As per the past several years, I attended the Canadian National Expo on August 26th-28th at the Metro Toronto Convention Center. In addition to the Comic Books, Sci-Fi, Horror, and Anime, this year saw yet another addition: Gaming. With an expanded show floor and plenty of things to see and do, this show would be bigger and better than ever before. But of course, if you've been reading my reports for awhile, then you'll know that it's not just the convention itself that makes things interesting.

Friday: Blood and Bananas.

The adventure began, as it usually does, in line. I had made my way to the building much earlier than I ever had before and was very surprised at how close I was to the front! Look, I'm already inside the area within the black fabric! For sombody who's been going to this show for years, this is amazing. Shawn and his friend Andrew would join me soon afterward. The line started moving before it usually does and went surprisingly smoothly. It didn't take long before we had purchased our tickets and were waiting in another line outside to get into the dealers area. Then I ate Pocky.

It was in this outdoor line where things got silly. Andrew had, at some point prior, decided he needed some whipped cream. So while waiting in line, down the hatch it went. How or why one makes such a decision at times like this, I do not know. But it was certainly a sign of things to come.

A woman was trying to get some directions, and for some reason, asked us for help. I can't fathom why she'd come to us as we couldn't have possibly looked all that helpful. She asks us "Do you guys live here?" to which Shawn replied "I DON'T LIVE ON THE STREET!" No, not very helpful at all, but damn funny.

When Logan and James arrived, all hell broke loose. Directly across the street from the line was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation building. At this particular time, the CBC was undergoing a labor dispute and employees were locked out. A bit of a demonstration was going on outside the building, with protest signs and the whole works. Logan, Andrew, and James decided to pay them some "supportive" visits. In exchange for their "heartfelt" support of these employees, they were rewarded with free drinks and... bananas. Yeah, bananas. Wow. Who could have guessed that bananas would somehow be involved in the lineup for this convention? After this I don't think anything will ever surprise me.

Michelle and Lauren arrived in their costumes, bloody dead students from Battle Royale! They were extremely popular and had their picture taken several times.

As usual, the line to go upstairs didn't start moving when it was supposed to. Apparently (and this is just information that I overheard so I don't know for sure), there was a line that had looped all the way around to the point of blocking the escalators going up! Eventually things got sorted out and we were on our way. Aside from this, the lines were fairly painless and moved very fast this year.

Woah, when they said that this show would be bigger, they were not kidding! There were plenty of things to look at and take pictures of. So, you know what, here's a bunch of pictures right now.

Gaming Stuff.

NECA is just one example of the corperate presence at this show.

Gotta Catch'em all. Easier said than done judging by the size of this enormous Pikachu. It may look cute, but would probably eat your children.

Expensive Shirts.

Here's Jeff and Shane, two of my compatriots from Comic Book Masters. Don't they just look so professional? Shane had a booth to promote his awesome book, Dorthy Gale: Return to Oz.

There were several "Cool School" events over the course of the weekend, where established comic book artists discuss the industry and give live demonstrations. I made a point of going to one called "Breaking into Comics with Udon". I've been to other Udon panels at this show in prior years and so I know that Erik Ko is a great speaker and always has very informative things to share. Going to this panel and asking questions helped to solidify which directions I will be taking in the future, and I think that someday you readers will be seeing exactly what I mean.

Kenny Baker, the man inside R2-D2, was in town and held a discussion panel. Kenny admitted early on that he didn't really know very much about Star Wars, but he's been in plenty of other movies and live shows so he still had plenty to talk about. He talked about traveling all over the world and going to conventions, how beloved he is in Japan, and some of the hard times he's faced in his life and career. Not everything he had to say was exactly "politically correct", which made the panel quite humorous. His trip from England was a mess, but that didn't stop him from delivering an entertaining panel.

Saturday: I am the Hero.

The gang from Mirage Studios was back again for another year, so I had to check out what they were up to. They each had some awesome Ninja Turtles artwork for sale, and they were doing sketches and shooting he breeze with the fans.

I just had to take the opportunity to get my picture taken with TMNT co-creator Peter Larid and penciller Jim Lawson, two guys I've been a fan of since I was a kid. Thanks to Rin for snapping this photo.

Another of the "Cool School" series that I attended was "Drawing Babes with Michael Turner". I mean, honestly, how could I pass up seeing something like this? Informative and hilarious, Micheal Turner, the artist behind Witchblade and a recent run on Supergirl, tried his bestto explain how to draw great looking women without sounding like a pervert. He cracked up several times as he attempted to carefully choose his words. I think the points got across though.

After that, I met up with my loyal crew who were waiting in line for the Masquerade. It is here where an epic tale took place. While waiting in line, people were taking pictures of cosplayers. Somehow, with my keen ninja sense of observation, I had noticed one guy taking his camera out and his convention pass falling to the ground. When he was done taking the picture, he walked away, completely unaware that he was no longer in possession of the only object that would allow him to enter the masquerade and enjoy the rest of the convention! So I yelled...

He heard me (in fact I think the entire building probably heard me) and promptly retrieved it. I was then lauded by the masses as The Immortal Hero for All Eternity. Well, maybe it didn't go that far, but I did get a "thank you very much" at least. The people that run this show are notorious hard-cases for having a pass to get into the masquerade, so I'm pretty glad I could help someone out like that. It makes me feel powerful.

Back again to host the Masquerade was Gordon Rose. Didn't he retire 2 years ago? Yes, but here he is again anyway! He must know that he can't leave us. We all just love him too much. He did an awesome job and was hilarious as usual.

This year's Masquerade was excellent. There was so much more variety than previous years, with a very broad spectrum of source material used as the basis for the costumes. If this was a concentrated effort on the part of the people running the masquerade, then my hat is off to them and I hope to see this trend continue.

For some reason, after years of seeing very few comic book related costumes, The Joker was a popular character this time around. There were 3 Joker and Harley Quinn entries in the masquerade, and I saw 2 other solo Jokers throughout the weekend. The absolute highlight of the show was the second of the 3 Joker and Harley performers at the Masquerade. While doing their skit, the accompanying music suddenly stopped, and was replaced by a recording of the voice of the man in the Joker costume, who proceeded to get down on one knee. Over the speakers everyone heard...

"Stephanie, will you marry me?"

Holy marvelous matrimonies, Batman! Hundreds of people just saw The Joker ask Harley Quinn to marry him! Of course, she said yes, and the crowd erupted with applause. Yes, this was real, and the Harley cosplayer had no idea that was going to happen. It was an amazing sight to behold, probably a once in a life time thing. So best of luck to Harley and Joker in their life of crime together!

Willy Wonka, Jason Vorhees, Ash from Army of Darkness, The Terminator, Darth Maul, and The Punisher were also among the list of performers, along with the usual batch of anime characters. But one entry that really stood out was this one...

Ben Grimm, the ever lovin' blue eyed THING!

This was a pretty cool costume that was certainly very orange. But something seemed weird about it. The guy inside could barely walk! He just took the tiniest of steps. He still had not made his way to the exit by the time the entry after him had already finished! There was not much clobberin' to be done at this pace. Why was he so slow? Well, I found out later that his costume was actually made out of 100 pounds of rocks. Yeah, real rocks that he painted orange. You'd think the costumer would go with foam instead. But, nope. Rocks. Rock on.

Sunday: Kill the Heathen.

As soon as I arrived that morning I got in line for the Voice Actor Q&A session. Scott McNeil was actually hanging around the line at varrious points and said hi to me. This, along with a breif meeting a day earlier, alleviated my fears of repeating what happened at Anime North when I apparently walked right by him without saying anything.

The Q&A session featured Richard Cox (Inu Yasha), Brad Swaile (Kicker from Transformers Energon), Kirby Morrow (Miroku from Inu Yasha), and Scott McNeil (you know by now). This was a hilarious and fast paced panel. The room was far too small though, and was probably filled way past acceptable levels.

At one point, someone asked Scott a question about the 4 voices he played in Beast Wars. Scott wanted to clarify that he was talking about Beast Wars and not "The Bad Thing". Some people didn't know what he was talking about, so he finally said, in a downtrodden tone, "Beast Machines". I started clapping and cheering upon the mention of this controversial and misunderstood chapter of the Transformers saga. I was alone in my exuberance, and thus Scott points at me and yells "That's him! Kill him! Kill the heathen!" Heh heh heh. How Ironic that, a few days later, Beast Machines would finally be anounced as a DVD box set release. Yay!

The highlight was when someone asked Scott something regarding the live action X-Men movies, specifically about Wolverine, a character that Scott played in animation. Before Scott could answer, Richard starts going "No! No! No!", then he stands up and keeps going "No! No! No! We had to deal with this every day at the studio!" We were told that Scott thought that he should have been Wolverine instead of Hugh Jackman. He said "Wolverine is short and stocky, I'm short and stocky. You want to go with an Australian, I was born in Australia. You want to honor the fact that he's Canadian, I'm Canadian. And I sound just like the guy in the cartoon, bub!" But the official studio line was that they would not touch anyone from the cartoon with a 10 foot pole. But while Hugh Jackman has become this huge star, lucky for us, Scott McNeil goes to anime conventions.

After wondering around for awhile, I decided to check out the Geneon Entertainment panel. They showed a cool video celebrating their 10 years in the North American anime business, answered questions from the audience, and gave us a peak at some of their upcoming releases with a bunch of amazing trailers, including the new Hellsing anime. This convention marked the first time that anime industry panels have ever taken place in Canada, and I was happy to see that the room was pretty full. Hopefully panels like this will become more common at Canadian conventions, because I think it's important for companies to reach out to the Canadian fans.

Actually, I really went to this because companies tend to give away free prizes at these types of things. They did, but I didn't win any.

When that was finished I just hung around for awhile and talk to a few folks until the convention was over. On my way out the door, I was interviewed for some radio show in Detroit. I have no idea what will ever come of that, but hey, whatever.

Stuff I bought.

One of the best parts of the whole convention was this boxed in area made up of metal shelves, looking like a giant white cage. Inside was an incredible selection of hard to find legitimately released DVD movies at amazing prices. I honestly could have taken home 20 or 30 titles, because there were so many movies there that I wanted. I could only afford 3, but one of them was a 3 pack, so I got 5 movies in total, all live action films from Japan. They were Red Shadow; a cool ninja movie directed by Hiroyuki Nakano, Sky High; a freaking amazing film by Ryuhei Kitamura, and a set of 3 movies directed by Keita Amemiya that includes Mechanical Violator Hakaider, Moon Over Tao, and Zeiram 2. Not a bad haul, but not nearly enough!

The dealers were "Cinema1" and they have some retail stores here in Ontario. I had actually been to one before and it was great, but their set up at National Expo was mind-blowing. Plus, they gave away free Robotech toys with purchase! So there you go, Cinema1. You got some free publicity here on SykoGrafix.

I also bought this awesome Racer X shirt. Wearing it makes me even cooler than I already am. It cost a lot of money, but it's still only the second most expensive shirt I ever bought. This came from Stylin Online, who once again had a large area full of cool shirts I wanted to buy. Hey, another free plug. How about that? I should be getting free stuff for this.

I also bought a TMNT comic book. It's a limited edition reprint of the very first issue, made for the Ninja Turtle's 20th anniversary. I think I got the last one they had. Peter Larid signed it for me too. So I might as well put in a plug here for NinjaTurtles.com. As if they really need it.

Conclusion.

All around I think this year's Canadian National Expo was pretty successful. The past few years have seemed like the show was getting too big for its own britches, but the expansions in terms of size, space, and content have really made a difference.

Actually there were several events that I would have liked to have seen but couldn't fit into the schedule due to timing conflicts. There were anime premieres, a live JPop concert by ANGELA, several other comic book art related panels, and Q&A sessions with guests like Margot Kidder, Erica Durance, Crispin Glover, and Elvira. Elijah Wood was there too, but you had to pay big bucks to see him.

Once again I thought that the horror portion of the show had some of the coolest stuff. The brand new gaming side of things didn't really appeal to me, but it seemed like events were well attended. But as a fan of Comics, Anime, Sci Fi, and Horror, having events related to either or all of the above under one roof at the same time along with a level professional corporate presence means that this show offers something that other shows do not. With events running smoothly and plenty of things to see and do, it seems like several of the problems I've encountered at this show are finally being addressed, and that's a good thing. I hope that things run as smooth next year.

Sayonara.

R2-D2 says that you can now look at the
Picture Gallery!

Previous SykoGrafix CNExpo Reports:
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