in short, WonderCon 2008 & X-Files 2

This year, I attended WonderCon only briefly. Other then the X-Files 2 panel, I hadn’t much interests in anything else at the convention. How much more excitement can I get off on people dressed up as Star Wars characters? I definitely had no desire to browse through over-priced action figures and comic books. How old am I, really? And I was getting irritated by a crowd of stormtroopers and overweight wonder women bumping into me. Shopping at Costco isn’t even this bad. Then there are the “has been” 2nd-rate actors from sci-fi shows, that date to about 50 years back, trying to make a living selling autographs; I don’t think their fans are even still alive. It really depresses you about old age. Immortality is a curse.

I’m trying hard to refrain from using the deragatory “G” word here.

And, I don’t want to insinuate only a negative attitude towards the convention. I was able to get a glimpse (from a distant) of Gillian Anderson & David Duchovny of X-Files fame. And that made more than worth the convention experience for myself. It’s one of the few shows on public TV that I can speak of obsessively in a trance-like state. There to promote the summer release of X-Files 2, Chris Carter (creator), Frank Spotnitz (writer) and the two stars were on stage giving a Q&A. Audience members weren’t allowed to ask for autographs. (Maybe in about 50 years, it will be possible.) For us common folks (who got in late), they were projected on a big screen as they spoke. We viewed a new trailer to the movie, but they didn’t talk much about it during the Q&A. The trailer, captured amateurishly by an audience member, can be found on YouTube here. One of those groupie members you hear screaming in the background is probably me. Both actors still look good, even after all these years (the power of Hollywood). I was only able to take the following pics with my cell phone. Sorry, pretty fuzzy images. Somebody actually filmed the entire Q&A on Youtube, but you gotta have patience, it’s like 17 clips total. If you listen carefully, people were hollering out,”Where’s Xzibit?”

          

All in all, it was a “C-Average” visit for me to WonderCon this year. Although, I do wish I had attended the Harold & Kumar 2 panel to get a glimpse of John Cho. He’s the next Sulu of the new Star Trek movie, ya know? Don’t call me the “G” word, please. And I should of made an effort to visit the talk about Vertigo Comics, esp. since I am addicted to reading Y: The Last Man now (Shia LaBeouf is rumored to play the movie version. Uhm… whoopee??). I personally consider Vertigo the “HBO of graphic novels”. HBO is going to make The Preacher into a series, so my analogy is not “G”-obsessive.

I apologize for my lack of enthusiasm and pics. You definitely can catch more than enough professional reports of WonderCon 2008 on IGN/Rotten Tomatoes, io9, Coming Soon, as well as a bunch of other sites. Hell, even one of my best friends and favorite Hungarian, Eszter took better pics than I did; she was only a few feet away from the stage. But, you have to be a literate, geeky Hungarian to understand what she wrote about it.