Awesome Con has come to another close, and this year was its best yet. I have been going to Washington DC’s largest comic convention since it first started five years ago, but this year had the best guests, most booths and artists, and (admittedly) largest crowds I have seen yet. As a comic and pop culture fan myself, it’s so, well.. awesome… to have a convention I can look forward to every year that celebrates geekdom like no other event in DC. It’s not every day that you see empowered varieties of the Joker and Harley Quinn walking around the streets of our city, but I know I can always count on Awesome Con to shine the nerd signal to beckon all of us in the DMV to come running.
Below are some of the highlights of the Convention for me. The not-so-awesome news is we unfortunately have to wait ’til 2018 for to come back into town. However, the good news is we already have next year’s dates and it’s happening a full 3 months early (March 30-April 1). So start getting excited now and we will keep you up to date as the guests start being announced later this year.
1) Cosplay. Of course, #1 has to be the cosplay and getting to nerd out about your favorite superheroes, comic book characters, and TV shows with a bunch of like-minded people from the DC area. With all of the politics-centered events in this area, it’s sometimes easy to forget that in this big city there are surely people with similar interests. Awesome Con brings these people out in droves. It never fails that every year I see people dressed up in costumes that speak directly to me, ones that only certain fandoms understand. Specifically this year I saw quite a few people dressed as the clones from one of my favorite shows ORPHAN BLACK, whose fantastic costumes would only be spotted by fans of the show. However, the best and most creative costume I saw was an empower Princess Leia dragging around a Jabba the Hutt who himself was clad in the iconic gold bikini. Hilarious.
2) More star-studded panels, autograph signings, and pictures. Awesome Con has come a long way since I started attending a couple of years ago. Then, the largest panel hall probably held about 500 people. Now it’s up to 5,000! This year, I went to a panel that had DOCTOR WHO’S David Tennant talking with Smithsonian scientists about time travel. How cool is that?? Of course, he also took questions from fans in the audience too. Perhaps the biggest star in attendance this year was the great Stan Lee, who also hosted a breakfast for those fans that bought VIP tickets to the Con this year. Other big name guests included Edgar Wright, who premiered footage from his new film BABY DRIVER, Felicia Day, Eliza Dushku, Wil Wheaton, Catherine Tate, John Barrowman, and many more!
3) Wonder Woman costume. As WONDER WOMAN is my favorite movie so far this year (ahem I have seen it 3 times now), I was super excited that Warner Bros. displayed Gal Gadot’s actual costume from the movie. It was behind glass, but the costume had a presence at the Convention, being a showcase on the exhibit hall and a way for all of us fanboys and fangirls to get an up close look at the front and back of the costume that we have come to admire on screen!
4) The booths! More booths than ever means more artists to appreciate, merchandise/art to buy, gadgets to try out, and freebies to collect! I have never seen the exhibit hall as busy as it was on Saturday morning. I couldn’t tell if it was the extra booths that made things so compact and crowded or if it was the extra people. I think it was a little of both. Regardless, crowds are something I expected and the trade-off of bonus merchandise and art was worth it. I can never get through a Convention without finding a few things I have to purchase and this year was no exception. My most exciting find was the booth Shawn’s Custom Characters, which I swing by every year. Shawn is a wonderful artist and I look forward to buying his work at the Convention. My favorite purchase from him are his coasters, which are great gifts for fellow Disney/Star Wars, etc. fans.
