Wizard World Chicago 2005

Woo, Warmoth and I got up at the crack of dawn to head up to the Wizard Comic book convention in Rosemont, IL. Brian scored us some free exhibitor passes since he used to work at Wizard, so we got in an hour before everyone else...free. It was good times. We were all allowed to be geeks, but we took comfort in the fact that there are indeed people nerdier than us on this planet. Here's a brief overview.

Hey it's the Scarecrow!

There was a lot of exhibits celebrating Batman Begins. Unfortunately the Batmobile wasn't there, but they had this uber-cool exclusive Batman action figure that I picked up:


The merchant section had every imaginable action figure, t-shirt, bootleg dvd and comic book you could ever want. Warmoth scored a bevy of comic books and Steve got a great Freakazoid DVD set. I got to complete my clone/stormtrooper collection with a figure I've been looking for a long time. But the one thing, that was out of all of our price ranges was this:

A full size Optimus Prime costume. I don't know if you can read it in the photo, but the pricetag is a mere $3000. His chest opens to reveal a glowing Matrix of Power, he's got fully articulate fingers and he comes with Megatron in gun form. Apparently a 6 foot tall person would appear 10 foot tall with this thing on.

There were a few people in costume. I counted 3 stormtroopers, a couple jedi, an oddly dressed superman, several batmans, a few furries (gross) and then I ran across these guys:

Apparently Chicago has their own GB franchise. Nice lookin' proton packs I gotta say. There was a lot of GB merch that I wanted to buy, but alas, my pocketbook would not allow it. Ed showed up too:

Last there's this guy: It was so nice to see Death in such a good mood. Usually he's pretty crabby.

All in all a great day. Unfortunately the real world isn't as fun, but it's nice to escape every once in a while.