The SurlyGurls Countdown to Comic Con

Now that Awards Season is over, it’s time to start booking our vacation time off for the best season of the year: Convention Season. Like angry, dirty bears emerging from their caves in the winter, so to will the nerds be venturing from their parent’s basements to seek out exclusive collectibles and action figures to get them through the long winter nights.

Since our first pilgrimage to San Diego Comic Con in 2010, we’ve come to fully realize what an amazing thing it can be to gather with like-minded nerds to celebrate the popular arts! Anyone who has read our ‘Confessions From A Couple Of Nerdy Girls‘ post, will know how much we LOVED Comic Con. So much so, that this year we will be attending not only SDCC, but also Chicago’s C2E2 and Toronto’s Fan Expo.

First up is C2E2 in a mere three weeks from now, April 13 – 15, at McCormick Place. We have it on good authority (from our friend and fellow blogger Matt Graham) that it is a good god damn time. Maybe not as big and shiny and full of pretty Hollywood faces as SDCC, but a great way to reach out to some of the best comic creators out there.

Having said that, the thing we’re looking most forward to is seeing our favourite Syfy star, Josh Gates, get to come out from behind the moderator’s podium and get his own hour to talk all about his monster hunting adventures.

Aside from that we’re really just looking forward to expanding our graphic novel collections (we’re coming for you Arachaia booth!) and a dream of Andrea’s coming true: getting to heckle and boo that ass-clown Ryan Buell from ‘Paranormal State’. If anyone can force him to tell the secret of his big, bad, vague and often alluded to but never explained “childhood experiences”, its her! There is a reason her mouth is bigger on our little SurlyGurls cartoon!

At the end of the summer, we’ll be staying a little closer to home and heading to Canada’s biggest convention, Fan Expo, running from August 23 – 26 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. It’s like a giant amalgamation of five different conventions in one. They have guest line-ups for each one separately – comics, horror, sci-fi, anime and gaming.

This year we’ll get to feast our eyes upon, in our humble opinion, the sexiest of all the Starfleet captains – Sir Patrick Stewart! That’s right, the Earl-Grey-Tea-Drinking Captain Picard is the main attraction this year! Followed closely by a rare appearance by Gillian Anderson. And it’s only March, which means so much more can be added in the mean time!

Though we’re super excited for the other two, the real crowning jewel to our summer of conventions is still San Diego Comic Con – the pop culture ground zero – taking place July 12 – 15 at the San Diego Convention Center. With the move from the third week of July to the second this year, the organizers of SDCC have done us the huge favour of making us wait one less week.

Comic Con is the holy grail of socially awkward fanboys and girls. It’s the one convention we all dream of attending one day. There is nothing else like it in the world, and knowing what it’s like first hand makes it impossible to experience it through nothing but twitter and t.v. segments.

We’re already guessing at who will be there and what movies will be featured and trailers unveiled. We’re looking forward to broadening our horizons even more with another round of Film School panels which we discovered last year. Not to mention the abundance of random celebrity sightings.

One of our favourite panels every year is the Entertainment Weekly ‘The Visionaries’. Our first year it was an hour with Joss Whedon and J.J Abrams. Whitney nearly lost her mind in a room with that much genius. Last year it was Jon Favreau and Guillermo del Toro, two of the best directors on the planet. This year, we’re making a prediction/request – Christopher Nolan and Ridley Scott. We know you can make it happen Entertainment Weekly!

There is no hiding it, we love our television programs, and this year we are making it our mission to finally see the inside of Ballroom 20 where most of the t.v. panels take place. We’ve missed our chance to see a ‘Chuck’ panel seeing as the show is now over, and we’re pretty sure ‘Fringe’ is on the chopping block, so ‘Grimm’ has made it to the top of the list this year.

**Note to SDCC Organizers – Please don’t place ‘Grimm’ two panels before the ‘Twilight’ panel…there is no way we’re fighting those Twi-hards to get in!!**

Our favourite memory of everything we’ve experienced at Comic Con has to be 100% the chance to see ‘Scott Pilgrim VS The World’ a month before it hit theatres. It was just such an event – being two of the lucky few who won their way in by picking the right button at the panel, following Edgar Wright through the streets of San Diego to the theatre, watching it with a room full of excited, hardcore fans dressed as Ramona Flowers, and followed by a kick-ass 5-song set by Metric.

We’re hoping that something similar happens this year. ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ opens in theatres five days after Comic Con, so it would be our front-runner for a special sneak peek. But with movies like ‘Total Recall’ and ‘Expendables 2’ coming out as well, it could be anything.

Not only is this going to be our third year attending Comic Con, but it will mark the first year anniversary of the birth of SuryGurls.net. It was at Comic Con last year that we realized our passion and humour and pop culture knowledge was worth sharing with the world. While the first year we attended we thought it would be just a fun, nerdy experience, it has become the high-point of our year. We look forward to it more than we look forward to Christmas morning.