ComicCon, successful bank robbery techniques, and a phenomenon known only as Studio C

After roughly 2 hours of planning and preparation on my part, and probably more on my dad Eric’s, we went to ComicCon last Saturday. For those of you who don’t know, Comic Con is a convention, originally based on comic collecting, but has expanded to cover most of Geek, and a large portion of pop culture. And we were there, right in the thick of it.

It all started on Christmas. Something my dad likes to do is get each of us kids a gift that is essentially “Time with dad”, where we go do something fun, like a magic show, or two tickets to Comic Con. And Comic Con finally came.

Although it actually goes Thurs-Sat, we were planning to just be there Saturday. But we ended up going on Friday for an hour, just to get a lay of the land, and see where everything is. While we were there we ended up meeting and talking to Ray Park, the actor who played Darth Maul in Star Wars I. He was a really nice guy, and gave us a free autograph, even though it normally cost something like 40 dollars. Then we had some pizza that was so old they were selling it half off, so that was a bonus.

So Saturday morning, we headed out, bright and early, in hopes to get there while the lines were still short. We arrived, and once we were in the convention center, the adventure began.

One thing I should mention, is that it is pretty normal to go to Comic Con dressed as your favorite movie, TV, book, or video game character, and so of course we dressed up. We “cosplayed” as two of the main characters from a game called PAYDAY 2. The premise of PAYDAY 2, is that you try to rob banks. You can opt to try and stealthily break into the vault, or you can go in guns blazing and endure a long and aggressive police assault. I chose this game partly because it is pretty fun, and partly because it was really easy to make costumes for. The thieves wear suits, which we already had, blue surgical gloves, and specific clowny looking masks which I purchased on the internet. It ended up looking almost exactly like the actual game.

There is so much to see at the convention center, between all the booths, which have all sorts of things for sale, from comics, to swords, to foods of different kinds. There is also a huge area filled with celebrity guests, who you can talk to, or get an autograph, or even a picture with (although things start to get expensive pretty quick!). We looked around a bit before finally deciding to wait in line to meet Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia from Star Wars), but we were disappointed when she had to go and speak at a panel. We could have met her, had we waited around for another hour or so, but we had more exciting things to do, so we moved on to see Ralph Macchio, the actor who played Daniel LaRusso (the karate kid) in the movie the karate kid, which was pretty cool.

All our activites were punctuated by people walking up and asking for pictures, or saying “Hey, nice costumes” or “Hey, it’s the Payday 2 guys!”, which was fun and exciting for me. There were a lot of people who recognized the game, and joked around, pointing out security cameras for us to avoid, or asking where the rest of our crew was. So a tip if you ever go to a Comic Con yourself: definitely dress up.

As the day went on, we ended up our first panel. Panels are where guests sit in front of a large crowd of people, and try to entertain them for some amount of time. They will talk about what whey are working on, or do QA or just anything really. Panels can be a lot of fun. Another great thing about panels is that you can sit down, which feels awesome after a long day of walking the floor.

Our first panel was Brandon Sanderson, the author behind Steelheart, and the Wheel of Time series as well as many other popular series — one of my favorite authors. He and the other author in the panel, Dan Wells, made fun of each other and joked around, while telling stories about their time together in college. They also answered some questions, and read excerpts from their books. It was pretty interesting.

After that, we were kind of getting hungry, but of course, this is a quality convention so there was food everywhere! After that we ended up walking around looking at things a bit more, and went to get a caricature drawn of us. The guy claimed on his sign he could do it in 2 minutes, but it was more like 10, at least!

If you aren’t from Utah, you might be less familiar a single group of people. They call themselves “Studio C“, and here in Utah, they are the next best thing to gods. They are a group of BYU graduates who put together a comedy sketch show that airs both on YouTube, and on BYUTV. Their sketches are pretty good, and very family appropriate. They were all sitting in a big booth signing autographs and stuff, which we considered joining in, until we saw the line. It would have probably been two hours, at least! Their panel was coming up soon, and we decided that we could probably just go to that instead.

We actually went to get in line WAY before their panel started, mostly because Dad’s back and legs were getting really tired. When we got to the room where Studio C would eventually be, I was excited to see that we were going in to see RJ Mitte, or Walt Jr. from Breaking Bad. He didn’t talk for too long, but it was pretty cool to see. Then, after quite a while of sitting in our seats, Studio C appeared.

Their panel was really fun, they did a lot of funny stuff and answered questions in a fun way. Jeremy’s mustache came up a significant number of times. All in all, it was a very memorable panel, but I’m getting tired of writing, so I won’t go into much more detail.

Then I bought a sword, and we went home. The end.