Geek.Kon 2012: The Dr. Jack Breakdown

I had been at at the Marriott in Middleton, Wisc., for about five minutes before it heard it for the first time, floating on the wind like a specter.

ACen...

The farther into the weekend I got, however, the more unavoidable it became.

ACen...

And finally, I found myself saying it. As in, "Boy, this was fun, but it was no ACen."

It's not really fair. Geek.Kon 2012 never pretended to be another Anime Central. Still, it was that gathering in April 2012 that got me to the University of Wisconsin's annual anime gathering, and it was through the prism of my first and to that point only convention that it would be judged.

With that said, in honor of my great love Bill Simmons (and of course its namesake), here's the Dr. Jack breakdown: ACen 2012 vs. Geek.Kon 2012. Fight!

ENVIRONMENT

On first impressions, Geek.Kon gets a firm thumbs up versus ACen. Not only did I not need to pay for parking, there was less confusion finding it, and less walking overall. The Marriott, by virtue of being one hotel rather than ACen's four, was better kept and easier to navigate. It also looked less like an airplane hangar than the cavernous interior of the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center. From the shorter badge line to a greater selection of nearby restaurants, Geek.Kon's intangibles were noticeably superior to its grandpapi's.

Also Gandalf, who served as gatekeeper at Geek.Kon's many multi-door rooms. GANDALF.

Advantage: Geek.Kon

EXHIBIT HALL/ARTIST'S ALLEY

One of my first stops inside the con, though, showed me definitively that I wasn't in Rosemont anymore. While I did still spend a little, Geek.Kon's selection of merchants and artisans was piddling compared to the forest of booths at ACen, and those associated with the fringes of anime - TV, movies, video games, a.k.a. all the parts I'm interested in - didn't make the trip. Disappointing.

Advantage: ACen

COSPLAY

One of my favorite moments of the con: these girls spent several minutes trying to keep all their cosplay gear on the hotel cart en route to their room. Less favorite: the girl on the far left, who mistook my Game Boy-inspired iPhone case for BMO from Adventure Time.

Two areas at ACen took my breath away with their quality: Exhibit Hall and cosplay. One let me down at Geek.Kon; the other did not.

The weekend got off to a fine start with my friends Alex and Melissa cosplaying Professor Layton and his assistant Emmy, and my buddy Jack joined in by finally executing on his long-promised Gendo Ikari costume, complete with delightfully rub-able beard.

By far the most common cosplays were Avengers - we saw five Loki's, by far the greatest of any single costume, including one that was part of a full set of crossplaying Avengers - and Doctor Who's, including a stunningly similar Tennant and a functioning life-size Dalek.

Other favorites at the con included Slenderman, Missing No., a pair of Klingons, two Ghostbusters with electric proton packs, a very leggy Mrs. Pac-Man and Castlevania-style Alucard.

This well-dressed fellow caused no end of confusion for my anime-Alucard-loving chums.

(Additional Avengers wardrobe note: Rodgers/Stark 2012 shirts were EVERYWHERE at this con. How did I miss this?)

As much as I enjoyed Geek.Kon's cosplay, however, it just couldn't measure up to the scope and variety of ACen's. Also, ACen had Marty McFly. Game over.

Advantage: ACen

GAME ROOMS

Missing No. takes a well-deserved game break.

Here, in the nerdiest of categories, Geek.Kon not only stood up to ACen but sent it home crying to its mama. 

ACen's video game room was no slouch; you may remember Jack and I enjoying a fabulous, flailing round of Dance Central and my awe at the Smash Bros. players Tim tangled with for hours on end. Geek.Kon, however, had me at "Rock Band 3 stage" and didn't let go for most of the weekend.

Assorted highlights: Trying to explain Typing of the Dead to Megan; losing personally but seeing Jack wipe the floor with his opponents on a sit-down Mario Kart arcade; and, as ever, watching Tim own fools at Melee. Over the course of the weekend, finding Jack, Megan, Melissa and Alex was a challenge, but if Tim wasn't with me it was better than even money he had a GameCube controller in his hands, waiting to drive Captain Falcon's electrified knee into some poor third-rate Nintendo mascot.

Jack, in full Gendo garb, kicks some futuristic ass in F-Zero GX.

As for Geek.Kon's tabletop room, we didn't spend much time there, but it had the selection of ACen's with a crowd to match this time. I was pumped to get a farewell game of Ticket to Ride in with Jack, Tim and Megan Sunday when I saw the room's organizer packing it away into a plastic tub. Next year, perhaps. (We did get to break in Jack's shiny new Settlers of Catan set at Tim's afterward, with the Packers losing to San Francisco as wonderful background music. The victor? Do you have to ask, really?)

An unexpected highlight was Kon.Quest, which offered a variety of games and a scavenger hunt in a side room. I didn't complete very much of it, but it was a grand concept, and gave me one of my favorite memories of the con.

"I love how they ask you to find Adam in the (sparkly orange) vest without mentioning that he's the chairman."

One of the biggest disappointments of the con for me was the LAN room. Perhaps it picked up Sunday, but when I dropped by Saturday two guys were browsing the web and ready to tell me Steam's servers weren't cooperating. So much for my four-player in-person Left 4 Dead co-op.

(Side note: This room, along with Kon.Quest and half of tabletop, was closed Saturday for a wedding. No one loves weddings more than I do - seriously, it's unhealthy - but what the hell, Marriott? A 2000-attendee convention isn't enough business for you the weekend after Labor Day?)

Advantage: Geek.Kon

PANELS

Our lovely model poses with the somewhat-less-lovely Geek.Kon panel schedule.

ACen had by far the greater selection of panels - pages upon pages, across four hotels and dozens of rooms - but my panel-going experience at Geek.Kon had the potential to outdo it in the most important of con categories.

The biggest advantage of attending a con with 2,000 attendees instead of 27,000, I discovered, was never needing to wait in line. While Forsuk and I waited a half hour for a murder mystery panel we didn't get into, Geek.Kon's rooms were always welcoming, and I took the chance to improve on the meager six panels I visited during ACen.

Of the variety of panels I attended at Geek.Kon, however, nothing measured up to ACen's Assassin's Creed wedding or Video Game Orchestra concert, and a lot of crap was in the mix as well. When I found a good panel at Geek.Kon, I was thrilled: two discussions even made me go into full reporter mode, with pen, notepad, audio recorder and iPhone camera in hand. Here's a full rundown of my favorite, and a lede for the other:

MIDDLETON - DaishoCon personality Nick Izumi traced the history both of and influenced by an American icon through his presentation, "Stars and Pulp Forever: How Captain America Became the American Dream" Friday evening at Geek.Kon.

"There's more historical value to this than, 'America! America!'" he said. "Captain America was meant to assert America's heroic dominance abroad and would both influence and reflect how Americans understood foreign policy in the 1940's." 

Izumi traced the character from his creation at predominantly Jewish New York comic book publisher Timely Comics as a way for war hogs Joe Simon and Jack Kirby to get Americans interested in World War II a year before Pearl Harbor. The first book's cover - a now-infamous image of Captain America punching Adolf Hitler, which Izumi said never happens in the issue - showed the book's intent to encourage "immediate and decisive action" for democracy, Izumi said.

"You don't have to open the book," he said. "There's so much symbolism on the cover it's overwhelming."

That message proved to be very successful, Izumi said, so much so that many now assume Captain America was created as government-sponsored propaganda. While that's not so - it was dramatized as such in Captain America: The First Avenger - Timely's creation rang so true that when Nazi sympathizers Fifth Column attempted to stage a protest at Timely, Mayor Fiorello Henry LaGuardia shut it down personally.

After the United States entered World War II, Izumi said, Captain America became a rallying point for soldiers and citizens. Captain America's best friend Bucky posed as president of a real-life fan club called the "Sentinels of Liberty" that got children interested in the war effort, and mid-1940's issues included ads for war bonds.

Izumi said the end of World War II was the end of Captain America's first run, and put a damper on the latter part of that run. Because Timely wrote stories several months before publication, the impending end of the war in 1944 led to the end of Nazis in the book. In 1945 Captain America was removed, and in 1946 the book ceased publication.

Izumi said Captain America represented several firsts: it pioneered the two-page spread image, now common in comics; erased a rebooted Captain America, named "Captain America: Commie Smasher," later claiming the character to be an impostor and using him as villain in later issues; and even dramatized an event similar to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor a full year before Dec. 7, 1941. Captain America was also the first character created of what would become The Avengers, which Captain America joined in 1966 for issue #4. 

Izumi developed the presentation from a paper he wrote on Captain America as part of a senior history seminar at a University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. As a long-time fan of Marvel Comics and Captain America in particular, he said, reading the entire 1940's run of the character was "the most fun I've had researching any paper I've ever done."

"The reason Cap does the things that he does isn't just because he thinks America's great and he's going to do whatever they tell him is right. At the end of the day, what Cap is always about... is bullying. It could be as simple as beating someone up or international bullying," Izumi said. "There's something about Cap that still resonates today. Someone standing up for people who need defending is still being used today."

MIDDLETON - Technology may be the future of publishing, but five industry veterans showed that analog entertainment can be very fine at a "Digital vs. Traditional Publishing" panel Saturday afternoon.

(In all honesty, I'm not sure how I would approach a full article on the publishing panel; I asked what I felt, in eternal humility, were the best questions of the panel: should digital media carry resale ability, and what's possible in print that's not digitally? [Is my bias showing?])

The publishing panel gave me what I really wanted and seldom found at Geek.Kon: actual knowledge on a subject I care about, from the mouths of experts no less. 

Two other panels I attended were enjoyable if forgettable. Eric Stuart, a voice actor for Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh and others (bacon number: 3), did nothing but field questions from the audience for an hour. Cool for his fans, but not an experience I'll be looking to repeat. The same for an exhaustive/ing look at every iteration of Yu-Gi-Oh over ninety minutes on Saturday morning.

As for the rest... well, both cons had panel mishaps, but Geek.Kon's were infinitely more common and annoying. While Tim and I wasted a half hour waiting for VGO on Friday at ACen only for their concert to be delayed, the men behind Funtime Pro Wrestling Arcade and Panel! at Geek.Kon never showed up. And while Samurai Dan didn't blow me away the first time in Rosemont, he was certainly professional, which the girls behind Geek.Kon's History of Assassin's Creed couldn't claim after their promised 90-minute research lesson turned into a twenty-minute gameplay rehash and assorted fan art. The Fanfiction Contest results were every bit as dull as you might expect, and Sunday's Geek Show degenerated from tolerable to tragic in a hurry. Tell me, have you by chance heard "Popular" from Wicked sung karaoke? You have? You're kidding!

Advantage and victory, 3-2: ACen

For a certain class of person - one diametrically opposed to waiting in lines, with a thirst for participation and a Wisconsin address - Geek.Kon might be a better fit than ACen. For me, however, it was an enjoyable but not mind-blowing weekend that made me yearn for ACen more than revel in its own charms.

Geek.Kon did serve an important role in the road back to ACen, though: on Sunday, Jack, Megan, Tim and I bought in for Anime Milwaukee next February, where ACen staff will be selling discounted badges to their 2013 extravaganza in May. I can already hear its call in the air...