Bright and early on a warm Saturday morning in California a 25-year-old woman swept on to the main floor of the San Diego Comic-Con wearing a red wig, floor-length red cape, knee-high lace-up platform boots, a black loin cloth and a long-sleeved black top that ended just below her nipples – giving her a sort of upside-down cleavage. It took a while to move one’s eyes up to her face, but when they got there they were greeted with a perky smile and irises turned a disturbingly bright green thanks to coloured contact lenses. After posing for photographs – face menacing, cape held high – the woman, giving her name as Red Valentine, explained that she was dressed as the Goblin Queen, a character from the X-Men comic books who starts off as a housewife but turns diabolical after her husband leaves her. ‘She once tried to sacrifice her new-born child to open up a demon realm,’ Valentine said cheerfully. ‘I always go for deranged homicidal maniac women. I can do really cool poses and have fun with it.’
This was Valentine’s fifth year coming to Comic-Con. Tall, thin and defiantly sweet (not to mention extremely attractive), she was hardly the kind of girl I had expected to see hanging around the world’s largest comic-book convention. ‘When I was three I inherited all my older brother’s comic books,’ she said by way of explanation. ‘I learnt to read through comic books.’
This year about 300,000 people from all over the world flocked to downtown San Diego to wander among endless displays of collectible toys, comics and film memorabilia.
When the convention started in the mid-1960s it was a niche thing, popular with teenage boys and bachelors indulging their childhood love of comic books, but in the past decade the convention has grown significantly more mainstream. Hollywood has inevitably elbowed its way in, using it as a platform to grant excitable fans their first looks at action, horror and comic-book-themed films and hosting panels with the casts and creators of television shows such as Lost, Heroes and True Blood. But though Hollywood may have a lot of money to spend, the mass-market entertainment machine of publicists, film stars and producers has not (yet) fully taken over. And so the attendees remain an interesting mix of television-show devotees, Star Wars freaks, teenage anime lovers, Star Trek obsessives, Harry Potter fiends, pop-culture bloggers and, of course, good old-fashioned comic-book lovers.
The costumed women of Comic-Con, a small but highly visible contingent in this world, have a symbiotic relationship with the less flamboyant attendees. The women are treated like celebrities, posing for hundreds of photos a day by adoring masses of both genders and all ages. And the masses get to indulge their fantasies of seeing (mostly) attractive (mostly) young women dressed as beloved characters such as Wonder Woman, Elektra and Lara Croft wandering around in the very visible flesh. It’s like Disney World for grown-up geeks.
‘I’m a huge dork, so any chance I have to dress up is great,’ said Lea Patrick, 26, who was dressed as Harley Quinn (the Joker’s girlfriend in Batman) in a sheer white body stocking with a red sequinned diamond barely covering one breast and a black one barely covering the other. She was also wearing a red and black jester’s headpiece and her face was painted white.
I asked her what she did when she wasn’t dressing up and she handed me a card. ‘This is what I do,’ she said. In her day job she dresses as a Playboy bunny, or sometimes a sexy cop, at the Hollywood & Highland shopping and entertainment complex in Los Angeles. ‘I spent the most money on this Harley Quinn costume, but it makes the least on the street, so now I just wear it to conventions,’ she said. Then she trotted away with an austere but convincing Batman to pose for more photos.
Not all the women at Comic-Con are so intent on being revealing. On the second floor of the convention centre, where the emphasis was more on Japanese anime films and manga comics, the atmosphere was younger and more PG. Teenagers with furry tails attached to their miniskirts and plush animal ears on their headbands held signs that read free hugs. It felt like a cross between a rave and a giddy church meeting.
Among the people camped out in a long hallway was Caitlyn Hall, 21, who was being helped into an elaborate, boxy costume by four friends, each wearing a tan jump suit with the words field medic stamped on the back. Hall, who is studying to be a librarian, is part of an emerging trend in Comic-Con costuming: trans-costumers. These are people who dress up as transformers and robots. It took Hall six weeks to build her Corvette transformer costume, an intricate get-up made almost entirely from foam and plastic sheeting covered in vinyl. When she was fully suited, her face and body were wholly obscured. Sexy? No. Impressive? Very. When she started to walk slowly towards the lift (with one of the Field Medics as her guide) it was like watching a piece of transgressive folk art in motion. I was so moved that I asked to have my picture taken with her.
Hall acquiesced, but she was in a rush to get to a planned ‘meet-up’ with other trans-costumers at the Hasbro booth on the main floor. A meet-up is when people who are dressed as characters from the same film, comic book, television show or anime series pick a place to get together and stand around looking similar. (If nothing else it makes for a great photo op for the legions of Comic-Conners armed with impressively large digital cameras).
As Hall carefully picked her way through a sea of flashing lights and mobile-phone photographers, trying to stop her costume from unhingeing, she ran into Robyn Murphy, another trans-costumer. Murphy was dressed as Arachnia – a spider-like robot from the Transformers universe – in a form-fitting foam suit that covered every inch of skin. She had brought three hand-made transformers suits from her home in Australia to the convention. ‘I’m, like, the only one in Australia that does this,’ she said, excited finally to meet other people who share her love. ‘Or at least it’s a very small minority.’
Without exception the costumed ladies of Comic-Con were sweet and smiley, and happy to pose for a picture by whomever asked, no matter how many people asked. (And lots of people asked.) It made me wonder: how often do these girls get hit on? I posed that question to Lana Marie, 24, actress/model/digital artist/shop assistant, who was dressed as Catwoman in a hand-made black spandex outfit that she had accented with white yarn. She said that she hadn’t been paying much attention. ‘I’m kind of in my own world,’ she explained. ‘One guy mouthed,
“I love you,” but it is usually the creepy ones who do it.’
I put the same question to Ashton Larson, an impressive, if perhaps overly perky, Wonder Woman, as she was flipping nonchalantly through a box of comics on the main floor.
‘You have no idea,’ she said. ‘Some guy just took a picture of my butt.’ She didn’t seem to mind.
Towards the end of the day Katy Budd, 28, had propped her feet, encased in 5in stiletto boots, on a table in the dingy cafeteria area of the main floor. Even here she was besieged by strangers wanting to take her photo. She started to rise, but when our photographer told her he actually preferred her to stay seated, she replied, ‘It’s OK if I sit? That’s amazing!’ Her smile was very un-villainess. Budd, who drove down to Comic-Con with two friends from Vancouver, was dressed as the Baroness, Sienna Miller’s character in GI Joe, the action film of the summer. Her outfit comprised black thigh-high patent-leather boots, shiny gloves that went almost to her shoulders, pleather top and pants, a chunky waist belt and the requisite red cobra at her neck.
This was Budd’s second day at Comic-Con. The day before she had come without her costume, wearing jean shorts, a black tank top and a pair of Converse boots. Nobody asked for her photograph, nobody gave her so much as a second glance.
‘It’s insane the attention you get when you’re dressed up,’ she said, marvelling at what a pair of boots and a skin-tight pleather outfit with a cobra insignia can do for a girl. ‘It takes me an hour just to make it halfway across the floor.’
Source - www.telegraph.co.uk
