Highlights of MCM Comic Con 2018

I know that it was more than three months ago now that the UK’s biggest celebration of pop culture happened, but with rebooting my blog and a new job, it has taken an age to get this ready to go live. Back in May though I took my annual pilgrimage to London’s MCM Comic Con. It’s the one weekend a year that I can fully geek out with friends and other like-minded people. This year though was the first year that we had chosen to do all three days since this tradition started back in 2015.

As per usual, it was a long and exhausting weekend that began at six o’clock on the Friday morning. After three hours on the train and another hour traversing London, I arrived at the Excel Centre around half ten. I met with my friend Jack, and not long after joining the queue, we made it in just after opening time at eleven.

We knew that Fridays are always the least busy of the three days, which was part of why we added the extra day. That way we knew we could have a more relaxing day walking around the event before the usually extremely busy Saturday. And it was busy! Both the Saturday and the Sunday are busy, but the Saturday is the busiest. Even the train to the Excel was packed. This was the other reason for adding the Friday. Now we were already in the capital, meaning we could join the weekend queues earlier than we usually would. It worked, but we were still queuing for over an hour. Fortunately the final day was slightly better, and we were able to spend another two full days at the convention.

FRIDAY

This was also the first year that we had a proper itinerary. We each had panels we wanted to watch and talks we wanted to get to, so we had our days planned around those. However, our itinerary for the Friday was pretty short. There was only had one person that we both wanted to see that day; Anthony Daniels. The actor, best known for his role in the Star Wars franchise, wasn’t appearing on stage until 5:40pm, so we had the rest of the day to browse through the 100+ stalls.

The Friday is one of the better days to do this as well, with the smaller crowds before the weekend and vendors still with a lot of their stock left. That doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed everything you want though, as it turned out one of the items I wanted most: the Pop! figure of Black Panther’s Shuri, sold out extremely quickly.

Eventually it was time to get to the Live Stage for Anthony Daniels’ talk, which turned out to be one of the best of the whole three days. He began by talking directly to the audience, as opposed to the usual format of a Q&A session between guest and interviewer. Anthony spoke about his time on Star Wars (obviously!), but he stepped off the stage to engage with the audience, to answer questions, and ask some, and he even invited an audience member on stage. He and his guest, dressed as R2-D2, conversed a little before doing some Star Wars roleplay. The whole talk was very entertaining and light-hearted. It seemed very much as Mr. Daniels enjoyed being there, and wasn’t using the event as a promotional opportunity.

SATURDAY

After the long wait to get inside, we spent a lot of the middle day walking between the several talks and panels that we wanted to attend. The first was Letitia Wright, of Black Panther fame. The actress was due to step onto the Live Stage at 11:45, but was slightly early and the audience that had gathered was huge. She was there to talk about her role in Black Panther, but fans really wanted to know about her future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and [Spoiler Alert! (although you should have seen Infinity War by now)] what happens to her character Shuri now that her brother has “died”. But as expected, we didn’t learn much.

After grabbing something to eat in PopAsia (the food there is delicious!), I split from Jack to head back to the Live Stage to hear from Felicia Day. It wasn’t what I was expecting though. I was hoping to hear a little about her time on Supernatural or Buffy, but she spoke mainly about her online work, including her web-series The Guild. That’s not my kind of thing though, I stayed but don’t remember much.

After that, I met back with Jack to complete our Saturday itinerary with the Twisted Toonz panel. I had no idea what to expect, as it wasn’t on my itinerary but it was on his. It turned out to be very good fun though, as the group of voice actors read the first Harry Potter book in the voices of some very well-known actors and cartoon characters, including Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Walken and the Animaniacs.

The Saturday has the most everything; visitors, guests and especially cosplayers. I’ve not yet taken part in this side of the comic con experience, but I love to see it. The creativity, imagination and effort put in by some cosplayers is amazing, but I didn’t get to play cosplay bingo this year though, which was a shame. We did visit one of the Cosplay Masquerades before we left though. It was the UK qualifier for the World Cosplay Summit. We didn’t stay long though – the bits we saw were too strange, even for us.

SUNDAY

As with the Friday, we only had one talk that we wanted to attend on the Sunday. The only thing, it was another relatively late one. Tom Ellis was appearing on the Main Stage at 4pm, only an hour before comic con closed for another year. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except for the fact that we had to get back across London to catch our trains back home, but I couldn’t miss the talk I’d been most looking forward to.

Again, like the Friday, we had several hours to spare before the talk. We spent much of this time looking through the stalls, some of which were looking increasingly sparse. Sometimes you can get bargains when you’re shopping on the final day but I wasn’t planning to buy anything today (and taking all the way home would’ve been difficult as my bag was now full).

After eating something, again at PopAsia, and a bit more browsing, it was time to head to the Main Stage. We turned up not long before Tom Ellis was due to step onto the stage but we were able to find seats. Others were not so lucky. Tom was a great guest to listen to – one of the best talks I’ve been lucky enough to see – and was not afraid to interact with the audience. He was there to promote the brilliant Lucifer, which at the time had recently been cancelled by Fox, so #savelucifer was a big talking point. Since comic con though the show has been picked up by Netflix, which is great news!! He played us a little guitar whilst on stage (unfortunately I don’t remember the song) and got slightly emotional when a video was put up on the big screen of fans showing their passion for his show with the savelucifer hashtag. I’m very glad that I got to see the talk, even if it meant leaving pretty late and getting home at 11pm.