A trip to Rhode Island Comic Con

I went up to the Rhode Island Comic Con this past weekend, with Jen and Lily as well as my friends Frederick and Jen. (With two Jens, we call the first "Jen Classic" and the other "Kenobi Jen")  It was a really nice little trip, and surprisingly inexpensive. We drove up in one car and stayed in a Motel 6, with boys in one room and girls in another.

This was Lily's first time at a big convention. We'd been at the Great Allentown Comic Con last year, but that's pretty small and local. This was the real deal.

In talking about the Monster Mania Con in August, I mentioned that there is often a lot of bleed with the theme of conventions. A comic con will be billed as a comic con, but they'll take any celebrity who answers the invitation. Monster Mania largely avoided this dilution, but Rhode Island Comic Con didn't. So, consequently, we had legitimate genre celebrities, Billy Dee Williams, Danny Glover, the actors who played the Bounty Hunters and Admiral Ackbar, but we also had a bunch of wrestlers, and the actors from weekend at Bernie's, the latter of which struck me as almost completely inexplicable.

We arrived around one on Saturday. Jen Classic's plan had been to see the local attractions around Rhode Island, while the rest of us took in the con, but she was feeling a bit under the weather and wound up just seeing local attractions near the convention center.

The costumes were nice. There were a ton of bounty hunters. As I was getting my wristband, one of the convention guys asked, "How many bounty hunters do we have at this con?" and I was like "We don't need their kind of scum."

We also saw Magneto in a plastic helmet. I can only assume he was cosplaying as Hipster Magneto. Any pictures that come up when I google that phrase?

Ah, there we go.

Lily enjoyed the costumes. (Though she asked why one scantily clad Batgirl was "walking around in her bra") She was in her shy mode, and generally didn't want to talk to people, so I did it for her, and everyone we approached was very nice about having a picture taken. (Also, kudos to the RI CC for having a clearly stated "Cosplay is not Consent" harassment policy posted). I thought a bunch of them were really neat, though I won't be posting any of the pics here. I did like the pair of friends who were dressed as Korra and Asami.

Frederick: Isn't that the Avatar?
Me: God, that's racist. Just because she's in a Water Tribe outfit doesn't mean she's automatically the Avat-. Oh, she's with Asami. Yeah, she's the Avatar.

We all had a pretty good time. We came in under budget, because I didn't really see anything I wanted to buy for myself. Lily saw a caricaturist, and she posed more or less patiently for her sketch.
 (It helped that she had a good view of the crowds passing by). We also bought some series 5 Lego minifigures. When we told him which figure we wanted, the dealer helped us feel the packages to try to identify the figures within, which was awfully nice of him.

She just looks so happy there.

There were a large number of artists there as well. We picked up a Wonder Woman poster that I quite liked.


Kenobi Jen  was familiar with Providence because she went to school at Brown...

Well, she graduated with a degree from Brown, and since

A.) she was surprised that the school had a stadium,
B.) all of her stories about Providence are about bars and/or coffee houses,

I'm not sure she spent all that much time at the school itself.

We visited Swan Point Cemetery, but that is worthy of its own post.