Montreal Comiccon: Day 1

Friday marked the first day of Comiccon in Montreal. The Palais de Congres gates opened at 1:30 pm and fans of sci-fi, super heroes and merch flooded in.

As part of the convention's opening, Mayor Denis Coderre was scheduled to make an appearance to perform a ribbon cutting ceremony. However, in true Montreal fashion, it took multiple detours to find out where the ceremony was being held. The ceremony was to be held in front of the CHOM tent, but asking con personnel where the tent was located led to being redirected to other personnel, which led to being directed to the main information desk which led to being directed to the convention info desk which led to ignoring the final redirection and instead wandering the exhibition hall until the CHOM tent could be found.

No convention is complete without at least one hiccup.

When Mr. Coderre arrived, fashionably late, he had a small photoshoot with a group of X-men cosplayers before the ribbon cutting.

During the shoot, he joked around with a Deadpool cosplayer and called the always-present Ace Ventura cosplayer his “brother from another mother.”

The exhibition hall itself was surprisingly packed on the first day despite the golden rule to wait until later in the con for prices to drop.

After touring the exhibition hall, I attended my first panel of the day: Super Geeked Up LIVE. You know a panel is going to be good when you enter to sit down and Eye of the Tiger starts playing.

Super Geeked Up is a webseries hosted by Jeff and Jordan who discuss sci-fi, fantasy, superhero, and video game topics and play super-fun geek-themed games live every week on their website. For the panel, they were joined by special guests from Geek & Sundry series LARPs and Battle Jar and turned their usual online show into a live, interactive panel.

The first game played with the audience was the Character Cage Match – pitting groups of fictional characters against each other. The hosts divided into teams and chose four people in the audience to join them. Each side was given two fiction heroes and had to argue their case about why their chosen characters would win against the others. It was as diplomatic as a highschool debate, but that’s what you get when fans collide. In the end, Deadpool and Harry Potter won out against Luke Skywalker and Harley Quinn.

The second game was Lets Geek It On – a fictional character dating game. The hosts assumed the roles of characters and guests had to ask them questions as they they were eligible bachelors to determine who they were based on their answers. I was lucky enough to guess bachelors two and three correctly, who were Hermione Granger and Batman respectively, but bachelor number one was Westley from the Princess bride.

The third game was Universal Translator – where two guests pretend to have a conversation in fictional languages and the hosts “translate.” One guest did the trumpet noise that the adults in the Peanuts series make, and another “gave Klingon a try.” tlhIngan wej jatlhDI'.

With some time to spare, the final bonus game was Characters with Accents – where hosts gave two teams of guests characters and accents, and the guests had to combine the two and have the other guests guess who they were portraying and with what accent. The game ended in a tie with both teams getting six characters guessed.

As the panel finished just on time, I had to rush out to my second – and final – panel of the day: the William Shatner conference.

If you have never attended a conference with Shatner, I highly recommend it. I kept a notebook with me for the entire day to jot down the things I saw and interesting points in the panels. The first line for the Shatner conference reads,

“I don't know what I'm witnessing.”

Shatner began his conference by discussing his roots in Montreal, his old childhood friends, the places he used to visit, the culture in Canada and garlic spare ribs. It was deduced after the first question was posed by the audience that “not bad” is not an acceptable response if Shatner asks how you're doing, as he flew into an almost-rage about how Canadians always give a response that is neither good nor bad. The second question asked about where Shatner believed Star Trek would be fifty years from now was met with Shatner confirming he wouldn't be around fifty years from now, a philosophical spiral into “what is Star Trek?” “what is sci-fi?” “what is science?” and leading into a lecture on quantum physics and eventually the evolution of special effects in movies for about twenty to twenty five minutes before concluding with “I don't know.”

Other highlights included a rant on how pretty Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is and how much Shatner thinks we should stick a maple leaf on Trudeaus face and put him on the flagpole because he's so pretty.

It was an experience. Not a bad experience, perhaps one of my most favourite panels of all time, but an experience all the same. I would say it's akin to listening to a beloved grandfather rant about the good old days and all that they've learned while complaining about things have changed and that no one truly knows anything.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable day. I even got to ride the infamous Azur metro train home. Tomorrow will be the biggest day of the convention this weekend, and I am full of pizza and ready to start again.