Wizard World Philadelphia 2012 – Panels and Star Trek Coverage

Another year of WizardWorld has come and gone, and while I’m exhausted and a fair deal poorer than when it all started, I managed to survive. So what all happened? Read onwards and we’ll tell you! If you’re looking for the Captains Panel coverage, move straight to page 2.

Thursday

Wizard made a couple of changes that greatly helped the con. Regardless, they still can’t manage themselves out of a paper bag, which we’ll get into in more depth later. This year the con expanded both from 3 days to 4, and from the two smaller halls of the convention center to fill up the two largest halls of the convention center. This allowed them to move the queue inside for the first time. While it wasn’t as hot as it has been in past few years during con, it’s still a much welcomed change, as it prevents long lines all the way down Arch Street of people waiting to pick up tickets (or at least should have. I’ve heard reports people still waited outside for over a hour). It also kept that long line from combining with the other convention going on at the same time in the convention center, the Trans-Health Conference. Which at first glance seems like “Oh, a health conference across multiple disciplines.” No, it was the other kind of Trans. And I’m all inclusive (I bought a copy of Astonishing X-men #50 last week, and fully support Archie and what they are doing with Kevin Keller), it made for a interesting sight with all the standard comic book cosplay mixed with all the Trannys and Drag Queens.

The move to the larger halls allowed for them to spread everyone out more. The cramped aisles of past years were widened considerably, which made making your way through traffic much easier. They also for the first time had roped off queues for each featured guest, which alleviated the massive clusterfucks they had been in prior years of people just making a formless mass around one booth and making the main aisle unmaneuverable and blocking other booths. And for the most part, they even managed to properly gauge how long those queues should be, grouping larger guests next to smaller ones to space all the lines out right.

While the addition of Thursday was nice, it didn’t really add anything. It was only open 5-9. The only people who really showed up were the VIPS so they could get their swag on early, and a few people getting badges after work. However, it did offer a nice opportunity to walk around and get a feel for the room without it being too crowded, because as everyone should know Rule #2 to a con is “You never buy anything on first sight, always make at least one loop around.” (Rule #1 being of course “Thou Shalt shower every day, no matter your usual hygiene routine”). I did however manage to fill a long box full of sub-$1 books before the end of the night.

Friday

I had intended for Friday to be my main shopping day, but my phone would not cooperate with me. As I’ve discussed in my CLZ Comics app review, I can’t do a con without it. It’s handy to have your whole collection in your hand. Since writing that, I’ve figured out how to work around most of my complaints (they still need a way to have a ‘undo’), but this was all my phones doing. My collection is now so large (5800+), when I try to sync to the phone, the phone just runs out of processing power and slows to a crawl. I killed the program in the middle of a sync, and it cleared the database on my phone. It wasn’t until early Sunday morning I was able to get a full sync completed, and that was after about 7 tries.

I was so angry at that, I spent most of the day helping out at our friends booth, Kat’s Anime Hats. I did however go to one panel, on the Psychology of Batman, hosted by “superherologist” Dr. Travis Langley, author of the book Batman and Pyscology: A Dark and Stormy Knight. The panel however started late, this being a running theme all weekend. The panel was co-hosted by Anthony Michael Hall, who was the GCN reporter in the first two Christopher Nolan films. However, he got lost trying to find the panel room, which was about as far away from the convention hall as possible while still being in the convention center. So while we waited for him, we watched the trailer for Dark Knight Rises about 4 times. After Anthony Michael Hall showed up 20 minutes late, he said that the best part of being in the films was working with Christopher Nolan, as he was able to learn so much from him. He felt that of all the movies, the Tim Burton ones had the closest feel to the original Adam West show. He said he considers himself a bit of a “news junkie”, and used that to help him prepare for his role. He also revealed that Heath Ledger directed the scene with him as a hostage being held upside down. Christopher Nolan really gave him a handheld camera to shoot that with, and that’s what ended up in the movie.

From here on out Dr. Langley proceeded with a shortened version of his powerpoint, stating that reporters seem to be disproportionally represented in the comic medium (Clark, Lois, and Jimmy Olsen; Vicki Vale; Peter Parker; Ben Urich). They help ground the superhero mythos, representing the point of view of the everyman, the reader. He said he had had discussions with Bob Kane and that one of the inspirations for Batman was Teddy Roosevelt (sickly as a child, his wife and mother both died on the same day, well studied, traveled abroad to learn, rose to prominance for police reform and for being a soldier). Batman is not legally insane, nor are most of his villains, because they are aware of what they are doing, and understand the consequences. Nor does Batman have a split personality, which usually involves one personality having amnesia for what the other does (like Two-Face in the great BTAS episode “Second Chance”). Instead, he merely plays two distinct roles. He then stated that Batman definitely has some form of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and that Christian Bale looked to both Johnny Rotten and A Clockwork Orange for how to play up to that. And at that the panel ran out of time not even halfway though the presentation, which was a real bummer.

Saturday

Saturday was jammed packed full of action. In a example of poor planning by Wizard, the first panel of the day was the Stan Lee panel, which was very sparsely attended, because most people were still in line getting tickets. Without a VIP pass, I was able to get pretty close with just a minimal wait. Yet again, the panel started 20 minutes late. This meant we were “treated” to 20 minutes of stand up from emcee Jarrett Crippen, winner of Who Wants to be a Superhero season 2. After just a minute or two, someone heckled him with “Bring out Stan!” to which he replied “Do I come down to Burger King and screw with you while you’re working? If he were here I would.” He killed time by telling of one time he was in the green room of the show alone with Stan, and to kill time they had some small talk over a game of ping pong. It was just a friendly little rally going, when a producer came up behind him to say something to him. While he was distracted, Stan slammed to ball at him, to which he said “You just got beat in ping pong by Stan Lee!” He also told of when he was crowned winner, one of the runner ups, Basura (aka Aja De Coudreaux) jumped up and wrapped her legs around him in congratulations, to which Stan leaned over and whispered in his ear “You’re welcome”. Finally Stan arrived, at which point Jarrett handed the mic over to Clare Kramer, who is apparently someone more famous, I’d never heard of her, but she emceed most panels all weekend. She was apparently the main villain from Season 5 of Buffy (you know, the one that got cancelled before swapping networks) and the owner of the main sponsor of the show, GeekNation.com, which just launched in beta Friday, so I can’t really comment on it.

Stan then finally arrived on stage and got a hug from her, to which he responded “After that hug, everything else is an anticlimax” and that “everyone knows more about me than I do”. I’ve seen him speak before, and sadly its true. While The Man is a legend, he’s almost 90 years old, and in his later years he has become the master of the non-committal answer, so there isn’t much to report here that is new information. One thing he did answer definitively is that his vitality comes from his love for what he does, and that he feels like he’s playing all the time. He said that in his early years he was embarrassed by what he did (hence why he used the nom de plume Stan Lee, and not his given name, Stanley Leiber), but of late he’s come to realize that “entertainment is the most important thing in people’s lives.” When asked to speak about Dr. Doom, Stan said that his greatest strength was that he was a king of his own country, and that when he commits a crime in New York, he has diplomatic immunity, which is something that wouldn’t happen at any other publisher, making Marvel different. He then said that he knew Spider-Man would be huge as soon as he saw the sales figures. When asked about which characters he most wanted to see in their own movie, he said all of them, but he was particularly looking forward to Black Panther and Dr. Strange. When asked if there was a villain he didn’t create that he wished he had thought of, he said “I can’t think of any I didn’t create”, which elicited a good laugh from the crowd. He was then asked what defined a hero for him, he responded that to him, a hero was “anyone who does good when faced with a choice.” He then said as an afterthought “A bad choice would be reading DC”

Photo Ops

It was at this point that I left for the Star Trek Captains photo, and my day slowed to a crawl. I fully expected it to, and was prepared for it (I brought a chair), but the level of incompetence shown here was staggering. Wizard has always been more concerned about the money than the fans. For example, the $700 difference between the VIP Captains Ticket and buying everything it entailed separately, or the fact that they initially tried to sell the 4 Captains photo by itself for $800, but had to bring it down to $500 for all 5 Captains because no one was buying it, or that when I bought my Shatner VIP package months before the show it was $375, but as the show got closer they quietly raised the price to $450. But with the addition of so many more photo ops (Shatner/Bakula, Shatner/Stewart, each Captain individually, and the 5 Captain Shot), plus all the other ops with guests with limited schedules (Hemsworth, CM Punk), they finally realized on Tuesday of this week that doing all that at once with just two photographers was impossible.

So with 2 days until the show opened, they brought in a second photography firm to handle all the Star Trek photos on Saturday. When I showed up get get in line at 12:30 for the 12:45 Captains Photo, there should have been 4 completed photo ops done already going back a full hour. They had not even started ANY photos yet. They had a total of 8 photo ops at this booth. However, they only had 5 lines roped off. These lines were also only about 100 feet long, and were unlabeled as to which line was what, so it ended up just being a large lump of people all angry and waiting. The lines needed to be much longer. In fact, the William Shatner line ended up running the entire length of the convention hall, being far oversold of what was practical. Also, the way VIP was handled was horrible. Rather than two lines, everyone was lumped into one line, and before a op was ready to go, a volunteer would run down the line shouting for VIPs to step out of line and move to the front, while all the non-VIP’s would move back. Pretty much everything about the management of it was handled badly.

The actual photography of it went fine, though it was insanely fast paced, and everyone was all seated and you stepped in behind them. It could have been a William Shatner impersonator for all I knew, I never saw him. Scott Bakula and Kate Mulgrew were very nice though, waving me in and telling me to kneel down some, as I had to lug my chair through with me, unlike most other ops that have a table outside for your stuff. I was supposed to have my picture taken at 12:45. I ended up getting it taken at about 2:15, which all things considered isn’t so bad. However, Wizard was unable to get their right and left hands talking to each other, because they were unwilling to keep guests to the schedule. Numerous staff and volunteers were heard to say “Guests are on their own to do what they like when they like” so when one guest doesn’t wanna disappoint fans in his line to make a scheduled op, and the other guests see that, it starts a chain reaction. Staff really needed to start closing off lines before photo ops/panels to ensure things went as planned, but they failed to do that numerous times all weekend long. If a guest won’t leave until his line is empty, fine, but stop filling the line up before they have things to do.

So then I immediately looped back around and got in line for the William Shatner photo. Fortunately Bill is a consummate professional and well seasoned with these things, and his ops went like clockwork. I had that photo done in about another hour. Then I waited around for the photos to be printed before the panel began, but they weren’t ready in time. We’ll come back to that later. I’m not sure how, but they somehow managed to get all the photos taken before the panel.

Still, they turned out pretty good.

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JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook