Toronto Comicon with TNG

Hey, friends and followers. I’m a bit tired after my day at Toronto ComiCon featuring most of the cast of “Star Trek, The Next Generation”, but I’ll share some of the highlights and some pictures. 🙂

Got to the Convention center around ten minutes to 11am, which was when the Con was supposed to start. It was at least 11:30 by the time I finally got onto the Dealer’s floor, and I spent nearly half an hour waiting outside. It wasn’t bone-chillingly cold today, but it wasn’t really warm either, and I hadn’t wanted to lug a heavy winter jacket around with me. Luckily, my “Can’t Stop the Serenity 2012” zippered hoodie was pretty good at keeping me warm.

I wandered around the Dealer’s room a little, picked up a flyer for the November TCON Doctor Who convention, said hi at the Toronto Browncoats fan booth, and found the one comic vendor who regularly stocks a good supply of Dark Horse graphic novel collections. Picked up Buffy Season Nine, volume 2, which I’ve been looking forward to, at a great price, and then I hurried off to a talk on “How to write a graphic novel in an hour.”

That was a great talk – there wasn’t much graphic stuff in it, except for a bit of discussion of ‘set pieces’ – scenes where the setting is important to both the plot and the character. But the guy talked a lot about fiction and plot in general, and mentioned some interesting stuff about the four other kinds of fiction other than plot – Tale, Monograph, Character Study, and Sketch. The audience really loved it, especially when he called for volunteers to judge the plots we worked out on 6 criteria: sex, violence, suffering, wickedness, comedy, and novelty.

After the Graphic Novel talk, I planned to go in for the Innerspace taping, but was tempted away by the next line, where people were lining up early for the Brent Spiner / Michael Dorn joint Q&A session. So I hurried off to the food court first – because I knew that if I joined that line, I’d be busy with Q&As for a few hours, and would need some pizza to keep up my strength.

Important Con Note: Always remember to double-check what a line is before you join it. There was a couple who got the Innerspace line mixed up wht the Brent and Michael line, for instance. I also saw a line of people mostly pointed at the food court, and figured that there was actually a long line for pizza or something else. Turned out that it was Patrick Steward photo ops. 😉

So I got into the Brent and Michael line with my pizza, ate it up quickly, and got some fanfic editing done on my Palm Tungsten – the first time I’ve used it for revision in many years now, but I think it went well. Then I got back up and they brought the lines in, and I got a pretty good seat. Michael and Brent played off each other pretty well, talking about how many hours they spent in makeup chairs over the years, and Brent did this really really good impression of Patrick Stewart.

I left that Q&A when a volunteer told the guys that they had five minutes left, because Gates McFadden and Levar Burton were coming up next in the same room, and I knew they were going to clear the room and let in the people who’d been waiting first. Slipping out five minutes early is a good rule of thumb I find, you don’t miss that much and get into the line ahead of everybody who waits to the end of the first panel.

Gates and Levar were really fun too; Michael had said something about Gates being the one prankster of the TNG cast, and a bad prankster, so somebody asked her about that. Levar teased her a bit, and she came up with a description of a really elaborate prank she played on Patrick, redecorating the bridge after he’d been off with Borg some time. Even Levar was impressed, and said that he wished he’d seen it.

Gates also had some interesting stuff to say about why she was dropped for season 2, suggesting that she’d been targeted by a producer after speaking up for stronger women characters, but the fan response eventually got her back on the show.

After that Q&A let out, I was starting to feel like I didn’t want to hang around too long. My knee was feeling stiff after sitting on the floor editing and sitting in the cramped chairs, but I went back to the sales floor, taking some more pictures, and picked up another graphic novel; ‘Angel and Faith Season 9, volume 2’, which I didn’t even know was a thing. Now I need to find volume 1. 😀

All in all, a very fun day, and what’s more, I didn’t even spend much cash – thirty-one dollars for the 2 graphic novels and one slice of pizza. I’m low on funds at the moment, so didn’t hit the autograph lines or the photo ops, or even buy as much merch as I might have.