Jameson’s NY Comic Con Journal: Day 1

Hey everybody! Jameson here, reporting on Day 1 of the Second Annual New York Comic Convention.

Friday February 23: After stopping by the press office to pick up my pass, I headed downstairs with my sister Cate to line up for the ‘Buffy Trivia Challenge.’ Doors had been open to the public for about 90 minutes, and there was a substantial line and wait outside the convention’s main room. The evenings major attractions seemed to be tryouts for Stan Lee’s “Who Wants to be a Superhero?” and a packed panel for Marvel’s popular superheroes-are-weapons-of-mass-destruction Civil War series.

Cate managed to be selected as one of 8 competitors for round one, and took her first (of several) prizes of the evening – A ‘Men of Sunnydale’ trading card set. She later answered one of the most difficult questions of the trivia (the Buffy equivalent of a Level 4 SAT question), “Who is the patron Saint of Vampires?” and nabbed some more prizes. The competition was stiff though. Joss Whedon’s brainchild series has a huge fan base, and some of the competitor’s really put the ‘fan’ in ‘fanatical.’ The best part of the “Buffy Trivia Challenge” was the host, James Leary (who played Buffy’s sister Dawn’s demon baby-sitter Clem in the television series), who kept the audience laughing the entire time.

By the time the Trivia Challenge had ended, the line upstairs had subsided and we walked around the convention’s main stage. We saw a demo for the Godzilla video game that will be available on Nintendo’s new Wii gaming system hopefully by next Christmas. Though in the early stages, the demo made awesome use of the unique motion-sensitive Wii controller, as was illustrated in a battle between Godzilla and MechaGodzilla. Think of it as a more socially acceptable and evolved form of smashing building-block skylines as a kid. Not far from the Godzilla game booth, Cate and I were attacked by monsters from another soon-to-be-released video game, The Darkness, which is not based on the heavy metal band that authored brilliant 80’s redux metal like “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” (though that would be pretty fucking awesome in my opinion), but on the Top Cow Productions comic book of the same name, by Paul Jenkins and Mattias Snygg. The first-person shooter puts you in control of a Mafia hitman who has a lot of guns and supernatural powers and puts you in a Clive Barker-type story set in a gritty digital New York City. I’m hoping the price of the Xbox 360 of Playstation 3 has dropped by the time this game is released, because the sooner I can act out my supernatural-power-wielding-professional-assassin fantasy, the better.

We also saw lots of quality superhero and Star Wars costumes, tons of tables for both major-label and indie publishers, cool toys like a Leatherface statue and a Smurf-town, and lots of other cool stuff.