Entry posted by dviddy
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So Maddison and I have been doing this thing where we attend not just LEGO conventions, but also pop-culture/comic/nerd conventions here in town too. It's been a lot of fun, and she's been working on cosplaying a lot too. We've done two since Christmas, at one she was a femme Tony Stark (Toni Stark?) from a gender-swapped movie universe, and this newest one she threw together a Kanaya from Homestuck. I have pictures of the Kanaya for the moment, I need to edit the Toni Stark ones still.
The last con we went to, which was Wizard World Portland, was pretty fun. We went last year and I got Jason David Frank's autograph. I wanted to do that again this year, but we had just taken a trip to Canada to visit Janus, Hahli Husky, and Tufi, so we were short on funds, and autographs are expensive. (I also wanted to get Billy Dee Williams to autograph my Scrubs season 5 set, but again, money).
We hit paydirt in the artist alley though, as we turned a corner and there was this guy:
This is Stuart Sayger, who did the Inika and Mahri saga comic art. I've always been pretty middle of the road on his work, to be honest, probably because I "came of age" in the more traditional styles first used by TLG. We were super surprised to see Stuart at this convention, and when we asked him if he had BIONICLE merch, he practically lit up and showed us this poster and several issues of the comic. We had him sign the poster and bought it from him, and a bunch of comics too (some of which may end up as prizes for contests, if anyone is interested in that sort of thing).
I can't emphasize enough how ridiculously nice and excited he was to talk to us. We came back around again towards the end of the con, and he spent almost an hour talking to us about working for LEGO, on BIONICLE, about BZPower ("let me tell you about BZPower. It's a great community and I loved stalking it and just reading what people wrote about me. But let me tell you. On BZPower I am either LOVED or HATED. Like utterly HATED.") He told us about exclusive sets TLG sent him to use as art references, he just kept talking to us. He was probably the coolest "famous" dude I've gotten the chance to meet for a long time. We obviously told him we were staff members here, and he was just fantastically nice and asked us how we felt about the line, the art, etc.
And at one point he went "you know, I'm hearing rumblings, and don't tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm hearing that there's word BIONICLE might make a return, as the original fanbase is just about the perfect age for the con circuit and I keep meeting fans and this seems perfect time for a return, you know?"
I'm probably gushing a bit here, but I just can't emphasize enough how much he made the con for us. Heroes of Cosplay was filming at this convention, so we knew the cosplay contest would be fun to watch, but rigged results-wise, so meeting someone so passionate about their work whom we consider a household name for our fandom was delightful (also, his non-BIONICLE art? STUNNING HOLY WOW.)
Also he dresses like a DBZ character.
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