Where to begin?  As soon as you step into the NY Comic Con, you are assaulted by the experiential overstimulation.  Fortunately, I had a loose plan from the start.  My friend Larry and I are cosplay fans and on Friday we needed to get over to Artist Alley first for prepping.  Artist Alley is the section of the con (and it is quite a big section) where the independent artists are able to show off their stuff.  There is amazing creativity here.  After a bit of time at the con, I realized Artist Alley is truly the place to be… but I’ll get into that later.

Larry and I went to a friend’s booth to store our items and get into our gear.  I dressed as The Question, a DC hero I absolutely love.  For those not familiar with him, the character Rorschach from Watchman was based on The Question… only The Question is way cooler.  My costume didn’t take long.  Larry’s however, was a project unto itself.  He dressed as Mr. Freeze.  In order to keep the fishbowl helmet from fogging, Larry installed three cooling fans.  Blue LED lighting provided the atmosphere.  Oh, and a voice modulator was also installed for pure awesomeness.  All batteries were also installed into the helmet.  We painted his chrome dome white and he put on the signature red goggles.  Of course, once a person wears red goggles under blue lights, things become much darker.  How come they never discussed this in the comics?  Of course, The Question wears a mask to cover his entire face, eyes included, so I’m not one to talk.  Anyway, Mr. Freeze finished his ensemble with a freeze gun that shoots fake liquid nitrogen.  Here’s a quick vid:

From that point on we couldn’t take three steps without photo ops.  I really can’t take the credit on that one.  Only the die-hard fans wanted pics with me.  Still, I made every effort to photo bomb the backgrounds of every Mr. Freeze pic.  We very slowly made our way to the DC booth at the main floor for the true madness.

Truly one of my favorite parts of these cons is the sheer impressive unending waves of cosplay.  In recent years, the game has really been upped.  We’ll post our full Cosplay coverage this weekend.  However, I came for more than just the costuming.

I spent some time on the main floor checking out the various displays by the bigger name companies.  First, I checked out the video game section.  There was really only one game on my main radar… Assassin’s Creed 3.  They had an enclosed demo with a reasonably long line.  After about 15 minutes I got in to see… a super lame demo that I’m pretty sure I saw nearly a month earlier on YouTube.  The girl running the demo was obviously worn out from doing the same script for who-knows-how-many hours.  She passed out inflatable hatchets which we were instructed to wave when we saw something exciting.  Most people played the sheep game.  Oh, and if we pre-order the game right there we could get a free tee-shirt!  Weee.  Even if I wanted the shirt, I was ineligible since I pre-ordered months earlier.  All this for a game that is due out at the end of the month.  They didn’t even have a playable demo!  Moving on…

A number of other games looked pretty good.  Some that grabbed my eye included the new Tomb Raider, Scribblenauts Unlimited (reviewed HERE by Rishard), and Marvel Avengers Battle for Earth which has good motion gameplay.  However, being the old school nerd that I am, I was happy to see Night Warriors: Darkstalkers Revenge and Darkstalkers 3 bundled up together for the PS3 and XBOX 360 Live.

I also checked out the Age of Wushu MMO by Snail Games.  However, Mannix reviews that HERE on Nerd-Base and I’ll leave the full review to him.  Here’s my quick 2 cents though: Great kung fu genre, pretty scenery, I like the martial arts school system, still a MMO though (not my thing).

I next headed over to some of the bigger name comic companies to see what’s what.  Honestly, I didn’t see anything that really grabbed me.  This wasn’t my first time to NYCC and I felt the main floor was a little lacking in innovations this year.  Perhaps I’m spoiled and have grown too accustomed to getting too many goods online.  I just had the feeling that I didn’t need anything… at this point.

I headed over to the Kevin Smith panel.  Unfortunately, I got there a little too late and it filled up.  I’m sure I’ll get the latest info from his “SModcast” podcast.

After that I met up with Mannix to check out Stan Lee’s World of Heroes panel with model/actress Adrianne Curry and writer Peter David, .  Mannix will post his review tomorrow (Saturday) morning.  I’ll leave this one to him. Videos will be included along with a more personal interview between Mannix and the panelists.

Saturday flew by.  I didn’t even have time to don The Question suit.  Mannix, Rishard, and I decided we needed a beer and we walked out to Hudson Yards Cafe a few blocks away.  As much as we were surrounded by beautiful girls in sexy cosplay outfits all day, I think we all fell in love with our waitress.  Actually, we are fairly certain she was drunk.  She kept having her friend, who didn’t work there, serve us.  Even though she didn’t know the beers on tap, we didn’t mind.  Our original waitress would occasionally make it back over to us where she gave us no less than three free beers.  At some point we ended up with a third waitress.  Anyway, we needed the break and the bar did a good job.  We headed back to the chaos.

Rishard and I ended the day at Artists Alley.  We really spent some time talking with talented artists and perusing their works.  We both picked up a copy of the graphic novel Azteca, Ciudad Paradiso, Vol. 1 by Red Style Media.  I haven’t finished it yet so I don’t want to misrepresent the work but the artwork is nice and the main character premise seems interesting.  Reviews to come from either Rishard or myself.

I also picked up the book, “Disguised as Clark Kent.  Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero.  I’ll get to this one between graphic novels, kung fu books, and statistical manuals.  It might be awhile.