Books We Love Insider Blog: Marvel comics

The Great Corvalo, star of his own horror short. I think my son is channeling Igor...

Okay! Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia, is a huge S/F-comic-anime-fantasy jack-of-all-trades gathering, hosting everyone from crazed tv show and gamer fan types to--well, just about anybody, even an ancient S/F geek like myself. My taste is eclectic, and this is definitely the Con for that as it has a lot of everything, from classic S/F novels to old television shows like the industry-spawning Star Trek, to Horror, to Doctor Who, to Brit, Japanese, and American fantasy. My son, a software engineer and his wife, retired civil servant, have been attending for years, and this was the year they finally persuaded me to leave my cave in Pennsylvania and come down for four days of collective madness. I had no idea of just how big this event was.

Street scene--While waiting in a panel entry line which wrapped around a city block, I was accosted by a nasty goblin,
star of a horror short also featuring Walter Koenig of the original Star Trek

In the first place, I hadn't realized that this was going to be 70,000 people all squeezed into 5 hotels and then erupting like pyroclastic flow onto the streets of downtown Atlanta, right in the heart of the business district. I attended the very first Star Trek Con in NYC many, many years ago, and let me tell you, it was nothing like this.

As you can see, I'm a Doctor Who fan with questionable taste in friends...

We emerged from the MARTA on the first day and immediately passed any number of assorted monsters, storm troopers, Anime characters, Orphan Black and Stranger Things characters waiting in line for breakfast at the Chick'FilA. By the time we arrived at the registration line, we'd encountered any number of full dress (and full drag) attendees parading the streets. Soon, we'd all be moving from hotel to hotel in search of the next panel discussion we hoped to get into.

Parade Day was Saturday! It takes over the downtown for a few hours of total madness.

The last (utterly vain) human female, veteran of many surgeries, (Doctor Who) and her "moisturizers."

There were many dragons.

Tom Baker version Doctor Who--two of them--with a somewhat disturbing version of his sidekick, Amy Pond.

Everyone's favorite Alien stalks the streets, and, later, the hotel lobby...

We arrived at 7 a.m. on Saturday in order to grab a curbside seat for the parade, and the place was already filling up. On this day, another GA dwelling son brought his school age daughter, as we'd planned a long day's adventure with her. As a senior and a marching band member, she is BUSY, but she made time to join us, in her best Hogwart's garb--House Slytherin.

Filk with talented Nick Edelstein--his uniform that of a Next Gen Starfleet Commander--who can do a mean Jimi Hendrix riff, too!

Filk is a Dragon Con tradition--the songs we all know with substituted S/F lyrics. Word play is second nature to writers, so I found this great fun. A well known classic in the genre would be Yoda, by Weird Al Yankovich, easily found on Utube--if you need to. My grandgirl, an apple who has not fallen far from the tree, could and did sing along with this deathless classic at one of the filk sessions we enjoyed. The term "Filk" comes from a long ago typo in a scholarly article about the influence of S/F upon Folk Music. Embrace the Typo, we say--or 'we says,' as LOTR's Gollum would have it.

Devo Mutants w/old lady in fav Dr. Who t-shirt

In short, this was

Zot! Pow! overwhelming!

The world has learned to embrace Nerd-dom, and finds it can still survive. (The world has also learned that it sure can make a good ol' American buck off all these OCD crazies, as well!) Two floors of a downtown mall were dedicated to vendors so the shopping sprees available were limitless. The crowds there were just as crushing as the hotel parade-see-and-be-seen lobbys. Costume Play (Cos Play) seemed to have the most entries, though sugar-fix theme decorated cupcakes could also be purchased.

Not usually much of a shopper, I tried on a lovely green dragon tail--only $50.00--but decided I could probably live without this, especially when I considered wearing it onto the plane...

And, for all you Game of Thrones fans, the place was alive with characters from this show. Blonde Danerys look-alikes were everywhere, but we didn't manage to get a good picture. I especially liked the ones who had colorful baby dragons perched on their shoulders, a tender maternal touch.