Comics, collectibles and B.O.

I got up at 9AM, got dressed and tried to wake up. I was not at home, but rather at my friend Keith's house and if we were to get a ride to the train station we had to move now. I packed my belongings and we were soon on our way. It didn't take us long to get there and on the way we had met up with Shaun who was the only one of us who actually knew where we were going. We knew we where getting close as people
wearing colorful and strange attire became more and more frequent. And once we saw our first Stormtrooper of the day we knew we had arrived at Supernova.

For those of you who may not know about it, Supernova is one of two major Pop-culture conventions that grazes Australia each year (the other one being Armageddon, but we will get back to that one). It is a place for nerds of every size, type and walk of life to congregate in hopes of getting that missing on rare issue for the comic book collection or to catch a gimps of their favorite C-grade TV celebrity.

Now I don't mean to sound cynical or degrading towards such an event as the way I see it everyone benefits. We, the nerds, get the chance to indulge our secret (and for some people there...most people there not so secret) passions and I admit to always look forward to having a look around and see if I can't find something there that I can't find elsewhere.

But for a $25 entry fee I expect more then what Supernova this year could deliver, and it became clear that Supernova is the event that makes you long for the bigger and better Armageddon expo. The celebrities this time around were rather dull in my opinion, with only Hayden whatshername from Heroes (you know, that cheerleader) as the only one that caught my eye, but not even that was enough to make me actually go to the Q&A session with her (the fact that I hate Heroes may have something to do with that).

This is a much smaller expo then Armageddon and it suffers because of this. The store booths were predictable and the merchandise not anything to get excited over and as we all quickly realized after 25 minutes of walking around we had pretty much seen what we needed and gotten what we wanted.

Wrestling fans also got their predictable fix as every expo like this needs to have a wrestling ring for some reason. This is getting old fast (maybe just because I'm not a wrestling fan what so ever, I don't know) and I would be happy if at some point in the future these events would come up with some variation in their entertainment.

And what's with the B.O. in these places? It truly never fails. If there is a gathering of people with nerd tendencies then the lingering smell of B.O. quickly follows. Perhaps its the wrestling, the I-can-only-imagine-being-hot-as-hell cozplay costumes some of the people are walking around in or just the fact that 50% of the population in these places have long ago decided do forgo the entire deodorant revolution. Whatever the case might be, you don't want to stay in one place for more then five minutes unless you enjoy being light headed.

The day managed to drag on a bit longer as one of Keith's favorite animator...or something was there to sign autographs and we both proceeded to stand in line for an hour.

All in all I would call this one a rather big disappointment, but then again I might not be the target audience really. The really hard core Heroes fans and just hard core nerds in general seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely, so maybe I'm just being picky. Maybe I'm just not the nerd I used to be...food for thought.