By Dave Paone
Campus News
The Westside of Manhattan was once again overrun with superheroes, aliens, video game characters and a large number of individuals who were on a quest, as the New York Comic Con was held at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.
The four-day event last month attracted college students from near and far.
Alex (who preferred to use only her first name) is a 20-year-old student at New York University. She came dressed as Kafka of Honkai Star Rail.
Alex said she knew she was a geek from a “super young” age.
“My dad’s a geek. He’s really into Star Wars and Star Trek, so we watched those when we were really young,” she told Campus News.
They even dressed as characters from the franchises on Halloween and at movie premieres together.
Now we know who to blame.
Melia Velez, a 21-year-old senior at Montclair State University, came dressed as a Divine Dog of Jujutsu Kaisen.
Melia is a family science and human development major, which is a far cry from dressing up as a Wolverine. She uses cosplay as a creative outlet and a respite from the grind of academia.
In the past she kept her two lives separate.
“There’s always a version of you at home versus a version of you that you show to other people,” she told Campus News. “So at home I would be into all of this stuff; I’d be into anime, comics, everything,” but in high school kept it all “on the down-low” until her senior year.
By her freshman year of college she decided it doesn’t matter what others think of her hobby.
“I’m perfectly fine being the way that I am and I’m enjoying myself,” she said.
Daniella Cuevas traveled from Los Angeles to cosplay as Padmé Amidala of Star Wars.
She’s a 20-year-old business major at El Camino College and attends cons for pretty much the same reason Melia does and describes cosplaying as “a little getaway from reality for a little bit.”
Gal pals Adia Jefferson and Zoey Tomlinson were first-time cosplayers at NYCC. Adia is a recent grad from Temple University in Philadelphia and came dressed as Ice King from Adventure Time.
Adia is a lifelong fan of anime and the NYCC has given her a venue to express her geekiness.
“It’s just who I am. I feel like in a setting like this I can just really be myself,” she said.
Comic conventions aren’t just for young people.
Dr. Shamika Mitchell is a 46-year-old English professor at Rockland Community College in New York.
She teaches an introduction to literature class where she presents old-fashioned, daily comic strips (particularly The Wizard of Id, The Boondocks, Cathy and others) as a form of American literature.
She also includes Manga Shakespeare. Manga is a style of comic book art that originated in Japan and is extremely popular with the cosplay crowd. And Shakespeare is, well, Shakespeare.
Not only is he presented in comic book form, the “doths” and “thous” are replaced with more modern, American words.
There’s an old saying, “High school ruined Shakespeare for me,” and Shamika feels Manga Shakespeare is an effective antidote to that poison, and turns the Bard of Avon on to students who would have never found an interest in him by reading his plays the old-fashioned way.
Two weeks prior to NYCC, Shamika told Campus News she planned to attend, and added, “I won’t be cosplaying, but I will be geeking out.”
And geek out she did.
The first two days she spent networking and collecting whatever free merch she could and on day three she moderated a panel discussion that she originated. On day four she was a guest on someone else’s panel.
In addition to panel discussions (for which attendees pay extra), cons also have an “Artist Alley,” where writers, illustrators, publishers and just about any other creative type can rent a booth to sell his products or services.
At NYCC’s Artist Alley, writer Ghezal Omar – who bills herself as “the first Afghan-American comic creator” – set up shop to sell her “action-packed, girl power graphic novels,” .357 Mangum Opus and Pimp Killer.
Ghezal’s story starts when she was a toddler in Afghanistan when the USSR invaded her homeland in 1979. Her family became refugees and after a few years in London, landed in California.
Both her parents are college-educated so it was likely that Ghezal would go to college as well. She originally planned on film school, but that proved to be too expensive, so she attended Cal State East Bay as a communications major.
It was there she took screenwriting courses and the first incarnation of .357 Magnum Opus was a screenplay. However, she decided to rework it as a graphic novel and had to go through several artists before finding the one to complete the job.
Ghezal’s day job is in marketing and feels her BA in communications is instrumental in her daily work.
“Writing is the number-one skill in marketing,” Ghezal told Campus News.
In college she learned how to write for television, newspapers and other journalistic subcategories, which are skills she uses regularly.
Also in the Artist Alley was comic book cover illustrator, Jenny Frison, whom Campus News first met at a con at the Nassau Coliseum in 2018.
It was there she told us of how her father made it clear to her that if she chose art as a major in college, she needed to pick a field that would enable her to make a decent living.
“He sat me down and was like, ′If you want art to be your thing, you have to be able to make money,′” Jenny told Campus News from her booth at NYCC.
This edict from the person paying her tuition sent her on the path to illustrate comic book covers.
Since our last meeting, Jenny’s popularity among comic book readers has soared. At one point during the first day, the line of fanboys and fangirls snaked around the corner of her booth, as each awaited his or her turn to have Jenny sign reproductions of her artwork, sometimes snapping a selfie with her.
“It’s amazing that people respond to the things that I’ve done,” she said. “It means a lot to me.”
In the line was Coley Nowak of Indiana, who owns the online comic book store, MutantCityComics.com.
He describes himself as “very artist-oriented” so he’s aware of which artists are illustrating what comic books and Jenny was on his radar.
He had 10 items signed, at a cost of $35. (The first three were free.) Coley confessed he might sell some of the signed comic books. “I’ve got to fund this New York trip a little bit,” he said.
Alexis Wipperman and Chelsea Gard traveled together from Ohio to cosplay as characters from Lore Olympus. Alexis is 30 and Chelsea was a few days away from saying farewell to her 20s.
Both work for a company with a federal defense contract and both know just how geeky they are.
“You just have to embrace it,” Alexis said. “Once you realize who you are you embrace it all. Nerd, geek, it doesn’t matter.”
“Someone told me once that your 30s are all about describing what you lost and loved as a teenager, so we’re just on that quest to find our joy at this new stage,” Chelsea said.
Later this month the Javits Center will host another annual cosplay event, Anime NYC. And as usual, Campus News plans to be there.
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