C2E2 Day 2

Today I cosplayed at Loki. (or everyone's first guess Pikachu so I guess I was Loki Pikachu?). As I have said before I am flexible with my cosplay. You can see whatever character you want to see. I won't say you are wrong, though I might say what I was trying for instead. Let your imagination rule.

First Panel was on American Gods. The good news is season two has started filming. I also have to say this was a very giggly panel. They were laughing the whole time. The process for auditioning for Shadow Moon was like 16 different audition tapes, Neil Watched about 600 and there were about 1,200 audition tapes in the end.


Shadow talked about how he developed the character to make it able to be filmed, at first he was too book like. I liked when he said for example when you dead wife appears in your room you lose your shit instead of the beautiful poetry Neil Gaiman wrote about loving her no matter if she is dead or alive.

There was a funny story about how calm and mild-mannered Yetide Badaki is. At one point with one of her costumes and makeup a security guard thought she was just someone who wandered in and said she could not go onto the set and she said ok and waited outside until someone was like whatever happened to her, where is she?

There was a discussion about how American Gods shows how we can believe in more than one thing, we can believe in what we need at the moment to survive. And that we need both the new and old gods. The old god represents the human touch that the new gods sometimes are lacking. And the whole point of the show is that we "believe into being." Ricky Whittle said if he could be any God he would be the God of chocolate.

Yetide spoke about how she got into acting because of the stories the elders used to tell in Nigeria. Ricky said for him it was not nearly as noble, he was studying law, and when he was given the opportunity to be on TV he first thought was all the girls he would get.

The panel ended with a hilarious description of working with green screens. A lot of you are seeing a buffalo and he is so big, bigger look up, and side to side, the other said too, look higher, no you looked to high it will all work post-production.

I stopped by My Robbie Thompson's table in artist alley. And he remembered me. :) We talked a little about Silk and poor J. Jonah Jameson at the end of Thompson's run. I also gave him this year's poems (one an accounting of my writing this year, one a response to advice he gave last year in response to a question.) I did not get to spend too much time because I was hurrying to the next activity but I hope to stop by again tomorrow. I do not often get to hang out with one of my "best of writers, best of dreamers" :)

Next up was Getting a free autograph from Mark Millar which I had won. And it is cool he signed my autograph book but I know why I don't bother with autograph autographs I waited in line for close two hours to take advantage of my free autograph. 

My second panel was #BlackComicsMonth: Inclusion in comics. The takeaways were:

• No matter how many awards the industry looks through black comic creators. 
• It is all about knowing someone, who lets you in the door 
• As a POC you always have to be better than everyone else even to be noticed 
• In order to break in it is important to already have an audience which you will be bringing with you 
• The comic industry likes to leave money on the table. You may be selling out of your comics but they will keep saying we don't think there is a market 

A story that highlights the double standard in comics is we learned there was a white male editor who was known for literally biting people, yes really bitting people, and kept working on comics where POC who are writing really good comics are told there is no market for their work, and if they say anything are called difficult. One panel member talked about how she brings a "big black dude" to go with her simply so the white male executives look at something besides her chest. Having the big dude just standing nearby forcing the white guys to be professional even if only out of fear. Which shows there are still major issues within the comic book industry.

There was also a discussion on how if you are writing a diverse book you may have to front load it and tweet about how you are writing about POCs etc especially if it is in a genre that traditionally has had no representation to build an audience.

The last panel was one on Hispanics in Comics which many highlighted the fact we need more voices in comics and we need new characters not just "slapping on some brown paint".