we wanted to see for ourselves as they very much enjoyed this convention.
The convention is not as big as SDCC, but much much larger than Silicon Valley ComiCon, and we had an amazing time! It also helped that the entire crew of the
Animaniacs were there in attendance! I'm quite the fan...snarf!
One of the highlights of the whole show was the
Twisted Toonz event, where various voice actors for a variety of cartoons read the script for Return of the Jedi. It was so hilariously funny that I cried tears of laughter and one of the voice actors fell off his chair! I suggest checking out the ECCC versions as they did all three of the original Star Wars Trilogy!
Aside from the main events, we also attended quite a number of the smaller panels. I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity and depth of many of the panels. And there were quite a few that I couldn't attend because there were too many attendees to fit safely into the rooms. The ECCC app was a worthy download and help me keep track of everything I wanted to attend.
I went to a few cosplay-based panels, such as styling wigs, prop building, etc. There were a few writer workshops as well.
The Dealer's Room was fairly massive and including some big names like Weta and Dark Horse, as well as some smaller local shops, such as Mishu from Seattle.
The Artist alley was also huge! Just when I thought I had finished it up, there was another one around the corner (three in total). We might have purchased a few prints....
(Photos taken with permission from the artists)
I got to see some of my favorite artists and get a few things autographed. Artist alley was just as extensive as the Dealer's Room.
The cosplay was incredible.
(Tefiti from Moana)
There was an huge parent/child cosplay contigent. This father and daughter duo in the Weapon-X series is awesome.
And even some unborn children got into the act too!
There was also quite a number of panels dealing with cosplaying with
your children and exposing your children to geek culture. There's some
good parenting done there!
And some of the entries into the cosplay contest were pretty stunning.(The Lion Armor took first across the board)....
A nearly life-size tauntaun was pretty cool, as was all of the armor entries.
As for myself, I wore two previous cosplay outfits as I really didn't have time to make anything new ---
Shego and
Go Go Tomago. I neglected to take photos of GoGo's outfit, but I did run into another Shego while we were running around the convention. It was nice to see another Shego!
Sufficed to say, we had a BLAST at Emerald City. We got to hang out with our Pacific Northwest friends and family and seriously enjoyed ourselves.
We will be returning to ECCC. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to experience a large comic book convention without going to a mega-con like San Diego ComiCon.
