ComicCons and Career Contemplations

This last year has been a strange one. Being on strike for three months may have shaken my confidance, but it also inspired in me a passion for politics and economics; I spent so much time analyzing the numbers and the minutiae that affected our positions, and then explaining them to folks on the line, that I found my inner wonk :) Moreover, the time spent walking in circles I put to good use, reading everything I could get my hands on. At home, when I wasn't debating someone on Facebook, I was losing myself in the world of Skyrim in an attempt to counter the terrible psychological effect of walking in circles for hours (see Learned Helplessness). I may have had a terrible feeling that the world was falling to pieces around me (courtesy of walking the line), but my only way to combat the feeling was to give myself a sense of control. Knowledge gave me that control.

Back in the lab, the time on the lines left me feeling disconnected from the people at work. I threw myself into finishing the project, and at home found myself either playing Skyrim to escape, or Star Trek Online to game with my husband. When the project ended, I gave myself vacation time before looking for something new. I'd finished my bachelors, nearly killing myself on my honours thesis, then run a research project for three years and earned myself one hell of a recommendation letter, so I deserved a vacation so that I could think about where to go next. On that vacation, I discovered ComicCon.

Now don't get me wrong, I've been a geek and a gamer for a very long time now, but there's a big part of the geek community that I feel slightly apart from. Excluded.

I have a confession to make: When I was a kid, I wasn't allowed comic books.

My mother was against violence, whether on TV or depicted in cartoon form. My only exceptions were TinTin and Asterix because they were in French and more or less PG. Hell, she cancelled cable when YTV started getting interesting (I got a few episodes of a new show called He-man in before it went away), so we were more or less brought up on PBS. Instead, I had another outlet: the library. I got into reading big time, loving mysteries early on, and later getting into epic fantasy (First the Hobbit & Narnia, later Eddings & McCaffrey). Who cared about kids at school making fun of me if I had a good book waiting for me in my bag to escape into?

It wasn't until college that I realized quite how deprived I'd been. My brother and I had been allowed to watch Lois & Clark, and so I was a HUGE Superman fan, but without ever having read a single issue of the comic, and suddenly I discover that Superman was Dead?!?! My entire experience with comic books and graphic novels is still limited: When I was still in high school, I picked up a few Sailor Moon Mangas (in French, poetically); After I moved out, I was fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to read the Gen 13 series, which I ate my way through in one sitting; Later, a roommate let me borrow his Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (as I loved Zim), Hellboy and SinCity, and since then I've worked my way through most of Sandman; Oh, and I've been reading everything Joss Whedon does (though I'm behind on Buffy season 8, and I haven't yet read the 3rd Firefly series). That's the sum total of my comic book exposure. So while a lot of my gaming friends have been spending boatloads of cash to go to conventions for years, I never really saw the point. Okay you get to see a few celebrities, but then there's just a ton of people selling comic books and art, right?

Seeing my old friend, @Kessel Run getting into the hardcore gaming world and getting paid to go to conventions in the last few years though made me start paying closer attention. So did a crazy trip down to Vegas for the closing weekend of the Star Trek experience a few years back (I posted about going, but never got around to posting about what we did. I should get around to that... or at least post the photos :P). Last September, too late, we found out that tickets to Montreal ComicCon were actually affordable, so this summer I started pestering my husband to go.

It. Was. Amazing!!!!!

We came out of it with a pair of lightsabers (mine is red!), autographs from John de Lancie (who I got to chat with for a bit!), Adam Baldwin, and James Marsters (all beautifully framed by Encadrium). We ran into a ton of old friends, met some fantastic new ones, and generally had blast! Oh yeah, and our good friend Greg won a draw to play a game of Settlers of Catan with Wil Wheaton of Tabletop (oh, yeah and a little show called Star Trek), and had a two close brushes with fame (Malcolm McDowell brushed past on his own just after Patrick Stewart went by in a fedora and followed by eight security personnel) in rapid succession. That weekend was literally the high point of my year (and a close second to my honeymoon last year, as the high point of the decade)

So when I got a call from my buddy Rob, who'd filmed the Settlers of Catan game with Wil, asking me if I wanted to go to a little Geek Market in Ottawa with him and do a few interviews on camera, who was I to refuse? If one of my oldest and bestest of friends can be paid to go across North America to go to cons and hobnob with famous people, who am I to turn down the opportunity to possibly do the same? Of course, with slightly more than 12 hours notice, I could have been better prepared, but that'll teach me to return Rob's phone calls a little faster :)

A lesson I took to heart yesterday afternoon when he called to ask me if I wanted to go to Hal Con in Halifax. Keeping my fingers crossed that I get approval (instead of @Kessel Run who couldn't make it)! I've already started researching the guests for question ideas.

And if I don't go, or if Geek Inked decides to go with another candidate? At the very least, it's reminded me that there is an entire industry (other than science/pharma) in which I would absolutely love to work. :)