Detroit Fanfare

The Blatant Geekery girls have returned from another exciting con weekend! It took me a couple days to recover, as I think I got a touch of the con-crud from shaking hands and taking pictures, but now I'm back trying to get things done and ready to recap our experience at Detroit Fanfare.

This was a different experience for the both of us.  Normally, Graphics Girl keeps an eye on me to make sure my wig isn't cockeyed or that I don't have lipstick on my teeth.  This time I needed her painting/drawing expertise. I was working the con with Josh Blaylock from Devil's Due as his character, Mercy Sparx. Mercy is covered in tatts when in her earthly form, but her other form is...well...a devil-girl. Painting the tattoos proved to be a longer process than either of us thought. We woke up around 4am on Saturday to get ready and be out the door by 6. I think we finally left at 7:30. Oops. We had a difficult time figuring out the best way to get the tattoos on my chest and eventually I ended up laying on the floor. If it weren't my sister doing the painting, it would have been incredibly awkward. The best part of the whole process was when she outlined and I painted. TAG TEAM!

We had to get a photo documenting the start of our trip, but it was absolutely freezing, and after standing outside to fill up the car, this is what we came up with. Brrrrr!

By the time we made it to the convention, we were already exhausted. Thankfully, we didn't have to wait long for Josh to find us and get us our passes. This particular con is a bit more comic based, as opposed to the whole pop culture movement that's happening, and it's fairly small and intimate. The really neat thing about that, is that even though we were at the booth most of the time, we ended up meeting so many fantastic people! The booth itself held a LOT of awesome. Devil's Due is Josh's baby and he's also the writer of Mercy Sparx, so hanging out with him is always a blast and we get to hear about all of his upcoming projects. Also in the booth was K. Lynn Smith, the writer and artist of Plume. She is just about the cutest and spunkiest girl ever. Not in our booth, but just around the corner, was another new friend from Devil's Due, Dirk Manning. He is the writer of the upcoming series, Tales of Mr. Rhee. Take my word for it, you need to go and check out each one of these.  I have goodies from each of them and have already gotten other people addicted. *cue maniacal laugh*

Sunday morning came a bit too early after the tiny bit of sleep we had gotten the two nights before. Not only did we have tattoos to do, but we had to paint me up all red. Makeup took about 5 hours that day.(That being said, if anyone wants to help us invest in an airbrush, neither of us would complain.) The time invested certainly paid off though. People really seemed to enjoy Mercy...even the kids, which I thought was strange. I expected them to be terrified. My favorite photo op of the day had to be a little boy dressed as Darth Vader, force choking me.  Hopefully we can get a copy of that and post it at some point, because it's just too darn funny.

Our own recreation of a panel from Mercy Sparx.

While doing a bit of walking, we found Tom Hutchison from Big Dog Ink.  It's funny, because I had just been looking at adding Shahrazad to my list of upcoming costumes and not only did I get to check out all of those, but found another thing to add to my Wizard of Oz obsession...Legend of Oz: The Wicked West. I had to get all those books AND now I have another Dorothy costume to work on. Oh, cosplay problems. We also ran into Derek B. Becker from Drunk on Comics. He's been a friend of mine on Twitter and Facebook for quite some time and we were finally able to meet face to face. I love the world of conventions! It's so much smaller than I initially thought. I know there are a bunch of people that I'm leaving out, but we loved meeting everyone!

We started packing up at 6:00, loaded up Josh's car and started saying our goodbye's. Graphics Girl and I had not eaten, so we were really hungry and had to make a run to Wendy's before we began driving home. Since I was the one driving and I was still painted up as Mercy, we were pretty certain that it was going to end up being fairly entertaining. I had no idea just how hilarious it would end up being. There IS video footage and it's on Youtube, but we're going to do a bit of editing before we post it for public viewing. Seriously though...so funny. No children were afraid of me, but at the Wendy's drive through, there was a bit of a freak out. We were both exhausted when I dropped off Graphics Girl, and I still had to drive home and try to get the makeup off of me. I'm still a bit red today, but I think I was able to get most of the remaining stuff off this morning. I can hardly wait to paint myself green tomorrow!

Have a safe and happy Halloween tomorrow.  Send us pictures of your costumes!  We'll post ours when we're able.  It'll be a DC family event!

~Songbird