NYCC 2012: At the Big Apple

Returning for a second year in a row, I attended New York Comic-con, which was coincidentally held in New York at the Javitz Center. As opposed to last year, where I got asked to come the day before the con, I was better prepped to attend and photograph the con this time around, here it is.

I left for Toronto to my girlfriend Alex’s place Wednesday night after a busy week of work up to that point, rushing to get there at 1am. Woke up after 8 and we left to go pick-up our passenger Jen before heading out to the USA. We listened to a good number of Daft Punk songs on the road, switched it up a bit after a while. Just like Otakon and Katsucon, the drive is more or less 9 hours long.

After an unscheduled detour, we arrived in New York around 8:30, just in time for me to witness a very drunk homeless man tip over from the sidewalk and land straight on the hard asphalt road. With so many one-way streets in NY, I had to loop through Times Square to get to our hotel, and my God is it ever busy with pedestrians who don’t obey the traffic laws! Included among them was a security guard!!! I had the advanced green light people! You had the orange-hand-of-STOP!

Parking was located right beside our hotel and was $35 a night, which isn’t bad considering we were a 2-minute walk from Times Square, though the European-based (Russian?) parking guy was not so pleased with me for some reason, not sure why.

Megan was already there waiting for us at the hotel, it was a rather cold and bit worn-down hotel, but it did the job to keep us alive and warm for a cheap price. We went out to eat a yummy dinner shortly after at Ruby Tuesday’s.

We arose a couple hours after the crack of dawn, being around 10am, got our stuff together and traveled as a herd to the Javitz center. The hotel was much further than last year’s, about a 15 minute walk. There were plenty of useful stores along the way.

As per usual, most of my weekend involved taking photos, and some videos. I roamed the dealer’s room a bit every day, visited The Oatmeal booth, RoosterTeeth, Cyanide and Happiness, and a few others. I lined up for the Halo panel on Saturday and had an exclusive look at some of the new stuff in Halo 4. The room was packed!

I had a few photoshoots over the weekend, including a Katamari shoot in Times Square, stay tuned for that! I met up with the usual friends Sam, Nikki, Alex, Gill, and other Canadian people.  Re-met-up with NYCC people from last year as well, some of them I recognized, some of them had to poke me for me to realize hah. I bought a few items in the dealer's room, Halo anniversary Soundtrack, Oatmeal's new book, BumbleBear poster from Happiness and Cyanide and TO anime movie.

The con was a bit smaller this year due to the construction on the top floor, where the artist alley resided in last year, kind of a bummer, since that’s a good amount of real estate where people could hang out and was a nice place for photos. Hopefully ALL of the construction can be done by next year…

What else can I say, had a good time with friends, went to the Disney store a couple times, bought a spider-man mug there, ate a tasty organic burger and downed some delicious vanilla shakes. I’m certain next year will be a blast to, and maybe we’ll get a hotel that’s ever so slightly closer to the con.

Check out the general con gallery photos, tourist photos here, and photoshoots will be posted later on once they’re complete. If you see yourself in a photo, and would like a bigger copy, you have the option of purchasing it for $5 which will get you a much larger version with a minimal watermark, more on this page. I'm selling copies to the cosplayers in the photos only.

Mike