Cosplay, Bronies and Romance at the NYC Comic Con

I took my first trip to the NYC Comic Con this weekend. It was a bang. Between ninjas making out, Pedobear getting cheers of approval at a children’s costume contest, girls dressed up as obscure anime characters bawling their eyes out and me getting constantly bumped and jostled by the thousands of attendees shuffling around and gawking at legions of nerd goddesses bursting out of cheap vinyl costumes originally designed for cartoon sex symbols of impossible physical proportions, Comic Con is a classic reminder that what is seen can’t be unseen. I still smell like stale hyper-buttered popcorn for some reason.

A crack team of Motherboard video editors is currently diving into the hours of interview footage our crew shot with cosplayers, creepsters, booth babes, bronies and the like to discuss the perils and joys of finding romance (and possibly just straight geek hook-ups) at Comic Con. To whet your appetite and hold you over until that piece airs, I spent my time in that musty pheromoneacopia waving a still camera around to document the action. Let me just say this: I’m not sure what I expected to find at Comic Con, but I certainly didn’t expect hordes of scantily clad geekbabes and graphic drawings of Batman violating Superman. I don’t know if it’s always been this way, but in 2011 Comic Con was sexy.

This chest-on-chest interaction really highlighted the fact that Comic Con is nothing more than a blended nerdgarita flavored with awkward fetishes and rented breasts fueling purchases of insane memorabilia and limited-edition pillows.

No joke, this leopard walked up and just stared for a good minute without talking. The best part is the young woman didn’t give a damn.

The real serious cosplayers are pretty much Comic Con superstars and have the smugness to match.

This is a six-foot tall muscular spandex butterfly woman in six-inch heels. I’m tall and I still had to stand on my tippy-toes just to gaze deep into his crazy eyes.

It was adorable how many couples showed up together in costume. Matchy-matchy outfits were unfortunately rare, which makes for weird visuals like imagining a lazy-bearded Inuyasha getting frisky with the kid from Dragonball Z. It’s the future of fanboy love!

One of the strangest phenomena at Comic Con was the prevalence of suitcases. All the serious fans were rolling them around. There were even a few suitcase parking lots. Swag surfing, I guess.

This caused a mini-riot.

These fun-loving girls ditched school to get their Con on super early. Please don’t tattle on them.

There were a lot of fresh tattoos at the Con, but there was none cooler (and creepier) than the guy who dedicated his leg to a zombie recreation of Star Wars. I believe that’s Chewbacca eating the rotting flesh of Han Solo.

Here’s a member of The Slug Club. He smelled very nice and didn’t try to make me drink any potions. He also had an incredibly attractive date. Good on you, Sluglord.

I was shooting photos of these girls (who said they were “like 22”) around the film crew and a guy mysteriously popped up next to me to also rattle off a couple shots. He was in his mid-twenties and his darn hands were shaking like leaves in a hurricane. Idol worship has never been creepier!

Mortal Kombat here seemed to be having trouble breathing with his mask on, but it’s worth it to look that good. Girls were straight drooling over this cat (for obvious reasons).

I know it isn’t the best photo but I wanted to make sure to share this guy’s spinning ninja dance and possible penis exoskeleton.

This guy… wow. You just have to wait for the video to find out why he’d be whipping out his cell phone on camera.

We found a couple young men willing to discuss the ethos of the Free Hugs convention movement and what it means to be a brony, AKA a young man obsessed with the My Little Pony franchise. Yes, that’s a thing now, and chicks surely dig it.

A team of these cubist cartoons came bursting out of a door from a locked conference room and waddled down the hallway, led by a pink, frilly dominatrix-type. I think this was the point when I realized my mind had been blown apart hours prior and I now had representatives of furry subgenres rolling around in my brain driven half-insane by the sounds of their screechy fornicating. I still feel sick.

And that’s the joy of Comic Con: there’s a surprise around every corner! And much of the time, it’s sexy!