The Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo

A few weeks ago I went to the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) to do a presentation on a panel hosted by the American Library Association.  My panel was academic, and I presented about using the Michigan State University Comic Art Collection in my research, in the classroom as a teacher, and as part of the MSU Comics Forum.  The American Library Association hosted a number of panels about comic books in libraries, in schools, etc.  So that part of C2E2 was academic.  The rest was decidedly not. 

I've never been to a Comic Con before, but I've followed the news coming out of many of them.  They have a reputation of being a bit insane with people walking around dressed in costumes, panel discussions with comic book writers and artists, booths packed with comic books, artist alleys with comic artists doing sketches and selling their work, and a lot of chaos in between.  C2E2 certainly had all that.

Here are some wide shots of the main floor:

When I walked out of the panel discussion I was a part of, these were the first two people I saw:

And that wasn't the craziest thing I saw.  That would probably be Batman and Godzilla doing a synchronized dance:

But there were other crazy costumes too:

And there was also a working R2D2 robot:

A game of quidditch:

And a massive chalk drawing of the Green Lantern.

I don't typically see most of these things at the academic conferences I go to.  I also got to go to a panel about the new Thor movie with the actor playing Thor there answering questions, so that was cool.