Kapow Saturday: The Con is On!

After two days at Kapow! Comic Con, it's fair to say that real life is just dull. If I could run around in costume all the time, meeting my idols and chatting to people who share all my interests and don't start looking for the exits if I mention comics, then I would. Kapow was a brilliant experience and an enormous amount of fun. Here's how it went down.

Day One

My first thoughts as I arrived: Holy shit. There are a whole lot of people who like comics.

Saturday was by far the busiest day of the two and it was pretty manic. But maybe the Tube has just desensitised me to large crowds, because I didn't feel squashed at all. I came with former-housemate and fellow-nerd Helga, and we dived in, orientated like crazy and headed straight for the first panel: Jonathan Ross' pros vs fans gameshow. It was a gameshow in the sense that Shooting Stars is a gameshow, with rounds including 'intentional or accidental?' with pictures like these:

Next stop was Merlin. After much deliberation between Merlin and Mark Gatiss, I followed my loins towards Colin Morgan and Bradley James. This taught me a valuable lesson: attractive people are boring. A mere five minutes into the Merlin panel I was regretting my shallow decision. Merlin was the disappointment of the weekend for me, with everyone bar the honorable exception of Katie McGrath looking like they had somewhere better to be. Case in point: Bradley James, who, it seems, was both hungover and texting. Who says men can't multi-task?

After this came the long winding queue for the Mark Millar signing. Here's where I learnt that comic cons are the only place in the world where queuing is actually fun. Helga and I got chatting to the people around us, including con-buddy Alex (oddly enough, in a room of 5,000 people, we kept bumping into the same people again and again. By the end of the weekend I'd made lot of new Facebook friends and Twitter followers!) Our queue went past the signing table of Nicest Man in Comics Paul Cornell, and after two hours of solid signing he still saw us waving and came over to see if we wanted anything signing while we were stuck in a queue. The man is a God-damn hero. Buy his stuff and line his pockets.

You know who's also nice? Mark Millar! He happily signed our stuff and chatted, congratulating me on getting Helga into comics, then posed for this awesome picture:

At the end of the day we got another disappointment when, after an hour of queuing, we didn't get into the Thor panel. (This is also how we learnt that the 'rule' about only queuing 45mins before a panel is never adhered to) Sad about not being able to ogle Chris Hemsworth, we headed for the exit. But just as we were passing the IGN stage they announced that Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston (Loki) would be doing an interview there for the people who didn't get into the panel! So we did get to ogle! Tom Hiddleston was intelligent and funny, and Chris Hemsworth was - I'm sorry, was he talking? Can you blame me for losing focus somewhat?

I hear that the Thor footage was very well received, with a tantalising Hawkeye cameo from Jeremy Renner (I didn't even see it and I was excited) and Hemsworth winning fans over when asked if Thor would be an extended advert for The Avengers. "Thor is an advert for Iron Man 3" he replied, no doubt with an Aussie twinkle in his eyes.

So, that's pretty much the highlights from Day One. Add in a lot of photos posing with cool things (the TARDIS!) and time spending money on comics and hunting down free swag, and you've pretty much got my day.

Next post: onto Day Two!