This weekend I geeked out at WonderCon, the comic book convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Here are my top 5 highlights.
1) Meeting Jim Lee
Jim Lee is a god in the comics world. He's the genius artist behind Batman: Hush and Wild.C.A.T.s, and the founder of Image Comics and Wildstorm. Like a complete fangirl, I lined up to get his autograph and photo.
When my friend & fellow comic fan Dan Tran saw Jim Lee, he said "Oh my God, I want to kiss him." Jim Lee overheard and gave him a funny look. Here's Jim Lee pretending to ignore Dan.
2) The Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles panel
This was a really fun panel to watch. It featured Thomas Dekker (the actor who plays John Connor), Summer Glau (the Terminator who protects John), Brian Austin Green (Derek Reece, John's uncle), writer Josh Friedman, and producer John Wirth.
- Brian Austin Green surprised me. He was very humble. Clearly he realizes that he's best known for his role on Beverly Hills 90210, which doesn't give him very much credibility as an actor. He was very grateful for the opportunity to play a more serious role. Wirth and Friedman both raved about how he nailed his audition for the part.
- Green trawls online forums to see what people are saying about the show. When fans first heard about him being on the show, the comments were very negative. But after a while they stopped referring to him as "Brian Austin Green" and just started calling him "Derek" (his character's name), which made him very happy.
- When asked what he's learned from the show, Green said "I've come away thinking that sci fi rules." This earned him lots of cheers from the audience.
- Summer Glau doesn't like reading about herself on the internet because it depresses her. But sometimes her mom sends her positive articles, which she does read.
- Glau is a trained ballerina. She'll be doing some ballet in the next episode of Terminator and is also working on a ballet together with Joss Whedon. She said that her ballet training was helpful for doing martial arts scenes in Firefly, but as a Terminator she mostly just picks things up and throws them.
- Glau has a boyfriend. She managed to convince him to let her practice shooting a bb gun at him. Ouch.
- When asked "How does it feel to be back on the network that canceled your show [Firefly]?", Glau responded "I pray really hard."
- Thomas Dekker was a bit obnoxious and kept interrupting other people while they were talking. But he's clearly passionate about the show, which was somewhat endearing. Lots of people predicted the show would suck, but Dekker really believed in the story & the characters, and felt vindicated when it got good reviews. The experience taught him not to back down.
- Dekker hopes that his character will get to punch at least one person next season.
- Dekker clearly has a crush on Summer Glau. He kept touching her and hugged her once during the panel.
- Dekker was supposed to wrap up the Zach storyline in Heroes but couldn't do it due to scheduling issues. He played Claire's friend Zach, the guy who helped film her miraculous healing powers.
- Josh Friedman originally wanted to bring back Kyle Reece, John Connor's dead father. He was told "you're gonna get fucking killed [by fans]" for the storyline discontinuity, so he decided to create the character of Kyle's brother instead.
- Friedman thought "The ultimate nuclear family" would be a great catchphrase/slogan for the series :)
- The characters on the show do their own stunts, which Friedman really likes, because using stunt doubles is time-consuming and never looks as good.
- Friedman has the next season planned out in his head.
3) Harold & Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay panel
I came in late and caught the tail end of the Harold & Kumar preview. All I saw was a Ku Klux Klansman urinating on Harold's head. There was also Q&A with John Cho (the actor who plays Harold) and writers/directors Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg.
- John Cho is hilarious in real life. When asked how his preacher father felt about him playing a stoner, he said "Smoking weed doesn't make you a bad person." Actually, he repeated this several times throughout the Q&A.
- When asked where Kal Penn (Kumar) was, Cho joked that Penn was in rehab for quaaludes. Then he admitted that Penn was "off somewhere trying to get Barack Obama elected."
- John Cho plays Sulu in J.J. Abrams' upcoming Star Trek movie. Cho said he idolized George Takei (the original Sulu) while growing up and was proud to be filling Takei's "giant slippers." He refused to give away any details about Star Trek, but Hurwitz jumped in to say that Sulu has an Australian accent in the film. I'm pretty sure he was joking.
- Hurwitz & Schlossberg said that their biggest regret about the first movie was that it didn't have enough nudity. They made sure not to make the same mistake twice. Schlossberg promised that HK2 has "more full frontal female nudity than any other widely released Hollywood film."
- They've done several test screenings for HK2 so far and the audience reaction has been fantastic. The movie is premiering at South by Southwest and will also be playing at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival in March.
4) The Iron-Man panel with director Jon Favreau
The panel was pretty short, but here are the highlights:
- Jon Favreau previewed a hilarious clip of Tony Stark testing out his jet boots for the first time. Stark takes off too quickly and slams facefirst into the wall. An overenthusiastic fire extinguishing robot keeps spraying him even though he's not on fire.
- Favreau admitted he pays attention to what fans are saying online. He considers the internet to be a huge watercooler and finds it useful to monitor the feedback.
- If Ironman makes a lot of money, Favreau might get to direct an upcoming Avengers movie.
- When asked about the rumor that the characters from the Incredible Hulk movie would be appearing in Ironman, Favreau dodged the question. He said he wanted to keep up the "white noise of uncertainty" around the film and not give away too much.
5) Cosplayers
Here are the best cosplayers I saw.
Midna & Wolf Link from Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Cobras from G.I. Joe
Grimmjaw from Bleach
More Bleach characters
Dumbledore from Harry Potter. He told me not to be late for school.
There were a ton of Star Wars cosplayers. That was definitely the most popular series amongst the cosplayers.
Harry Osborn in Green Goblin gear from Spiderman 3. His board was amazing -- it glowed green, had spinning parts, and there's even a tiny LCD screen embedded in it that was playing the Spiderman movie.
Sandman from Spiderman 3.
Probably the best Sailormoon I've seen at any convention.
Dr. Who
I couldn't tell what this guy was supposed to be and had to ask. Turns out he's an alien from the movie Aliens. His costume is made of black garbage bags and a black shoebox.
We had another group drawing session this weekend. Half the group was out of town, so it was just me and Jed. I completed 3 drawings, but I only like one of them.
This is my favorite of the three. It took about 45 minutes to complete. I tried to loosen up my drawing style and make it look more sketchy using dark, soft pencils.
I dislike this one because the outlines are too crisp and her eyes don't match.
I really dislike this one. I sort of gave up on it halfway through.
Magibon doesn't do anything in her videos. She just stares, blinks, and smiles at the camera. Occasionally she'll say something in badly accented Japanese, like "pizza is delicious" or "I am studying Japanese." Magibon looks 16, but claims to be 21, and is actually white, not Japanese. She's very cute, has huge eyes, and resembles an anime character.
Despite doing nothing in her videos, Magibon has somehow amassed millions of pageviews and has spawned a huge following of fans, haters, and imitators. She's even been invited to appear on TV in Japan.
This is Magibon's most popular video, with over 2.4 million pageviews. It's 30 seconds of her doing nothing.
Some of her fans have created loving tribute videos. This one is set to "Hey There Delilah" and features a Magibon montage.
The people who hate her have created parody videos. This one is by Jason Tobin, the actor who played Virgil in Better Luck Tomorrow and was also in Tokyo Drift. Make sure to fast forward to 1:00 to see Fake Magibon (Jason's real-life girlfriend) getting beaten up by Jason.
A creepy Magibon fan site came online fairly recently at Magibon.com. It claims to have been created by an obsessive fan named Frank and features a grainy black & white video of a masked man clutching at a wall with Magibon projected on it. Some people speculated that Frank and Magibon were part of an elaborate marketing campaign for a Japanese horror movie, but it turned that Frank was just a viral hoax created by a digital media artist named Danung.
Magibon has become so popular in Japan that Gyao (a Japanese internet/TV broadcasting company) invited her to come to Tokyo to work with them. Their YouTube message says something along the lines of "We saw your comment on YouTube about wanting to visit Japan. If you are interested in appearing on Gyao, we would like to make a Magibon show. We'll await your reply on YouTube."
Magibon responded saying she'd love to go anytime.
Lately, Chieze, Jed, Christine, and I have been getting together on Sunday afternoons for informal drawing sessions. We crowd around the dining room table, break out our sketchpads & pencils, and draw for 2-4 hours. Drawing in a group is pretty productive. We critique each other's work, share tips and techniques, and pool our art supplies. So far we've had two sessions. I've just been copying existing artwork, but hopefully I'll graduate to drawing original artwork at some point.
For Week One's drawing session, I decided to do an anime-style drawing in ink. I picked this picture, by an artist named Haccan.
I was feeling lazy, so I was pretty sloppy about copying the original picture. I left out the little kid, skipped the background, changed her clothing slightly, and messed up the proportions of the arm. I also learned that my Copic Multiliner SP pens suck. At $6/pen, I figured they must be really great pens, but it turns out that the nibs are really fragile. If you press too hard, the nibs get bent out of shape and the ink stops flowing. It was really frustrating trying to ink this drawing.
Next I scanned the drawing and started coloring it in PhotoShop, following this tutorial. I picked my color palette with the help of Kuler, a neat site that Chieze introduced me to. However, I ran out of time and only got as far as the flats, so there's no shading yet. Here's the work in progress.
For Week Two's drawing sessions, I decided to make up for the previous week's laziness by doing something more challenging -- a photorealistic pencil drawing. I flipped through Allure magazine and found this beauty editorial.
Here's the final drawing. I did a better job of staying true to the original than the previous drawing, but there are still a lot of problems. Her eyes are looking in different directions, her nose is too long, and I got really lazy with the earrings. But if you didn't see the original drawing, I think it looks alright. I used Derwent graphite pencils 6B, 5B, 3B, 2B, F, and 2H.
Today, thousands of people held protests outside of Scientologist churches worldwide. These were the February 10th IRL raids promised by Anonymous a few weeks ago. As far as I can tell from the news coverage and YouTube videos, all the protests were peaceful. Some had over 300 people show up! Many of the protesters wore masks or sunglasses to hide their faces -- Guy Fawkes masks from V for Vendetta were especially popular. A lot of groups also rickrolled the churches, blasting Rick Astley's 80's hit "Never Gonna Give You Up".
I'm a little surprised that so many people showed up to the protests. Anonymous has done a good job keeping up the momentum. They even managed to get a nice article in Newsweek. I tried logging into Anonymous' IRC channel but found that I've been banned. :( If you're looking for more info on Anonymous' war on Scientology, check out my earlier super long blog post on the topic.
Over 200 people braved -29 degree Celsius weather to attend the Toronto protest. Fast forward to 1:30 to see an interview with an ex-Scientologist, who thanks Anonymous for helping scared ex-Scientologists like herself to "come out of the woodwork."
Here's a TV news report on the protests in Clearwater, Florida. It includes a clip of the protest organizer telling people, "Keep it clean. No shenanigans!" (0:10). It also features a comment from a Scientology director of public affairs (1:10), who says "They're just whipping people into a frenzy about something to discriminate against my stated religious beliefs."
Rickrolling the church in Washington DC. Epic lulz!
Video of the Atlanta protest set to the "All your base are belong to us" song. Go to 0:33 to see a shot of 30 riot police in full gear, ready to shut down the protest in case it got violent (which it did not).
Over 300 protesters gathered in Los Angeles (credit: LA Times and blogging.la).
But only 30 people showed up to protest in Mountain View (credit: the forums at Enturbulation.org).
Protests also occurred outside of the US, in Canada, Australia, England, and Scotland. Here are some pics from the Sydney and Adelaide protests (credit: News.com.au).
