EDMO! (Central)

Notes from Armageddon Expo 2009

A Stormtrooper takes a photo of another Stormtrooper, then gets someone to take a photo of both of them together. Maybe they weren’t Stormtroopers, they might have been some other variation, Sand Troopers or whatever. A father who looks my age takes a picture on his phone of his son’s facepaint.
We get there before ten, by the time we leave at midday the line stretches a good fifty metres from the doors to the carpark. I’m very glad not to be suffering from the night before. Inside my first response is that I’ve never felt more tanned or cleaner shaven than I do right now. But that’s not fair.

I recognise more of the cosplay than I’m really comfortable with. I’m stoked to see two Poison Ivys and a Harley Quinn just cos they’re not Japanese. In the signing tent you can meet the guy who does the English dub voice for Goku and even get his autograph, if you could see any point.

As usual NZ comics are given a raw deal, forced to look more and more like American or Japanese homogeneity. Or maybe that’s where NZ comics are steering themselves, I don’t know. Maybe I’m getting old. Anyway. The few people doing interesting things do it with enthusiasm and humour that is infectious and heart-warming, but even they talk about moving to online comics.
Give it five years and there won’t be any comics here at all apart from Manga. And even they’ll only be here to explain the DVDs and merchandise

There’s a clear visual overlap between otaku and heavy metal – cloaks, make-up, elaborate beards. Some sort of ideological overlap as well? Not sure, I try and avoid metal and the people who think that way

Several people pushing round babies in strollers. Why are you bringing your baby? What possible enjoyment is it going to get out of it?
I need to stop referring to babies as ‘it’s

It’s like a microcosm of the real world, all condensed into a big warehouse – competition, commercialism, sexuality, racial diversity (although due to space limitations this is represented pretty much entirely by whites & Asians)
On the topic of sex – not wanting to have a go at anyone, I’m all for cute girls in little skirts – but since when is slutty-goth an anime? What exactly are you cosplaying? You know who you are. There’s a fine line between awesome and fail when you’re dressing like a cartoon character, and most people stay just on the right side of it.

I’m not sure which side the guy dressed as Dora The Explorer falls on

I understand and support the argument for video games as valid escapism but – Rock Band? Guitar Hero? What are you escaping from? Your life’s gaping hole where playing the guitar should be? You could fill that with actually playing the guitar. Even worse is DJ Hero, which is a new thing, where you have a turntable thing and pretend you’re making music. Oh no sorry, that’s what actual DJs do. With DJ Hero you can pretend to pretend to be making music.

Speaking of wasting your life – if you’re old enough to have grey hair and teenage children, you’re too old to be entering in the Yu-Gi-Oh tournament. Those teenage children of yours would be so embarrassed of you, if I thought for a moment that they existed. There weren’t many girls playing Yu-Gi-Oh, or rather there weren’t any, not that I could see, and that comes as no great surprise. Any social group that has both sexes in it doesn’t need such an elaborate, convoluted card game.
There’s a constant dull roar, default noise which is at all pitches and therefore sounds like nothing, you don’t really notice it, you just gradually become headachy and grim.

It sounds like I’m being mean and I’m not, or I don’t mean to be. It wasn’t till we were leaving and I was hungry and noise-fucked and the busted ligament in my foot was starting to ache that I began thinking snide comments to myself about the overweight Caucasian Sailor Moons, and I attribute it mainly to low blood sugar.

So what do you get for your eighteen (eighteen, Jesus) dollars, apart from the right to visit stalls and spend more money? Well, that should be enough for you, shouldn’t it? That and watching other people play pretend guitars over the thump and irrelevant waffle of Mai fm. Well what you get is a community, if you want it – for three days of the year you get to come together with like-minded individuals from all over Auckland, and further abroad, to spend time socialising and bonding face to face rather than over internet forums and Xbox Live. To see that yes, the disembodied voices that say the same things as you do belong to real people with real flesh bodies, real eyes and skin and smells. For these three days you get to come together in a place that specifically caters to you because nowhere else does, you know that, you know your place and your people aren’t found in high schools or office buildings or trendy bars or if they are they’re rare, isolated, few and far between. And more than just catering to you this place belongs to you, here and nowhere else are you the majority, with all the pride and confidence that comes along with that role.
These people looked so happy, so comfortable with who they are and what they do, and how often do you see that anywhere? Pick any person out of the crowd and you can see her as the quiet girl at high school who eats her lunch in the library and is awkward and shy speaking in front of the class and yet here she is, bubbly and radiant in a bunny costume or green spandex or dressed like an ninja that’s obscure but terribly important to her. And once this weekend’s over she’ll go back to being that shy awkward girl until next Armageddon, or until this particular demographic or group of demographics shifts over from being not cool to cool, blinks and is subtly amalgamated into the mainstream. It’s on its way, thanks to video games and the internet and New Zealand’s ever-increasing fear of letting our kids go out in the sun.

Oh and if the guy in the Starscream outfit doesn’t win the costume competition I’ll be outraged.

So the other day (and by that I mean any time in the last ten years) I was reading an interview with Alan Moore about writing Watchmen and the process he and Dave Gibbons went through creating it. I was convinced it had been his interview in Writers on Comics Scriptwriting, until I looked it up today and it turns out that actually he’s not interviewed in there at all. So now I have no idea where I was reading it, and thus can’t quote it or provide references.

Anyway in this interview he makes the argument that if a comic’s writer and artist are both doing their jobs properly you shouldn’t be aware of them. If you notice the art in a comic, even if you’re impressed by it, then that’s taking your attention away from the story, and telling the story, immersing the reader in it should be a creator’s primary aim. Same with the writing – if you’re aware of how well the story is written then that’s taking you out of the story itself. Showing off is counter-productive. Moore expressed it much better than that, but as I say I can’t remember where so I can’t find it for you. I do remember that he uses an example of the page layout in Watchmen, which is based uniformly on a nine panel grid. This means the layout slips into the background, becomes ignored, lets the story take prominence. Or something.

Then today quite by chance I found a post on Coilhouse.net talking about Jack Vance, a fantasy writer who predated Tolkien with a book of short stories published in 1950. The article starts with a quote from Vance:

A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone’s written the story. He’s supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.

Exactly. This essentially amounts to an argument against post-modernism, and I think I’m fine with that. Just have a look at Kill Bill, a collection of showy techniques and clever tricks that, when you get down to it, has fuck-all of a plot and what little is there is trite. Tarantino has always been a show-off, but whereas Pulp Fiction was look-at-me-use-my-amazing-directorial-skills-to-tell-this-story, Kill Bill was very much look-at-me-use-my-amazing-directorial-skills. If you have something to say (and there’s plenty of artists out there in all genres who, if they stopped to think about it, whould have to admit they don’t) then surely you want your work to express your point as strongly and as clearly as possible. And in some cases doing something tricky may help (Memento going backwards, say), but if it doesn’t add anything to the story then really, you’re just doing it to be cool. And the best artists aren’t cool; they’re invisible.

These haven’t been photoshopped at all, this is just how they came out of the camera. Wellington & Christchurch a few years ago.

Now let’s be clear, I’m not having a go at them. I like it when people are enthusiastic about their food, about what they do. And while it would be nice if they could be grammatical when they do it, it’s totally fine if they’re not. I know what they mean. And it’s fun. And look at their open sign!

How neat is that?! This place is on K’Rd and sells a weird mix of kebabs and curries and pizzas and stuff, it’s like three or four more traditional food places all smooshed into one. I’ve never actually been in, so I’ve got no idea if it’s any good. Looks alright, though. And I always intended to go in, or at least I did until one day I saw this:


Come on. Yes, sure, you’re that much more correct. I bet you have heaps more customers now, countless scores of people walk past and go ‘Oh let’s not eat there honey, they don’t know how to phrase their – Oh my God! They’ve fixed it! I’m gonna get a pizza and a curry and a kebab right now!!’ And even if that was the case, we can still see the mistake! It’s right there under your flimsy bit of paper! Nobody wins.

This basically boils down to one thing: back yourself. If you make a sign, stick with it. Even if it’s not perfect it’s your sign and plenty of people like it and you’re doing just fine in terms of customers through the door despite the error. Just leave it. Or, if you decide you have to change it, it has to be fixed, once you had it pointed out to you you just couldn’t bear the mistake, then actually change the sign. Properly. Don’t be half-arsed about it, we’ll respect you less for your lack of commitment, either way. The phrase about being damned if you do or damned if you don’t is false; you’re far worse off if you sit on the fence. At least in terms of my patronage.

So I went to an exhibition last night, artwork by primary and intermediate school children.
What a heap of crap. Not the art, that was fine, it was what you’d expect from kids that age. Some of it was actually quite cool. No, I’m talking about the parents. What a bunch of wankers. They made me embarrassed to be under fifty. Your children are not special. They are children. And you are not young and interesting. You’re at an art exhibition, sure, but it’s being held in the music room of an intermediate school. Stop acting like this is going to be in About Town. I swear to God, I came out of there dripping with so much smug I wanted a shower.

I’ve never seen a better argument for having kids when you’re either decrepitly old or inappropriately young – anything so that you don’t wind up becoming one of these sad trying-to-have-it-both-ways, I-drive-a-people-mover-but-I-wear-a-leather-jacket cocks. Argh. By and large I don’t like children but they were by far the most pleasant people there.

Anyway. Sorry. Just had to get that off my chest. Congratulations to all the kids with their pictures on display.