Recap: Silicon Valley Comic Con 2018

By July and Zero OmegaThe third annual Silicon Valley Comic Con in San Jose, CA certainly did not disappoint. Set up in 2015 by Steve Wozniak, the return of SVCC in 2018 was certainly a spectacle to behold. The previous two years saw a turn out of 60,000+ people and there’s no reason to believe that this year would be any different. A parade of cosplayers, celebrities, events, artists, exhibitors, and more inundated the San Jose Convention Center and it was an event to remember. July and Zero recap their experience at this year’s Silicon Valley Comic Con.Day One - April 6, 2018Day one kicked off on Friday to particularly dark and gloomy weather, which we can only assume impacted some of the overall attender of the first day, that didn’t stop the scent of bacon wrapped street dogs wafting through the air though. The registration line was short, seems like we got there right on time. Passes acquired and it was time to hit the exhibit hall. Exhibit hall this year was just as big as the last two, with a smaller, quaint artist’s alley off to the side. It was business as usual this year, though it was really just the calm before the storm. With a lot less traffic on Friday, it was easy pickings for anything that one could want and relative ease to get into any interesting panels running that night.We admittedly didn’t hit too much on day one, opting instead to review the overall layout of the con this year and explore what it had to offer. A gaming section for gamers, a kids zone for small children to be watched while parents browsed the convention, photo ops and autographs galore! But what’s most important is what we discovered on day two…[video width="640" height="360" mp4="http://www.thegeeklygrind.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/stan-lee-line_1_1.mp4"][/video]Day Two - April 7, 2018Day two is when SVCC really kicked into full gear. July managed to arrive early, but Zero arrived a bit later and was had to endure the security check-in line which began to fill onto the sidewalk at the convention center. Though due to great planning on SVCC’s part, six open lanes ended up turning what could have been a long standing affair into only the most minor inconvenience. While the metal detectors and bag checks were a slight annoyance, it was run pretty well relative to other conventions.Today’s agenda? Explore as much as the exhibit hall and artist alley, then hit up our main panel of the day: An Hour With Adam Savage. But first, the artist alley. While we don’t have a lot of pictures of the various art pieces shown off (a lot of artists ask that you do not take pictures of their booth), we can say that the art shown off there was incredible. A great mixture of Western comic, Japanese anime, and manga fan art, along with a ton of various crafts and trinkets. After spending some time immersing ourselves in a massive collection of art July mentioned one particular artist she came across not in artist alley, but right outside of it. That’s when we ran into…TheBlackDavinci / HarmonyChristopher Williams, “TheBlackDavinci,” is the artist behind a comic book series that is debuting at Silicon Valley Comic Con called Harmony. Harmony is a series that stars a super heroine who is deaf and has to communicate through sign language. The series definitely comes across as promising and we caught TheBlackDavinci as he was doing a live drawing of the cover for volume two. The premise absolutely seems fascinating and you can read more about Harmony and TheBlackDavinci here [link to spotlight article].After speaking to him, we moved forward and found ourselves walking downstairs and coming across that hot red car from two years ago donned with the Legion M logo. That’s right, we had our chance to once again speak with Paul Scanlan of Legion M fame.Legion MTwo years ago at the very first Silicon Valley Comic Con we had an opportunity to speak with Paul Scanlan and Jeff [last name] from Legion M. Back then they were just starting up their company which billed itself as the first fan-owned entertainment company, a goal to completely shake up Hollywood. This SVCC was big for Legion M as they were premiering their fourth movie, Bad Samaritan, starring David Tennant. We talked about how Legion M is doing, what led up to Bad Samaritan, and what we can expect in the future. You can read more about our interview here [link to spotlight article].Finally, after finishing up and browsing more of the exhibit hall (this is a fairly big hall, mind you) it was time for our panel, An Hour With Adam Savage and what a treat that this ended up being.An Hour With Adam SavageAdam Savage has a habit of doing a “cosplay walk” at SVCC, a day where he dons a full on cosplay and walks the show floor unbeknownst to the rest of the crowd. This year he decided on being one of the Knights of Ren. An impressive set of pictures were shown off depicting the process and his experiences at the convention. He then opened it up to general Q&A from the audience. [Need to find out if Tiffany is doing an article on his panel or not]. [Mention/link to Twitter about our coverage.]Once that wrapped up we decided that it was time to call it a day for the con, there is more con to explore tomorrow after all. Though it was at that moment we came across The Rock. Well, close enough, fiveoh_cosplay had a terrific and spitting image cosplay of 90s Rock that July ended up spotting in the audience. What we ended up coming across was a dance circle that fiveoh_cosplay had started. He found out a while back that dancing was a great way of dealing with the emotional stress.We learned about City Dance in San Francisco where every Thursday they host a dance night. A night where anyone can join in the dance circle and express themselves with no judgements, it’s all about love and working out your problems through the wonders of dance. It was a great and wonderful way of ending our day at the convention and prepare for what we would experience the next day.Day Three - April 8, 2018The final day of Silicon Valley Comic Con and the post con blues were setting in early. Right from the get go the crowd was definitely smaller than the previous day, but still much larger than Friday. July and Zero hit the con with one major goal in mind: the David Tennant and Krysten Ritter panel. This was likely the largest panel of the entire convention, David Tennant is just innate star power and Krysten Ritter is huge coming right off of Jessica Jones. As a result, the line to get in was massive and the house was absolutely packed.David Tennant / Krysten Ritter PanelTeeDub goes into great detail about this panel, so we’re going to let her spotlight speak to the recap of this particular panel. That said, the panel was amazing and it was an incredible treat to get to experience both of them live. We’ve got some amazing pictures of them thanks to July and TeeDub and I would encourage you to check out our full recap here [link to Tiffany’s article].With the biggest panel of SVCC done, it was time to finish out the final parts of the exhibit hall and see who we could meet and talk to. This is where we ran into our next spotlight…Mombie ZombieMombie Zombie is a glassware artist from California who started in jewelry work before taking her husband’s sandblasting unit and started to do custom glassware of her fandoms. She started with pint glasses and has expanded into shot glasses and wine glasses. While there has been a pick up in other type of glassware work that has been hitting the scene, hers was a great treat to see as her work was different than the other anime glassware that seemed to be displayed by other vendors. You can read more about our interview with her here [link to spotlight article].Once we wrapped up with Mombie Zombie we only had a little bit of time left to find our next exhibitor before the con closed for the year. We decided that it was time to bite the bullet and talk to NASA.NASANASA made its second appearance at Silicon Valley Comic Con this year and was displaying a huge number of things this year, but the two in particular that we got to talk about were their open source Mission Control panel that allows anyone to take it, find bugs and debug it. The point of this is to help make the Mission Control panel more efficient to work toward a larger goal of helping find water on the Moon. We also spoke to some of the engineering team who spoke about their work toward laser communications (as opposed to radio communications). It’s a lot to take in for just this particular recap, so check out our full spotlight of our interview with some of the NASA team here [link to the article].We were actually speaking to NASA right as the convention was closing out, so unfortunately not much time to check out anything else. We had to rush out!CosplayersA convention wouldn’t be complete with cosplayers, and we want to thank all the cosplayers that took their time to take a picture with us![robo-gallery id=49504]  And that was Silicon Valley Comic Con 2018! We want to thank the SVCC crew for allowing us to cover the convention. For now, July and Zero out!