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It’s going to take a while to get the images and sounds — and smells — of New York Comic Con out of our head, and images such as the above — a bevy of gender-swapped Doctor Whos composed of cosplay superstars — will show you why. There were SO many costumed people at the the show this year. The ratio of costumes to lookieloos was incredibly high. So yeah, if it was spectacle you wanted, you got it, including the topless woman with the fake mustache who was hanging outside the Javits on Sunday.

“Yeah, they were talking about her all the way back to Macy’s,” a photographer told me. Since Macy’s is five blocks crosstown from the Javits, this is the equivalent of light speed communication in New York terms.

§ Sean Gaffney has a detailed day-by-day run down of all the manga news:

Day One
Day Two
Day Three

Despite the presumed deathbed state of the American manga industry there was a lot of news, and the incredibly active and engaged manga/anime crowds at the New York Anime Fest totally disproved that.

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§ Photos! Michael Kupperman author of the new masterpiece MARK TWAIN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1910-2010, decided to dress up as Mark Twain! That’s right, even the PROS were cosplaying! He posed with everyone from a random Jedi to Solomon Grundy.

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§ Cartoonists Maris Wicks and Joe Quinones also cosplayed as Han Solo and Poison Ivy. Photo from a lovely Flickr set by Kevin Church. Kevin has disabled linking, but we have posted this tiny excerpt in the interests of a “historical or journalistic presentation” and hope we can be forgiven.

§ The Doctor Who stuff is out of control. This typical attendee was chagrined at having her eye poked by an errant pink sword, but glee at finding a Tardis made up for it.

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§ There was also Trek of several varieties.

§ For a random pro reaction, Kathleen David did things with puppets, and other, Star Wars things with her daughter.

§ Evan Dorkin had a pretty good time:

Spoke to some folks at another publisher about maybe possibly doing something together sometime within the next ten years. Unexpectedly ran into David Mazzucchelli and spent some time catching up. Talked to Ryan Flanders from Mad. Got to talk to Jill a little bit more at her table. Said hello to Cliff Chiang. Spoke briefly to Landry Walker while the show closed down, I’d been looking for him since I got there but never ran into him until then, unfortunately. That was pretty much it. The drive in was fun, I hitched a ride with Socko and Boomer and Tiger from Comic Book Jones (and Joe from Marvel). I had a Coke during my signing and ate some cruddy McDonald’s “food” on the way to the 1 Train to the ferry.  None of my Monopoly sweepstakes playing pieces were winners.

§ There are a googleplex of cosplay galleries spotlighting the attractive women of New York Comic Con, but io9 has

 

The Greatest, Strangest and most Obscure Cosplay at New York Comic Con, which doesn’t have captions so we only got a handful of them, but they are pretty spectacular.
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Spectacle. That was the word.

1 COMMENT

  1. I find it funny that the number one costume for women this year was the 11th Doctor. Was there some kind of planning for this? An Internet meme come to life I’m not hip to? Because I saw at least 20 of that costumes.

    A close second is any female costume that allowed the woman to wear fishnets and a thong. I missed the topless woman outside the Javits, but I saw enough exposed rumps to last me a lifetime. Don’t want to sound like a prude, but come on.

  2. The most common cosplay outfits were Deadpool (including a Deadpool Corps), Hit Girl (including an elderly version), Black Widow (tight outfit, but fully clothed), and Poison Ivy (including one “Poison Oak”).

    There were many unusual outfits… Plastic Man, Captain Boomerang, Ruby Rap, a few eight-bit-mapped cardboard costumes. No furries, at least the full-bodied species, just the typical manga ears and such.

    Both Cookie Monster crowns and those Viz deely-bobbers were popular with the general populace. Even a few Naruto paper headpieces as well.

  3. Torsten, I thought the Action Comics #1/ “Rags Morales Superman” was the big new costume of the show. The tired phrase of “brown is the new black” is so overused, but I just have to say “Rags is the new Powergirl”.

    All in all, a very strong, well-run show from my POV.

  4. Kupperman was there?? Dammit! I missed him. But no surprise as walking around that con was impossible.

    The anime floor was super cool. Yeah, it was crowded way beyond reasonable, but anime/manga people are *so* nice and fun!!

  5. Hey, Heidi! Thanks so much for linking to that photo of Maris and Joe and I’ve absolutely no problem with you sharing it. (Just fyi: you can actually use Flickr’s “Share” function to access an embeddable copy of the photo. I disabled out-and-out downloading after discovering my work being ripped off by a stock photography site.)

  6. Just because I’m anal-retentive and used to work there;

    googolplex = very large number, namely 1 followed by a googol of zeros.

    Googleplex = common name for Google’s corporate HQ in Silicon Valley.

    Ironically, while you probably meant “googolplex” above, since last I heard there were around 20,000 occupants of the Googleplex, that’s actually a more accurate size for the number of cosplayers at NYCC. : -)