Mormon Geeks Goes to the Salt Lake Comic Con!

You know what's great about blogging?  The title of your blog post can be as long as you wish.  Though it is probably best to have a concise title you don't have to worry about how much money you're spending on just the title of the post like with newspaper articles.  I love to blog.  I love Mormon Geeks.  We have a great community here and it's only going to get bigger and better.  I think part of that can be seen in our recent adventure to...

Yep!  That's right.  A few of the contributing authors were at the first annual Salt Lake City Comic Con.  I was the only author to go all three days but I did enjoy Friday with Joe and our close friends.  So, how was it?  It was exciting, like going to Disneyland!  It was awesome.  It was exhausting.  It was exhawesome!

Thursday

I got up and made my way to Joe's house where I dropped my stuff off since I was going to be living at his place for the next few days.  The first day I dressed up as Scott Pilgrim. I took the TRAX up to the Salt Palace Convention center.  I was pretty excited and was already seeing people dressed up.

When I finally made my way through the Nordstroms and got to the convention center, I was confused.  I had no idea where to go but followed signs to registration.  I noticed a lot of people were just waiting around.  The main event where all the vendors were was just opening up to the VIPs.  After making my way to registration, I got in line for my first panel.  I decided to see Nicholas Brendon.  I waited in line for an hour but it didn't feel long at all.  I asked Nick what he liked most about working with Joss Whedon.  He said it was like they knew exactly what the other was thinking.  Nick was very funny.  Two mothers actually introduced him to their sons named after the character he played on Buffy.

After the panel with Brendon, I got in line for the main event.  It was a good thing I made friends because they saved a spot in line for me.  :D  The main vendor event was what I was looking forward to the most.  Who would have known I'd get a cupcake there from my friends at Badali Jewelry?!

Badali Jewelry does fantastic jewelry based off fantasy literature and other nerdy stuff.  They had Cthulu pendants, Miskatonic University stuff, LOTR stuff, Mistborn stuff, etc. I got a necklace of Thor's Hammer to celebrate my nordic roots.  (The vikings intermingled with a lot of Danish.  I'm about 96% certain I have viking ancestry.)  After my stop at Badali Jewelry I decided to look around the vendor booths.  There was so much to see and so much to do.  At first I was so overwhelmed I thought, "I can't believe I signed up for 3 days of this."  Once I got to see more stuff and form a plan I realized, "Man, I'm going to need 3 days to do everything I'll want to do!"

Love this thing. Yes, that's my chest hair, relax.

One of the really awesome booths I went to was none other than Weta Workshop!  When I found out they were going to be coming to our comic con in Salt Lake City, I was ecstatic.  Weta has come to the San Diego comic con but not to anything else.  For them to come to us was a real treat!

  

Azaug the pale orc!

Later in the day I went to a panel about the Lord of the Rings mythos. It was informative and really fun to see some experts talk nerdy.  Of course I'm going to have a soft spot for Lord of the Rings.  My dad read the books to me and my siblings growing up.  My friend David Powell was one of the panelists.

After that, I went back to enjoy the sights and sounds of the vendors and took a lot of pictures with some cosplayers!

Spider-maids!

Friday

The next day I was really excited for because Joe and I were going with friends!  I couldn't wait to show them all the stuff I knew about.  So we woke up early.  Joe put on make up and his awesome costume.  (A lot of people wanted a picture with him.)  We grabbed breakfast at Amber's, a favorite of ours, and then headed on our way to the TRAX station for another trip into ultimate nerdom.

 

I showed Joe and the others where to register then I got in line for the main event.  While waiting for Joe and the others I did some gesture drawings and made a new friend.  That was probably one of my favorite things about comic con.  You got to meet some of the coolest people.  There's nothing better than being among people just as weird as you are.  While in line, we got pictures with awesome cosplayers of course.

Being there with friends made the experience that much better. Joe had this to say about what he loved about Comic Con:

All I have to say is that I LOVED Comicon! I loved the costumes. I loved the displays. I loved the celebs. I loved the art. It was a place you could go and whatever you were into be it Legos, DC, Marvel, Disney, Steampunk, Dr. Who or whatever was going to be there in some form or another. I cosplayed as a gender-swapped Harley Quinn and had to get pics with all my fellow Harley sisters! Not once though did I get a rude comment or an off-color joke about getting inspiration from a female character. I highly recommend picking up tickets as soon as they become available next year. Do it, and your inner geek will love you forever for it.

-JOE

Speaking of Legos.  The Lego booth was nothing short of amazing.  I could describe it to you but these pictures say it better.

I'm not sure if Joe went to any panels but I went to a few.  I found pretty quickly to pick which panels you want to go to ahead of time.  Some of them have some pretty lengthy lines.  In addition to going to a panel I also went and saw a short film.  It was really cool to see local film work done here in Utah.  I love seeing independent stuff because it amazes me what people will do on such a short budget.

Unfortunately I got a really bad stomach ache so I wasn't able to do everything that I had wanted.  Still, I was looking forward to finishing Comic Con strong!

Friday

Friday, my friends Adam, his brother, and Chris all went for the last hurrah.  It was the busiest day yet. Lines were packed to the brim.  I was really looking forward to a panel with Christian Jacobs, the lead singer of the Aquabats and creator of the Yo Gabba Gabba and Aquabats Super Show tv series.  Unfortunately, I waited in line for about 30 minutes only to find that Christian had cancelled.  Although I was sad I did get to see a friend of mine from Ogden who dressed up as Bat Commander himself!

After that panel I met up with another friend of mine with Atomic City Tees who gave me some special Mormon Geeks t-shirts!  (Will be come available for order soon!)  I then started handing out Mormon Geek t-shirts to friends and random people.  I wore one myself of course.  Chris and I ended up going to the end of the line to get in.  It wrapped around the entire building!  Thankfully, the line was very quick to get in.  Despite the humongous crowds, it didn't feel like we had to wait long.

Amon took my bending!

There was some great artwork all over the place!

Comic Con wasn't very organized. We waited in line for a panel and ended up being in the wrong one.  The panel was still awesome though.  The creator of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax did a great panel.  Despite the poor organization  I'm not worried about next year.  This year was a first for them.  They did great for a first year for sure.  It will be amazing to see what they'll do next year.  Just be sure to get your tickets in time, request off work, and plan ahead.

It may have been exhausting but it was worth every penny.

-Stephen

Being the bad guy

(Disclaimer: This is NOT a post about 9/11. I scheduled this post without realizing what day it would come out, but this has nothing to do with anything political in any way.)

The other day I was watching a critique on the latest Mario game when the critic said this about Bowser and Princess Peach:

“There’s something intriguing about someone who identifies themselves as the bad guy. Society calls him evil but he wears their label. He reclaims it and that is why they will never get him down. If the options are good or evil then Bowser will take evil because he has seen what passes for good: An unelected ditz living in obscene decadence and bestowing privileges on a pair of mustachioed foreigners…” –Ben Croshaw (You probably don’t want to look him up, trust me.)

This got me thinking: What if some villains roles are not to be obstacles for the heroes to overcome but are actually critiques on what society views as evil or good?

Let’s take Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Here we have a story not told from the hero’s point of view but from the villains, who claims that the world is full of problems and “he needs to rule it”. Horrible says that he’s evil and yet lives by a moral code which he is reluctant to break, namely that he will not kill. Opposing him is Captain Hammer, a super hero that we learn is actually a self-serving misogynist who does heroic things not because they’re good but because it’ll make him look good. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Horrible and Hammer switch places of hero and villain, you can see why Horrible would feel justified to kill Hammer and not want to be labeled as good.

Overall what we see is that Dr. Horrible doesn’t necessarily want to be evil, he just doesn’t want to be part of the status quo, where people suffer needlessly and worship an egotist in gloves. The late George Carlin once said:

“I’m an outsider by choice, but not really. It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out. I want to be in, in a good system, but until then I am forced to choose to stay outside.”

Now I know the argument that “If you don’t like the system why don’t you change it instead of isolating from it?”, but that’s exactly what Horrible and other villains are trying to do. We see a similar pattern with Magnito from the X-Men stories. He sees how his kind is being treated and believes that while Xavior’s dream is beautiful and would be wonderful if achieved, Magnito can’t shake off the lessons of his own past to fully embrace the X-Men’s cause, so thus he must facilitate his own ideas in opposition to his friend. Here Magnito not only joins Xavior in their mutual critique of the status quo, he also critiques Xavior’s decision to defend humanity, rather than try to conquer them.

As much as Magnito wants Xavior’s dream to be a reality, he just can’t see it as a possibility, and thus must be the bad guy.

Is there a real life application of this? Of course. Several years ago, the writers of South Park tackled a controversial subject, one that had rarely been touched in mainstream media: Mormons. They had a Mormon episode. Name one mainstream TV series or movie that had a Mormon character, even for one episode before this. I bet you can’t.

Now South Park had already become famous for its irreverent tone and inappropriateness, so for them to take on Mormonism was scandalous to say the least. With rumor already about that the two main writers were ex-LDS, the heat was on.

So how’d they do?

Not bad actually.

The episode, though it has its moments, is actually clean compared to most of their work, and their depiction of LDS people, though silly, is sadly true in some parts. Their retelling of the Joseph Smith story form the angle that he may’ve been a swindler is borderline sacrilegious, but it does leave some room that it could’ve been true, which again is more than mainstream had given us before.

 My favorite part is the message. For those who aren’t fans of the show let me break how the show does messages down for you: Two groups of people will get on the extreme sides of an issue, usually taking it even further than what it is in real life for comedic effect, only to have to find a middle-ground, usually with a speech by one of the kids talking about a middle of the road policy. That’s exactly how it goes down in the Mormon episode of South Park. For a large part of the episode, the town condemns the new Mormon family for pushing their religion in everyone’s faces, and trying to show that their family is better than everyone else’s. This is emphasized when one of the non-Mormon families tries to live the Mormon’s standards and fails miserably.

Now for the best part: At the end of the episode, the Mormon kid, confronted with these accusations, spins the whole thing around on the town and the audience by saying that all his family did was live their belief, and that it was them who asked questions and wanted more. He then says that if his religion makes him happy it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not(Just go with it here, folks), and that if

someone doesn’t like how his family lives then… Well, South Park is known for expletives.

So what we have here is that the writers, representing “Bad”, critique “Good”, both in mainstream Christianity for judging the Mormons and in Mormons themselves who do try to say they’re better than others because of their faith, and condemning both by stepping into an element not part of the mainstream (Cable TV), and metaphorically clacking their heads together. I honestly don’t think the message would’ve reached so many people so effectively if it hadn’t come from a “Bad” source, namely a potty-mouth cartoon on cable. And I know Mormons who condemn the episode and the message for the medium by which it was presented, and I also know Mormons who praise it BECAUSE of the medium by which it was presented, AND I know non-Mormons who have a pretty alright grasp on our basic beliefs because the episode existed at all.

Here’s where my musing on bad guys leads to: while the reason someone does something is completely their own, and they may lie about their actual reasoning, it may be a good idea to try and understand what someone who opposes a system or idea may have to say. They may bring up valid points on how a system is run and why it should be different. At the end of the day there is a reason a person opposes a system, whether it’s for their own greed or ignorance, or because they do not want to be associated with a system they find objectionable, and their standing outside it is a direct protest to a status quo that may need to be looked at.  And I’m not calling for a change in church doctrine on anything, or that any group in particular is doing anything wrong, but it is good to be reminded of one’s own actions and how they affect other people, even if we believe we’re on the side of the “good guys”. 
-JOE