Wizard World Philly – Recap Saturday

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Wizard World Philadelphia has come and gone once again, filling the Philadelphia Convention Center full of nerds, fanboy/girls, artists, actors, vendors, cosplayers, and so much more. One-Quest got to attend and it was a pretty awesome time. JohnScott will be around later to let everyone know about his fangirl reactions to meeting the five Star Trek Captains. Other than the reading material for you all we also got our first video going! It might not be the greatest example of moving pictures, but it’s damn close and on our first try no less!

Saturday was a pretty crazy day at the convention it was the only day’s Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and wrestler CM Punk were there for photos and autographs. So the entire show floor was essentially a big line for them by about 12-1 o’clock. If you’ve ever been to a convention before you know Saturdays are already the busiest day most of the time. Even with the huge crowd we still managed to see the sights, and meet some people. First stop in the morning was to meet Greg Capullo (Batman, Spawn, X-Force). The convention starts about 10am, we got there at about 10:20am and he already had nice long line. Being the fans we are, waiting wasn’t going to be a problem. Unfortunately, Greg had a panel at 11 so he was gone for an hour.

During our wait, we got some fun shots of cosplayer and some of the booths around us. So here’s a sample, make sure to click for the full size! And Thor, is our very own Audra!

By about 12:30 we were up front talking to him getting our stuff signed. If you ever hear a bad thing about Greg Capullo, it’s a bold faced lie. He was a great guy, spent a few minutes talking to us while signing our comics and the limited edition print that he was giving to the first 200 people at his table. We even got a chance to tell him about One-Quest and he took a picture for us holding up one of our flyers!

Our next stop was a few aisles away to see our friends at Kats Anime Hats, they had a pretty exciting weekend as well and you’d be smart to check them out.

Now that we’d met Mr. Capullo, and said hi to our friends we headed back to the entrance and started checking everything else out. The show floor was setup this year so when you first get in you have all the vendors, and some of the industry booths. Naturally we stopped to talk to the great people at the Zenescope booth. We asked about the Animated Series and they’re really excited about it! They expressed how thankful they were to all the help they got with it. We also got some pictures of them!

The rest of Saturday went by pretty quickly, we checked out a ton of different tables and looked at all the unique stuff vendors were selling, and took some fun pictures. Some of the t-shirts you find are hilarious and there are almost always a ton of collectibles and of course tons of comics from all over the place. After you pass through the vendor section you hit the “Hall of Celebrities” as I’m calling it. It’s essentially just a few aisles with larger booths and metal rails to form lines between so you can wait and meet your favorite stars. Wizard World gets a pretty good mix of celebrities. We already mentioned the big attractions of Chris Hemsworth, CM Punk, and the 5 Star Trek captains, as well as the one and only Stan “The Man” Lee. Outside of those names you also had people from shows and movies like The Evil Dead, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (movie and series), Wrestling, The Walking Dead, True Blood, and so many more. But today wasn’t about the stars for us, we’ll talk more about them in our Sunday coverage.

Saturday was about the comics and the artists, so after looking a bit at what the celebs were doing we moved back to the Artist Alley portion of the floor where we’d met Greg Capullo earlier and started checking stuff out. One of the best parts about conventions are artist alleys, you get some famous artists that are selling prints. But you also get these amazing freelancers and people who you’ve probably never heard of before that have some of the coolest artwork for sale. Chris has a terrible habit of buying way more artwork than he needs, but managed to keep himself in check, at least on Saturday. We spent the rest of the day walking around talking to some of the artists, taking pictures, and just having a good time. Eric even caught J.G. Jones as he was writing a sign that he was going to lunch and got him to sign his issue of Wanted.

All in all Wizard World was a lot of fun on Saturday, but like all cons a little too crowded and especially hard to navigate with so many people waiting in line for Hemsworth and Punk. And like any convention every year they fix things from the previous year and other things get messed up. The line situation to get onto the show floor for instance. Saturday morning the line was a big circle running back into itself it made no sense. After a few minutes staff realized this and started sorting it out though and Sunday didn’t seem to be a problem at all.

And it would be nice if maybe the celebrity areas were either more spread out or had better crowd control. Lines seemed to eat up huge portions of the floor around them and it made it almost impossible to get through let alone stand still for a moment to see if the star was actually at their booth at the moment. Wizard World is overall a fun time and well worth the visit if you haven’t been, or even if you have. Doesn’t matter if comics aren’t really your thing there are other things to do, which we will be touching on a lot more in some of our other posts so stay tuned to One-Quest for the rest of this weekend’s happenings at Wizard World Philadelphia.

Article Co-Written by Chris and Eric
Photos of Hemsworth, Lee, Punk, and 5 Captains courtesy of Wizard World
All other Photos by Erica Lowry

Eric is not a boss. You can Email Eric or follow Eric on Twitter @EricSweeten or Facebook

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