Know Your Meme Goes to New York Comic Con 2017

The west side of 8th Avenue in midtown is a strange place in New York City. On an island where every plot, lot and its sublot has been claimed or filled, Hudson Yards, Manhattan's soon-to-be latest neighborhood, is an urban ghost town, a surreal snapshot of a newly developed district in Simcity. But this weekend, Hudson Yards was flooded by hundreds of thousands of pop culture fans of all ages: teens, adults, kids chaperoned by their moms and pops, moms and pops chaperoned by their kids. New York Comic Con (NYCC). It's the biggest nerd convention on the East Coast.

Thursday, 10:00 a.m. Matt, Adam and I met up by Penn Station on 34th Street and 8th Avenue. This was the first NYCC for all of us. Having had a daily commute in the area for a few years, I’ve certainly heard and seen the hubbub NYCC brings to the city every year, but as soon as we joined the first wave of attendees and entered the main venue, we were immediately struck by the sheer volume and size of the gathering.

Jacob K. Javits Center is a massive complex designed much like an international airport. Yet, with thousands of attendees moving in droves at all times, the 1.8 million square feet arena felt like, as Matt put it, a “geek mall” filled to its max capacity. And it’s true. Unlike its west coast counterpart, San Diego Comic-Con, NYCC has always been a for-profit event organized by ReedPOP, with a reported annual revenue of $50 million. At that level of rainmaking, it has grown into such a high-profile industry event that not even Hollywood’s most wanted A-list celebrities can decline to attend, not even George Clooney.

Once we made our way through the security checkpoint, we were greeted by Bandai Namco promoters offering wearable printouts of Luffy’s straw hat and calling on a few volunteers to participate in a lottery game for their mobile game One Piece Thousand Storm.

After a brief moment of complete distraction by fancy pop-up booths, neat gadgets and professional cosplayers all around us, we headed over to our first panel event of the day, Geek Journalism in the 21st Century, hosted by Ryan Britt of Inverse Magazine and joined by writers Caseen Gaines, Emily Asher-Perrin, Jill Pantozzi, Krutika Mallikarjuna and Mike Cecchini. Reflecting the popular consensus that's been running for years on the Internet, much of the discussion centered around the future of fandom and challenges entertainment critics face as Hollywood's reboot frenzy persists, a trend that hasn't sloed down since Disney's acquisition of Marvel Comics in 2009. While the panelists acknowledged that reboots can bridge the gap between generations, especially for the millennial audience, and serves the industry well with its guaranteed profit, they all seemed to agree that some of these classics have been rebooted at the expense of legacies that the original works left behind.

Thursday, 12:15 a.m. Tara Strong is a celebrity of her own class. As the familiar voice behind Bubbles of The Powerpuff Girls, Twilight Sparkle of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and a number of other characters in video games, it is little surprising that she commands one of the most diverse and devoted fan bases. The seating in the conference room had already filled up by the time we arrived. Taking in the spotlight, Strong opened up the panel by talking about her latest voice work in the forthcoming film My Little Pony: The Movie, at times playfully breaking into the voice of Twilight Sparkle, and offered quite a few insights on how to get one's foot in the door of a career in voice acting. In a way, Tara Strong is the archetype of a celebrity whose fame probably wouldn't have been the same without the power of internet fandom. For decades, most voice actors lived behind-the-scene of films, TV shows and video games (unless you were already a famous actor), until people on the Internet began putting faces to their names in all corners of fan forums.

Thursday, 3:00 p.m. We assembled on the main exhibition floor, a gigantic open showroom where hundreds of vendors were offering all sorts of geek treasures and merchandises. The density of the crowd was more than any of us could bear for too long, although it was on the show floor where we spotted some of the most impressive cosplays at Comic Con. Aside from an army of Rick Sanchez, there were a number of other usual suspects in attendance: Deadpool, Princess Leia. Sailor Moon. Dv. A. Super Mario Bros.

Cosplay is a magical way for people to socialize. In 1939, Los Angeles sci-fi fan couple Forrest J. Ackerman and Myrtle R. Douglas showed up at The First World Science Fiction Convention in New York in futuristiccostumes, little knowing they had invented the world’s first prototype of a "fan costume," which would eventually become known as cosplay in the coming decades. At this year's NYCC, swarms of cosplayers, many of whom are Con-goers, but also event promoters and journalists, roamed the show floor, greeting each others in passing. Who they were didn't really matter. It was all about what they were.

This isn't to say that everyone is on equal footing at Comic Con. After all, it was the familiar faces from the big-screen that drew the fans out in hundreds of thousands. Throughout the day, we could hear intermittent bursts of applause from the live stage and autographing booths all around. And just from a glance at the guest list, one could gather which stars came to make an official appearance and which stars came to seize their day.

Friday, 11:00 a.m. Midtown Manhattan felt livelier than ever, with long lines wrapped around every venue on the way to Javits Center and the day's construction work in full swing. Most workers seemed barely distracted by the seemingly endless stream of Rick Sanchez, Captain Kirks and Power Rangers pouring out of the 7 train subway exit, except for a few who would take occasional snapshots with their phones. I asked one of the men in hard hat if he has ever seen a crowd like this in Hudson Yards before. He said this is the most people he has seen in six months of working in the neighborhood. I asked him which character he has seen the most thus far. "Hello Kittys," he said. "Lots of Hello Kittys." Funnily enough, we didn't catch any glimpse of Hello Kitty cosplays.

In stark contrast to the construction workers, the tension was running high among the New York Police Department officers, as they tried to keep the crowd in motion outside the convention center. Mix a couple hundreds of RPG and FPS cosplayers sporting all sorts of weapon replicas into an estimated crowd of 200,000 people, you've got yourself a long day at work.

We started our second day off with our own agendas. Matt attended the Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams panel, which explored the storylines of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and The Man in the High Castle, and how art can combat bigotry through representation and diversity. As Matt put it, imagining the worse case scenario for America was "a real nice cup of coffee at 10:15 in the morning." Adam went to the Hey Arnold panel event, where the creators and voice cast of the show came together to talk about the upcoming animated feature film Hey Arnold!: Jungle Movie and reminisce about the early years of the show when the voice actors themselves were kids. I headed straight to the Artist Alley, where more than 100 artists and independent vendors have set up shop to showcase their works, ranging from hand-drawn illustrations and comic zines to custom figurines and wearable merchandises.

Just one floor level below the festivities, next to the autographing booths, there was something very different going on. As much of a geek mall NYCC felt like, the vibe in the conference rooms stood out from the rest of the convention as scholarly and inquisitive. For an event of such massive scale, there were quite a few panel discussions that opened the doors to constructive discourses on identity politics and pop culture: The Wonder Women Behind LGBTQ Characters in Comics, Super Asian America, How to Respectfully Draw POC and LGBTQIA Characters, Gender Identity Through Art, the list went on. TL;DR, they were woke AF. And unlike the discussions that all too often devolve into mudslinging on the internet, everyone listened and waited for their turns to speak. With things in order, the discussions made leaps in the short span of an hour, something that we don't see every day.

Had the late French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard still been alive, he would have taken great pleasure in tearing NYCC apart, just as he had done with the Pompidou Centre in Paris and Disneyland. To be fair, Comic Con is a hypermarket of industrialized pop culture, where the boundaries of fiction and reality blurs with every transaction. Nevertheless, despite its glossy artifice and Disneyland-like deceit, NYCC does ultimately serve its purpose as a public forum where the creators and consumers can critique and workshop the status quo in today's pop culture. Say what you will about the mall culture in America, but there's nothing like the good old-fashioned consumerism that brings people together in this country, regardless of age, gender and color.

Round Table Discussion

This conversation was audio-recorded, transcribed and edited for clarity at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on October 5th and 6th, 2017.

First Impressions of NYCC

Adam: We’re all really exhausted, just from the sheer amount of people and fandoms and cosplays and comic book booths and panels. It was pretty crazy.

Brad: Luckily, we got our badges sorted out beforehand.

Matt: It seemed like a real nightmare this morning getting into the place. It’s a lot like Disneyland with the lines and the check-ins and the bags--

Adam: Also, let’s clarify that the Javits Center is like a fancy airport, better than the actual airports in New York City. It was basically like going on a flight through fandom, I guess?

Adam: It’s like the movie The Terminal, but for fandoms.

Matt: It’s like a play land for people who like very specific things. The more specific the thing,
the better.

Thoughts on Panel Events

Adam: One thing from Geek Journalism in the 21st Century that was interesting to all of us as “meme journalists” was to hear the perspectives of other people in the pop culture journalism industry, even if we all hears stuff we were a little bit familiar with, in terms of how to break into it.

Matt: I think that’s one of the things you see at a thing like Comic Con. You see all these people that like a very big “work,” whether that’s an anime, movie, or video game, and they really want to be a part of it. I think that that’s true in that a lot of the people here also want to be creators. They want to either be writing about this stuff or create this stuff. A lot of the panels we saw today, like the Tara Strong panel, there were a lot of people there asking her how to break into voice acting. I got to the Tara Strong panel assuming people would be asking her specifically about My Little Pony stuff, Powerpuff Girls stuff. I didn’t expect so many people would be asking her how to break into this thing. There’s a lot of people here looking into that, and that
definitely carried over into the Geek Journalism panel.

Brad: There was kind of a workshop layer to it, and that’s as good as Q&As can get.

Adam: Matt, you went to Michael Rooker's panel. Did you find your experience similar there? Were people asking him about acting or was there more a “people geeking out” vibe to it?

Matt: There was more geeking out, but it was also in a bigger room. Tara Strong Spotlight and Geek Journalism were held in very small, conference-like rooms, but Rooker's panel was held in the special events section, a giant auditorium. The way that it started was he was on a panel with an author who wrote Guts, Frank Darabont. They were discussing Rooker’s career. As the panel was going, Rooker became more and more restless answering this guy’s questions, and all of a sudden, he was like, “We have 38 minutes left!” then ran offstage and started running through the crowd, being like, “Who has a question? You have a question? What’s your question?” And people would be like, “Uh, what’s your favorite scene in Guardians of the Galaxy?" and he’d be like “Any one that I’m in!” Just stuff like that. It was very much like he was there to let people experience him. He was such a personality, you couldn’t even get a word in. There were maybe one or two questions about how he got his start in acting and he was just like “I had nothing else to do.”

Adam: So he wasn’t trying to be workshop with the audience. He was trying to be a celebrity.

Brad: That is really endearing, especially considering he has been a longtime character actor whose fame suddenly blew up only as of recently.

Matt: He’s like the breakout character of Guardians of the Galaxy, for sure. He is kind of building up a cult-following, like Bruce Campbell. Your parents might not know his name, but you know the face. Fans of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and fans of The Walking Dead will love him. And he’s a great actor. It’s about time he’s gotten that recognition.

Brad: I think that also reflects as how fandom works on the internet. Even in the context of memes, there has always been a tendency to put the spotlight on people in the backdrop instead of up and center.

Adam: Like the Left Shark.

Brad: Definitely.

Thoughts on Fan Interactions

Matt: I think that the appeal of conventions like this one is that its a celebration of the specificity of these things. Like, everyone loves Star Wars but not everyone loves TC-14 or R5D4, things that have fans but have like, one line in the movies. Still, fans will watch these things so many times that they end up having to focus on different elements to get new appreciation.

Adam: And that spoke to a conversation Brad and I had with Ryan Britt of the Geek Journalism panel about memes, and he immediately jumped to talking about Prequel Memes, which I think are exactly the type of hyper-specific, fandom-driven things you were talking about before. You pick out this one moment of the films and if you keep repeating it, it becomes a joke. I mean, at this point, it’s like almost 60% of the script is a meme.

Matt: Prequel memes in general changed the way I saw the Star Wars prequels. The fans are so attuned to finding one word that’s delivered in the strangest way and it becomes a meme. That’s very similar to the type of specificity you’ll see here. You’ll see things now, like Simpsons shitposting, where it’s like the more obscure thing you can put into a new context, the more successful that meme will be. That’s true for cosplay too. Like, if you can make something super specific and make it super well, your thing and blow it out, that’s where you’ll have the biggest Comic Con success.

Thoughts on Cosplay at NYCC

Adam: By the way, our Rick Sanchez cosplay count is 12.

Matt: But to be fair, you have to have a high IQ to like Rick Sanchez cosplay… [laughter]

Brad: Rick Sanchez has to be the most frequently seen cosplay, right?

Matt: There’s a lot of Deadpools.

Brad: Oh yeah, that’s true. Deadpool has to be the unofficial mascot of cons. There’s that YouTube guy, D Piddy, who goes to like, every single Con.

Matt: I think Deadpool is like the unofficial spokesperson of adult geeks. Like, “This isn’t your granddaddy’s superhero. He swears.” You know, this stuff started out as just being for kids, basically, but there’s a lot of that sort of “adulting” going on in fandoms and superhero movies right now.

Brad: It’s not surprising you see a lot of Deadpool after the movie. I’ve gotten so used to seeing D. Piddy doing wacky antics. I completely forgot that there was a movie after Deadpool had already become a convention staple.

Matt: And we saw that Deadpope, that was pretty awesome.

On NYCC and Consumerism

Adam: Matt, you were talking about a point earlier at lunch about how this place is very much like a Disneyland, and in the same way Disneyland is a land of wonder, it is also like, an orgy of capitalism.

Matt: When I was going through all the aisles and booths, I started realizing that we were basically at the geek mall. All the stuff that you want and care about in pop culture is here at your disposal. The things you knew you wanted, didn’t know you wanted, all here. It exists in the center of this Venn diagram between consumerism and emotional investment. People want to express their enjoyment of these things but outside of here they only have designated areas to express these things, like the movie theater or online. Comic Con gives people a chance to celebrate that, hence the cosplay. But there’s also this element of this engagement being sold to these people. There’s an element of exploitation here. It’s like the people here can become the billboards for these giant corporations like Disney and Marvel.

Adam: And you were saying before how you used to collect things but the realization eventually dawned on you how you were being kind of a pawn in this larger machine.

Matt: Yeah, at a certain point, you realize you’re spending so much money on books you read like one time, and you’re just like, well, what am I doing with this comic book collection? Like, I’m not gonna make money off this in the future. The comic book industry was ravaged by overprinting. The reason comic books aren’t worth any money is because everyone threw them
out. There’s so much supply and no demand. Now we’re existing in a space where superheroes and science fiction are the biggest American export. Entertainment is America’s biggest export, and superheroes and Star Wars are the top of that heap. Right now, to participate in these things is really to engage with America’s biggest global machine. It’s a weird thing, because the flip side of that is very pure: people love these things. I’m one of them! I love Star Wars and Star Trek, and people want to go and, as I witnessed today, argue over whether the Millennium Falcon would beat the Starship Enterprise in a fight. This is a conversation people want to have! There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does exist in a weird space.

Adam: Someone brought up in the panel how fandoms crop up around certain things basically on the strength of the characters. On the one hand, the general idea of a Comic Con is to create a place where perhaps social outcasts can geek out about their fandoms and find themselves in pop culture where they might not necessarily see themselves in their daily lives outside of that. There’s something really empowering about that, but at the same time, it is sort of playing into the great industrial machine. You can look at it both ways. It’s sort of cynical and cool at the same time.

Matt: There are some cool aspects. I think a big part about this convention and cosplay in general is feeling like you want to participate in this thing, in the same way, say, a Patriots fan wants to put on a Tom Brady jersey and paint their face. Someone wants to dress like Spider-man to express they like Spider-man. It’s basically the same thing. It’s not like the Patriots are a small Mom-and-Pop business. They’re a huge sports franchise!

Adam: That makes me think that the reason so-called “sports cosplay,” if you will, is more socially accepted, and part of what makes Comic Con so special, is that when you walk around the convention, there’s a really supportive and wholesome vibe, which is really awesome. Maybe because NYCC is so big, it doesn’t leave any room to be cliquey, which may be the case in some smaller Cons. If you have a niche fandom, you may not interact with like-minded people IRL every day. To come to a place like this is an opportunity to engage with some people like you.

Matt: I think what’s really weird about that is that this place is so pure and feels very welcoming to all different types of people, which is so different from the type of fandom that exists on the internet. It’s a total 180!

Brad: I agree that is the most refreshing thing, in comparison to other smaller-scale conventions I've attended. Like you said, the size of this place kind of renders cultural elitism almost impossible. There’s something nice about not having to be on, say, the same frequency, but everyone is on the same bandwidth, more or less.

On Inclusiveness at NYCC

Adam: This brings up an interesting point. Matt, you recently wrote a bit on Simpsons shitposting and how the phenomenon exemplifies the way geek fandom is portrayed in pop culture. Do you think the preconceived ideas about NYCC has shaped your expectations of what this event would be?

Matt: I always have a hard time with fandoms because of the toxic online culture of it, and it can really put a sour taste in your mouth. I don’t know why we have to be so mean about a cartoon! But when we came here and started talking to people and engaging with people it was a lot calmer and nicer than I expected. You’re dealing with a lot of personalities with things like this, and granted we went to small panels, but… I had a good time.

Adam: Mark Hamill was here, and there were some big names here that if we wanted to meet them, that would’ve been our entire day. We saw the line for his autograph signing and it looked at least two hours long.

Matt: Mark Hamill is like the perfect model supporting fandom as a base. After Star Wars, Mark Hamill wasn’t a huge movie star. It wasn’t until Batman: The Animated Series that he really started taking off as a voice actor. Through that, he built this fanbase that grew at conventions like this and carried him to where he is now. A lot of people and studios today recognize that you can maintain a good base and evangelize for your thing if you’re good to them. Michael Rooker is taking advantage of that right now by blowing it out and saying “I am the guy fans want to be around,” so people will cast him because they know he’ll promote the film.