For the first time since we’ve lived in Chicago (nearly 6 years now!), Damon and I finally made it out to C2E2, the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo. We regularly either miss it or forget about it until it’s passed, so we were pretty excited to go this year.
Neither of us had full-on cosplay to wear, but went with the next best thing — a video game hat/Star Wars shirt for him, and for me the Ewok scarf Claire & Alan had gotten me for Christmas.
Initially we had planned to make it down to a 50th Anniversary celebration of Star Trek, but the traffic was awful on 94 and we missed it by just a few minutes. Probably also didn’t help that we slept in, but it was Saturday. You’d be hard pressed to get us out of bed early for much, even C2E2. We’d also stayed up until 2 AM finishing the new season of House of Cards, but I digress.
We ended up finding free street parking, which was awesome. We had to walk a short distance to McCormick Place, but it wasn’t too bad other than the wind and the fact that I’d worn a t-shirt and a light jacket (not expecting to walk outside). After a brisk few minutes I started to warm up, and we made it inside.
There were tons of people in awesome costumes. On our way up the escalators and into the venue we passed tons of Star Trek jumpers and more Storm Troopers than we could count. Later in the day we even saw a guy dressed up as Dave Chappelle’s character Tyrone Biggums. While we were purchasing badges, though, we ran across what turned out to be my favorite of the day. I was only able to snap a photo from a distance, but this was by far the coolest thing I saw. Check out Groot:
This costume was huge. As you can see, he’s towering over the people next to him. I missed getting a shot while it was happening, but the left hand had lights in it that glowed. I was so blown away by the craftsmanship of this thing. Let me also add, Groot is one of my favorite superhero-type characters. He’s a kind tree! I just love him. I may have even gotten overly excited and squealed at this costume. Ahem. Damon and I vowed to have costumes next year. There’s no way we’ll be able to come close to some of the amazing stuff we saw this year, but it looked fun!
Once we got inside, we headed up to grab food and scout the event from the little food court bird’s nest. “We’ll never make it through all this in one day,” Damon said. To me, that sounded like a challenge. “Yes we can!” I said. And we did.
(C2E2, keeping us safe. We overheard a girl on the escalator complaining, “I heard they’re checking weapons. No way they’re touching my lightsaber. It has a $2000 hilt!”)
After we saw the size of the event, we ended up skipping the events and just perusing the vendor floor, which was insanely huge. Navigating the endless aisles of Funko Pops and fart clouds proved to be exhausting. We waddled slowly behind groups of people for hours. Both of us had to stop and stretch from time to time. Damon ended up ordering a new pair of all-wood glasses, and I snagged this adorable little 1701-D shuttlecraft necklace:
By far our favorite area of the day was the original artists. We picked up a few prints and were just amazed at the talent of these folks. Many of them were doodling right at the booths and it was overwhelming to see the amount of skill they had. Here’s what we got:
Did I mention I love Groot? This is a print by Eric Whalen.
Two amazing prints by Olga Andreyeva. We chatted with her for a bit and she was so nice! Check out the rest of her work!
Damon’s Life Aquatic print by Nan Lawson.
And my tiny Rey print by Raz Ortiz.
Legs aching, we finally finished going through everything after about 5 hours. Keep in mind we’d passed up plenty of booths that had some duplicate items and things that were too crowded to get a look at. We got home, flopped down on the couch, and ordered takeout. C2E2 definitely lived up to expectations, and I’m sure we’ll go again next year!
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