I spent most of the NYC ComicCon lurching in circles with my mouth half-open, hunting for a copy of Detective Comics # 587 and spending way too much money on plastic bullshit that reminds me of my childhood. The experience was spectacular.

I haven’t been to a comic book convention since 1991, in Virginia Beach — the whole enterprise was dusty, pasty and pungent. Not now, baby. Now that comics, computers and sci-fi are billion dollar businesses, nerds are out of the basement and blinking in the klieg lights. Pop culture’s always been a byproduct of marketing campaigns, but we are now in a golden age of hype and shiny bullshit.

Today’s thirtysomethings were the target audience back in the ’70s and ’80s when Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and other pop mythologies did the first Triple Lindy into the collective consciousness. Now we’re just old enough to have kids who get just as pumped about Star Wars as we did, and fetishizing fictional universes is a family affair.

Whenever alien archaeologists unearth whatever temples we leave behind, they’re gonna think that Spiderman was our God and stormtroopers were some kind of high priests. Frankly, I’m thrilled. Digging through comic boxes and buckets of chipped action figures gets me all stoked and unstuck in time and I get the same sense of wow, cool wonder that I got when my dad took me to see Star Wars for the first time.

But this thing was for everybody. Really, it was just like the Mermaid Parade except indoors and marginally less sexualized. The people-watching and the costumes were spectacular and totally worth the admission price.

This is my favorite photo from this weekend’s NYC ComicCon, but there’s a lot more after the jump:

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From The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, Vol. 1, No. 11, November 1983:

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Jeff sent me a link to an awesome, fun, faux-vintage sci-fi short film a while back, and I mean to share it with y’all, but it slipped my mind… until I was flipping through a sketchbook and found this hastily scrawled list of cultural references that I saw while watching it for the first time:

She-Ra, Princess of Power. Lord of the Rings. American Apparel advertisements. The Neverending Story. Mario Bros. Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. “The Clapper”. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Space Invaders. Silverhawks. Batman. Thundercats. Tron.

These things, in no particular order, sprung to mind immediately for me. Some of them are obviously intentional, others perhaps unintentional but likely to be seen by anyone who grew up when I did and watched the same stuff. Still others were triggered by a small detail or action in the video that other folks might not notice or associate in the same way. Anyway, here it is!

ELA in Love At First Byte by PepperMelon:

ELA in Love at First Byte from Fernando Sarmiento on Vimeo.

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Continuing our love-fest for extraordinarily costumed people in ordinary settings, we bring you the Land of the Free series from UK-based portrait and documentary photographer Steve Schofield:

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Speaking of otherworldly creatures, check out these Golden Age Mexican lobby cards:

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On Star Trek, a character is typically denoted as being of an alien species simply by giving them some sort of cranial abnormality. Vulcans have pointy ears, Klingons have forehead ridges, and Ferengi look like Klingons cross-bred with Stewie Griffin from Family Guy. Now, what Star Trek’s creature design team is overlooking, as far as I’m concerned, is the intense transformative power of full-blown, gravity-defying, gonzo-freakout beards and moustaches.

Above, we have Jurgen Burkhardt. He took home the title of “Best Freestyle Sideburns” at the 2007 World Beard & Moustache Championships (WBMCs), held in Brighton, England. And here we have fan favorite Willi Chevalier, whose triple-handlebar moustache/beard combo was once dubbed a “hair pretzel” by NPR’s Robert Siegel: Read the rest of this entry »

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The stranger’s skull was an inverted teardrop set with a tarsier’s oblong, expressive eyes, eyes blast-shielded by chunky, industrial glasses. A chiseled obsidian bowl-cut accentuated an already fashion-forward skull shape fairly dramatically, with a twist: the bangs on the left half of the forehead were cut at least three inches shorter than the bangs on the right half.

His features were delicate, feminine, sculpted by master craftsmen under bright lights and powerful magnifying glasses. A slender slip of a John Waters moustache sat atop his light longbow of an upper lip, its partner shielding a slight soul patch in the same dusty fox-toned hue. An everlasting job-stopper curled down his long, delicate neck into the comfort of a lime-green sweater neck-sheath, subdued neatly under a boxy brown jacket.

What really brought all home, though, was his makeup — faux-flesh-toned pancake makeup, accentuated with blush. But instead of using blush-colored blush … he used a metallic silver.

Sort of like this drawing:

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