BY SAJIDA AYYUP
§ One week is all it took the Seattle torchbearers of cons to arrive at a conclusion — ECCC2020 will see the light Aug 21-23, 2020. For those of us who were developing a liking towards #ECCCOnline, the news seems lukewarm at the best. WonderCon 2020 followed suit and said the unofficial Con dates may be July 23-26 which received positive reactions from some of the fans on Twitter.
This will give me more time to plan my cosplay pic.twitter.com/8aMq48tga1
— Wally B. ♦️♦️♦️ (@WonderousWally) March 12, 2020
§ Golden Age Collectables, a comic store in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, showed off some super cool cosplayers casually shopping for their annual con jazz
§ Wondering where to catch up on your annual con shopping while sipping tea at home, streaming cat videos? Artist Alley Online has got your back! They curated a list of ECCC artists who would have otherwise been at the actual Alley. Started by a group of friends to support each other’s work, this platform has now extended to non-ECCC artists who want to make new friends! Check out the live Twitch stream while you’re there, too.
§ Funko made their 2020 ECCC exclusives available on Friday morning. As of right now many of them are sold out, but you can still add a green-haired Troll, Speed Racer, or an Avengers: Endgame Thanos, among others, to your collection if you act fast.
§ Speaking of convention exclusives, during Friday’s Very Very Shopping Network Twitch stream (around the 2:10:00 mark), Dark Horse Comics announced that their planned ECCC 2020 exclusives will instead make their debut at AwesomeCon, currently scheduled for May 1-3 in Washington D.C.
§ You can check out the VVSN’s Saturday of #ECCCOnline streaming right here.
§ Cons are reserved for sharing one’s obsession, discovering new ones and reliving the old. Aaron D’Errico, an ability advocate from Friday Harbor in Washington, shared his big fan moment from the good ol’ days.
https://twitter.com/AaronDErrico/status/1238530303100100614
§ Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen artist Steve Lieber shared a thread on Twitter of nuggets of wisdom for emerging artists who would have loved having their portfolios reviewed by him at the con. Here’s the first few tips:
1. Violating the 180 degree rule makes this sequence hard to follow, particularly without any environmental clues to tell the reader that the p.o.v. has shifted so drastically.
2. A few more incidental overlaps will make the foreshortening on this figure read a lot more clearly.
3. Symmetrical compositions with a character dead center imply an important moment, often with a religious significance. Maybe don’t draw every panel like that?
§ Lieber also joined Ryan Estrada, Emily Riesbeck and others at Pajama Con 2020 a.k.a. Comfy Con! Check out the whole stream here. This one-of-a-kind Con sounded like a dream for us: attending events in pajamas only happens in dreams unless it’s a sleepover. Host Amanda Lafrenais from Iron Circus Comics opened on Day 1, “Let us rip the band-aid off” and continued the same enthusiasm on the last day. Kudos to Lafrenais for pulling this off! Sunday’s panel was all about table top gaming so here are some quick takeaways from the stream:
Milo Applejohn on what you can change about table-top role playing games like D&D and such
When we’re approaching something like Dungeons & Dragons, we have enormous history. I see a lot of generation gap in the way people play. The rules are here to support the experience, not the other way round.
Tyler LFG from DOTS RPG, a role-playing games project for disabled gamers, on making any game design successful for blind gamers
We do know that we live in a very digital world, we encourage people to make accessible PDFs. Setting headings in any digital files you use — when a screen-reader is using a document, it allows a lot of quick navigation. It’s pretty much impossible to use a referential Book without that sort of navigation.
§ And that’s a wrap for #ECCCOnline! We’ve sampled just a small fraction of the many talented artists showcasing their work over the weekend. Just browsing the hashtag on Twitter reveals dozens of more creators worthy of your time and money (and with online stores that will be open long after this weekend is over).
If there’s anything else that we learned this weekend, it’s that digital conferencing and interactive streaming via platforms like Twitch can potentially add a lot of breadth to cons in the future, and make them more accessible for people who can’t attend the shows.
Check out our previous rundowns of #ECCCOnline here and here.
