HOT Comic Con: Con of the Living Dead

After three full days of working the HOT Comic Con I can say that I have learned A LOT!  I've given presentations before, but never had to run a booth.  Even though I thought I'd thought of everything I quickly learned that there was a ton of stuff I should have done.  But Rob told me to make notes so that I'd remember for next time.  

When I found out on Thursday that our season brochures would not be printed in time for the Con, I thought that our table would be pointless.  But at the last minute Kelly, Caleb and I came up with alternative ways to advertise.   Caleb used his large color printer to print a poster sized season brochure to put on the table.  Kelly sent Caleb the show logos and Caleb created a black and white flyer with all our shows on it. We printed up a hundred of them to hand out and ran out Sunday morning, so Rob and I went to Office Depot and had 50 more printed.   I put together a slide show of our production photos and student work that displayed on the two digital photo frames that ran continuously.  I brought some interesting student-made costume accessories to display.  We had maps of the campus, course information, degree plans and scholarship info for attendees to take home with them.  It was Rob's idea to do a sign up sheet for ticket and course information.  We got about 30 people signed up on our mailing list.  Next time we want to have ticket give aways at the table and other swag to hand out like McLennan pens, stickers, and maybe a bowl of candy.

I got to see a lot of cool costumes and meet a lot of interesting people.  I got a lot of wonderful comments about my Zelda costume on the first day.  I immediately found another Link in his red costume to take a photo with.  Link was a popular character as there were two Red Links and One Green one (Sylvan) on the first day and another Red Link and two more female Green Links on the third day, including former student Stephanie Copeland.  The second day I went as Kaylee with Rob as Mal and Sylvan as Wash, and that seemed to be pretty popular as well.  Rob, who did lots of wandering around while I was booth sitting, got lots of requests for photo ops.  There were at least two other browncoat cosplayers there. We even found another Captain Mal and a Wash at the con.  The third day I went as Vampire Willow with Rob as Vampire Xander and Sylvan as Spike, but without bumpy forehead appliances or fangs.  I really hadn't planned on it being cool enough to wear the pleather so I never made the appliances.  I was worried that people would just think we were trying to be Goth and had failed, but I was wrong.  There were at least three girls who knew exactly who we were.   Two teenaged girls who came by the table asked if I was a Vampire and when I said, "Yes, I was Vampire Willow", the one girl turned to the other one and said, "I told you so!" I told her that Spike was my son and he was running around somewhere and they said they'd already had their picture made with him and that he was adorable.  A nine year old girl even asked me if I was a Vampire from Buffy, because it was her favorite show.