Once a geek always a geek

I’m not going to get into the semantics of geek v nerd v dork v dorky nerdy geek. We’ve all seen the Venn diagrams and there’s clearly some overlap. Superman is a God raised in Kansas to me. If I could disappear to anywhere, it would be to Silent Hill. I know that the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. I find it in my heart to feel bad for Omega who sacrificed himself so that Gallifrey could have time travel. I am able to draw life lessons from Judge Dredd. I know that the puzzle box in Hellraiser is called the Lament Configuration. I don’t like Mario Kart or any driving games. But I would be friends with Yoshi. I know Battle Royale is way cooler than anything else it may have inspired. And I still have all my Star Wars toys from my childhood and because of that I can name most of the Bounty Hunters in the Empire Strikes back, even though they were on screen for all of two minutes.

All of that reads like some sort of confessional that I should be making at a Geeks, Nerds and Dorks Anonymous meeting. And now I read that back, I wonder if everyone in that “GNDA” meeting would get every reference. It’s quite an assumption that everyone in the room would instantly recognise references to Silent Hill, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Doctor Who, 2000AD, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and Battle Royale. Equally, anyone sharing references to modern-day Manga and Anime would lose me at the first reference. When I go to Comic-Cons, if there’s a cosplay I don’t recognise, my mind immediately fills in the blanks by saying, “It has to be something Manga.”

I’ve been going to Comic-Cons in the UK since 2011. I took a year off at some point but decided that it left a hole in the social calendar that had to be filled. I say, “social calendar” but it’s actually a strange “social,” as it’s so hard to define exactly what a Comic-Con is. What I’ve finally settled on is that Comic-Con is actually “Cosplay-Con.” Without the cosplay there’s still a buzz and there’s still merch and talks and all things Manga and gaming, but the party feel, the energy, the geek Mardi Gras, that’s all gone.

I decided some years back to ignore the dichotomy of forever feeling like an outsider, even in a hall of people who have, at some point in their lives, felt as much an outsider as me. I tried going with friends, to introduce them to a comic and sci-fi world, and they liked some of what they saw, they liked some of the cosplay, but I think it was too alien for them, and hard to justify the money. Tickets are not cheap. In the end, if I went with a friend, it felt like two people being outsiders, but one was further on the outside than the other. My friends would very much be on the outside looking in, with me being on translator duties, explaining different cosplays and recommending good reads.

It took me a while of going there by myself to get to grips with being an outsider, on my own, in a place where the very culture is defined by being outside the norm. My kind of geekdom involves a lot of solitary activities. There’s never been a D&D club for me. I played Dungeons and Dragons once but never took to it. I don’t go in for online gaming. Almost everything I play is an RPG single player game. My geek definition is based on the things I like and love. For me, that’s enough for membership.

It has ended up feeling natural to be on my own at a con. The vibe and the energy at the event is worth the price of entry. It is also generally speaking, one of the friendliest atmospheres you could hope to find. And when you fail to strike up conversation, it’s handy to remember that by stereotype, some people on this scene might not be up for talking to total strangers. You’re not being shunned. You’re just in a social situation that needs to be accounted for. What you don’t realise is that you might be as clumsy in conversation as the cosplayer you’re talking to.

The May MCM Comic-Con is the biggest of all cons in the UK. Reportedly around one hundred thousand people attend over the two-and-a-half-day event. This con just gone, I had a couple of interactions where it came to mind how briefly clumsy life can be. I stopped a young man dressed as Spider-Punk, accidentally referred to him as Punk-Spider and then went on to say how I always play the Hobie costume on the PlayStation game. There wasn’t much he could say to that really. I thanked him for the photo op and we went about our day. I felt like someone on holiday in France. I’d been there before and spoke a bit of the language, but I wasn’t fluent. But I still wanted to show off what little French I knew. Spider-Punk is on my radar but not my specialised subject. I’m not fluent in it.

Compare that to Megacon at the start of this year, where I stopped to chat to a couple of Mega-City-One Judges. We chatted about cons, comparing London Film and Comic-Con and MCM and Megacon. We talked about growing up on 2000AD and how there seemed to be far fewer Judges there that day than normal and apparently that was a lot to do with a 2000AD convention going on somewhere in the country.

At the same con, I spoke to a guy wearing stilts, dressed in black, with a black hood, black feathers for angel wings and a face painted neon blue and wearing contacts that made his eyes bright fluorescent purple. He was a massive imposing figure, and he was lovely to talk to. It turns out that the character was his own and he has a lot of social media followers and he talks a lot about mental health and how it can be conveyed through Cosplay.

That is one case of breaking a golden rule I have. I try not to take pictures unless I know the character that the person is cosplaying. I think it has something to do with the whole idea of not speaking the same language, not connecting through not knowing. But there are times when someone looks stunning and you can’t resist.

The work that goes into some of the costumes is one thing. “Wearing it well,” and carrying yourself like the character, is something else. Most exciting is this idea of seeing someone leap off the page and come to life. At MCM this week I saw a guy dressed as Marvel’s Kingpin. He looked the part and had the size. He was actually a fine-looking man. In talking to him I said that it’s a really easy but effective cosplay. He said that all  he has to do is put on a black shirt and white suit. I had to let him know that he wore it well.

Some of the best photos I’ve taken have been where I’ve caught people off guard. There’s a Superman and Supergirl where the Superman is looking down, as though he is about to raise his head to look up to us, whilst Supergirl is standing there in typical stoic pose. It’s a far better pic than the one where they are both looking to camera. There’s a Robin where the girl’s cape got caught in the wind and it looks great. A Loki cosplayer walked past me as I was sat on the grass, and I asked if I could take a pic from that angle and it looks amazing, with him looking down on me, with grey clouds overhead.

In a Tik-Tok world, where you can dress up and strike any pose you like, there’s nothing quite like walking in that world.  Where else are you going to see people taking on an alter ego for the day? How often do you get to be stoic in your day-to-day life? I saw one girl, and I had no idea who she was cosplaying until I asked her, who had a level of cool intensity, that looked like she’d been ripped out of a manga book, and I thought, you can’t be that person anywhere else in any other public space.

My natural state is gawking and wandering around with a sense of wonder. I don’t think me dressing up as any character would take me further into that world. I’d still feel the same. I’d still be geek on the outside looking in. And maybe that is how everyone feels anyway. The idea that everyone who has ever cosplayed knows every other cosplayer is probably a myth. It has to be.

Also, who the hell would I go as? I’m not sure any of the characters I deeply care about I could do justice to. Morpheus from the Matrix, The Hulk, Cable from the X-Men. I could do a 2000AD Judge. The funny thing about that is that I’d then surely have to get involved in a Dredd and 2000AD clan. That would then involve immersion or attempted immersion in a way that wouldn’t sit right with me.

Last year, with all the buzz around the remake of Silent Hill 2, I was at the MCM Con trying to find any Silent Hill related Merch. I came up empty. What I did find was some brilliant Pyramid Head cosplay. One guy in particular looked amazing. He was ripped with a six pack to die for and when he removed his helmet, he was a fine handsome young man. I got speaking to the people around him and one of the Silent Hill cosplayers let me wear his Pyramid Head helmet. Then the good-looking guy got involved and I ended up wearing his Pyramid helmet. He’d actually done a good job of using a cycling helmet for comfort.

There is a ridiculous picture of me wearing that helmet and proving that inhabiting a character involves attention to posture that I’d struggle with. The whole experience made me feel like a kid. I’m probably twenty years older than this dude and I was like a kid meeting a hero. And the guy was lovely. The zombie nurses stayed in character throughout and eerily lurked. I felt comfortable with the scene, although still totally outside of it.

I don’t know if that cosplayer had the same ties to that game as I did. Considering the age difference, he would not have had the experience of playing on the PS2. It was a big step up from anything that had gone before. I remember reading a review where it was mentioned that when the game goes from cutscene to game they thought the game had glitched and frozen, only to realise that cutscene had transitioned to gameplay so seamlessly. Our own personal mythology around the game may well be very different. We talked more about cosplay than about Silent Hill. So, I never got a chance to see if we did speak the same language with regards to all things Silent Hill.

Reasons I go to Comic-Cons: To find things you can’t get anywhere else. To discover things, I didn’t know existed. I just bought two graphic novels based on H.P Lovecraft books. No one told me that Lovecraft graphic novels existed. To find things from my past, even if I have the exact same thing in the loft myself. To play arcade games because you can’t walk into a games arcade and play them anymore. To find anything related to anything you love and like. Where else are you going to find knitted Doctor Who characters? To pick up a prop and feel a little closer to a magical artifact, even if it is just a very good replica. I have a great picture of me with Luke’s green lightsabre from Return of the Jedi because some nice guy, having let me take pics of his cosplay, asked me if I’d like a pic of me holding Luke’s sabre.  

When I put it all like this, the artefact always comes first. It’s about the game you played and loved, or the film you’ve watched a tonne of times, or the comic that lives with you from childhood until now. The Con is where you can grab an object from that world and be in a place where the people of the fictions you love have escaped people’s heads and become physically real for a day.

We are all outliers here. It makes sense that the outliers in fiction are our role models. And so, we speak our own languages and reference our worlds. We recognise the same objects, and we know the same people. That recognition itself is all the connection you should need. And for three days of a con, the fictions we carry around privately, they escape and walk around this real world.