Edmonton Expo

A pair of cosplayers in Mandalorian armour—I call them the Candalorians—are slowly making their way down the hall at the Edmonton Expo Centre. Slowly because the hallway is busy, visibility in the armour isn’t great, and every couple moments someone else walks up to them and asks if they can take a photo.

This is the Edmonton Comics and Entertainment Expo, one of the largest such expos in western Canada, drawing cosplayers, nerds, geeks, and a surprising number of apparently ordinary people into its influence.

There are people here dressed up as characters from video games, from comic books, from movies, from TV show. From anime. So much anime.

There are superheroes like Spider-Man and Superman and Wonder Woman. There’s Master Chief, from the Halo video game. People in the Scream mask. Multiple versions of Loki, and Captain America and Spider-Man and Harlequins and Ghostbusters and Ghost Spiders and Starfleet Officers and Deadpools and Jokers, oh, my!

Suddenly, a whole crowd of Storm Troopers and Jawas and Jedi knights from Star Wars makes their way down the hall, led by an animatronic Artoo. Speaking of Star Wars, people are not just dressed up as characters. George Lucas walks by, chatting with Tony Stark—Iron Man’s alter ego.

There are nearly as many cross-plays and mash-ups as there are true representations. There’s Darth Vader in a power suit and helmet, and all manner of variations on the Mandalorian armour, including a US flag version and the Candalorians, mentioned above.

A seven foot Chewbacca walks by. A few moments later, Optimus Prime walks by at 8 feet. That’s impressive, until someone dressed in a steam punk junk robot costume that should be recognizable, but isn’t, walks by, a full five feet taller than most of the humans wandering about him.

Sometimes, the real word intrudes. Michael Myers—the hockey-mask wearing, machete wielding killer from the Halloween series walks by, having traded in his machete for a shopping bag. Spider-Man is pushing a baby carriage. Leeloo, from Fifth Element gets cash from a mobile ATM.

For some, this is the most important thing about an event like this: the sheer amount of creativity. And these are just the people showing up to the show, come to see and be seen. Inside a pair of ice-rink sized rooms, hundreds of vendors, from comic artists to cosplayers and from manga to magazines, are set up. If you have an interest in something even remotely geeky, chances are, you’ll find it for sale at one of these booths. There are replica swords and back issues of comics to self published authors and artists.

Every hour or so, there is a new suite of events happening. In the main hall on the first night of the event Captain James T. Kirk himself, William Shatner is there, talking about everything from making music with Ben Folds, to going to space IRL. He spoke about this latter quite passionately from the stage. He says the first thing he did when he was told he could take off his seat belt was rush to the window. And what he saw, was, well, not what he was expecting.

“I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her. Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.”

He says that leaving behind earth to be confronted by the vast emptiness of space “made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”

Not as upbeat as you were expecting? There’s other sessions. Meet the boys from the trailer park. Learn how to write fantasy novels. Or draw anime. Or watch nerd-core theatre sports. Or just hang around and people watch, because these people? Are pretty darn interesting.

There’s a crew of Tumbler Ridgeians here because a couple months ago Ridgelines gave away a bunch of tickets to the Edmonton Expo, and Colten Stribbell-Pack was one of the winners.

This is not his first convention. It’s his third, but it is the first big one he has gone to. He says he and the person he went with spent most of the first day just checking out all the vendors. On Saturday, they went to a couple panels. “They were mostly anime related,” he says. “That was mine and Sierra’s interests. And she went to see Dante Basco, the voice of Zuko from Avatar. And then we just explored, though navigating through all the people was difficult.”

On Sunday, they went to a few more panels, met David Hayter, the voice actor for Solid Snake (from Metal Gear), and “did a few last rounds of the artist’s alley just seeing what else there was. We wound up buying a lot of stuff,” he says.

And seeing the cosplayers was a thrill, too. “There were three people I saw in costume for one of my favorite video games, Bloodborne. I saw two people in hunters outfits, and someone has a character from the game and I just thought that was so cool. When we weren’t at any of the panels, we would just find a spot to sit down and watch.”