On Saturday, October 26th, my wife and I went to
TFCon Chicago. Over the years, I’ve never gone to a Botcon, despite a few of
them having been in the Chicago area, and I missed TFCon in 2014 when it was in
Chicago as well. We’ve been going to C2E2 for the last few years, so the two of
us are no newcomers to the convention scene, but this was our first trek to a
property exclusive convention.
There were panels and discussions and things, but I wasn’t
really interested in any of them. While I’ve never been to any of them,
Transformers conventions always seem to bring out the same guest list, and I’m
not very interested in most of them. Come and meet this voice actor from G1!
Here’s Bob Budiansky, the guy that wrote most of the character bios for G1! Oh
boy, an IDW artist! Some of these people have been appearing at the conventions
for several years now, and I’ve read recaps of their panels or interviews with
them enough by now that I don’t feel any true need to go and listen to them for
myself. And you know they get asked the same questions like every single time,
too.
We went to walk around the dealer room. TFCon is kind of the
Botcon of third party figures, so the dealer room was half merchandise and half
showcase for products. I don’t know what I was more fascinated by. The
merchants were a good assortment of large online retailers and smaller
operations, people selling customs and a smattering of artists. Toy company
FansProject had a huge set up, with a display case and several on-table models,
and Mastermind Creations was there as well with a selection of their works. I
know that much of what was out on display, third party wise, is by now fairly
old news, but I have never given much attention to the third party scene, as I
was never an active member of it. I’d admire pieces from a distance, but
stories of their quality and prices had generally driven me away from the
market. But oh, some of the things I saw.
Again, for me, third party figures are rarities, so I was
pretty amazed by every set of Masterpiece
styled Dinobots I saw, and I still have a hard time breathing when I think
of the MakeToys Devil Stinger (their enormous Black Zarak) and Pandinus (a
regular Scorpanok). What beautiful looking figures. I was super glad that
merchants like The Chosen Prime and Agabyss had pieces out on display so I
could actually see what I’d been hearing about and reading about for years now,
and they were real eye openers in person. I ended up taking the plunge on the
four available members of the FansProject Saurus bots, the third party
Dinoking, but that’s for another day. I was really enamored with the TFC Toys
Hades, their Liokaiser, and after having seen it in person, it’s definitely
going on my shopping list. I’d liked the look of the figures from the very
first images of them that I’d seen, but I’d heard online that the hips were bad
in combined mode, and again, for the expense that completing one of these
combiners entails, I was not about to start buying things that weren’t going to
be worth it in the end. Now however, I’m a believer, having witnessed them in
person. We’ve got some pictures up on the Coffin’s Instagram page, so you can
see them there. Yes, the Coffin has an Instagram page, dating back to the
earliest days of the Coffin . . . we just never really knew what to do with it.
I love walking around in a dealer room because besides all
the things you end up buying, and the great finds and deals you uncover, there
are the oddities and rarities. We saw one vendor who had a number of
pre-Transformers Diaclone figures, in their boxes. I’ve seen pictures online
and on the various fan boards, but I’d never seen them in person. And at the
prices they command, I’ll never seen them in my own collection, but that’s
fine. The exact same toys were released in the first year and a half of the US
G1 toyline, making the difference the box the toy is in, for the most part. I’m
not paying over a thousand dollars for an old cardboard box. Still, those figures
are part of the history of the brand, and that makes them always excellent to
see. Likewise with some of the Japan-only G1 figures. One table had multiple
Star Sabers, something I had never seen before, with even a yellowed one
running over $300. But, noteworthy, because I had never laid eyes on one
before. Of course, there were the pieces that were to be expected, so we saw a
few $900 Overlords and $1200 original Fort Maxes. There was a bunch of Botcon
stuff, and I think my personal favorite find, a Henkei! Henkei! Dark Skyfire,
which I snagged for $45. I have loved this figure from afar for years, and saw
one at C2E2 this year for over a hundred bucks. So, $45 suited me just fine,
and I can scratch that off my hunt list.
I saw so many things that I wanted. I was walking around the
room price checking things for like ten minutes, before something else would
catch my eye, and I’d start price checking that. And ultimately, the things I
was doing this for wound up going unbought. At least for now, but who can say
what the future holds? I got to talk to some fans about toys, and that was
really great. Sometimes it’s easy to get jaded by the fandom as it presents
itself on the Internet in the forums. I imagine this goes for practically all
fandoms, but the Transformers one bugs me a lot personally. Sometimes people
are so negative, to the point that it seems there is no toy, official or
otherwise, good enough to be purchased, that everything has some fatal flaw.
People hate official merchandise, people hate unofficial merchandise. This is a
waste of money, as is that. Everything is made from poor quality material,
regardless of who makes it. It was super refreshing to talk to a person, even
briefly, about a toy and have it be a positive dialogue, even if the subject
was negative. I talked to a guy for like three minutes about Titans Return Blaster, and he said he’d
bought it and didn’t like it. That was it. Online, such a comment is often
supported by claims of Blaster being the worst toy ever and other tomfoolery. I
think my lesson that day was more about the nature of the Internet than
anything else, but still.
I was also kind of surprised by the people that I saw in
attendance. As we all know by now, all of the geek culture fandoms are
expanding, being discovered by new people and taking in new members, as part of
the pop culture mainstreamification of said subcultures. While this is of
course a bad thing to some, and a great thing to others, one thing that can’t
really be denied is that the exposure they get keeps fandoms alive via an
influx of new members, no matter how old or how transitory. Much Internet ink
has been shed on the idea that the current IDW comics, particularly More Than Meets The Eye with its quirky
cast and relationships-over-action focus, have been attracting ‘the Tumblr
crowd’ and are at odds ideologically with some sections of the existent fandom.
But, based on some of the attendees at TFCon, those things are resonating with
a whole different audience, an audience that many may not expect. There were a
number of teenaged girls and young women (oh my god, did that make me feel old
to type!) hanging around the artist alley, and at one of the dealer tables, I
overheard a young woman probably no older than 20 talking about Nova Prime.
Nova Prime? Man, that’s a pretty comic-centric piece of knowledge, and also not
one that’s involved in any Conjunx Endura thing or anything like that. So I
don’t think that the comics are bringing in new audiences solely for the fact
that they contain shipping, or whatever other crusty and angry commentary
circulates online about the comics and their fans. Nothing new in the grumpy
parlance of fandoms being discovered and joined by new blood, but Transformers
has always seemed to me to be one niche fandom. Baring the horrendous live
action movies, Transformers is another of the 80’s toy cartoons that just stuck
around in the hearts and minds of then-children now-adults, and I don’t really
understand how people find it if they weren’t there. Transformers media is very
hit or miss in terms of its availability; cartoons aren’t on at reasonable
times or are of fluctuating quality (see: everything post-Beast Machines and pre-Animated),
the comics are generally poorly distributed because they have such small
readership, online forums are often combative and territorial, hostile to
newcomers and very hostile to those who hold opinions different from the
general one, sometimes frequented by know it alls who find it unacceptable that
you would not care about some obscure Japanese repaint or Manga character and
their impact on the story, and the
parent company has spent years essentially stating that their official policy
towards collectors and non-child fans is simply tolerating them, and accepting
their money without actually paying them any attention and occasionally
throwing out the narrative bones of Multiverse and no narrative connection
whenever asked about continuity matters. I suppose I don’t know how a person
gets into Transformers if they weren’t already in to Transformers.
But the good
news is that they do, and every fandom needs that, and it really is terrific to
see. I get the same feeling at C2E2, or when I see pictures of cosplayers and
stuff online. I have loved Spawn since
1992 when it first came out, but Spawn needs
new readers and new fans a lot more than it needs an old one like me if it’s
going to survive. I can understand, and often argue with people, the
territorial nature of geek culture, that angry response to outsiders or the
mainstream poking at the boarders of our domains, but the fact is, we need that
poking. Because while we may always be fans of Transformers, some of those who
poke at our boarders will like what they discovered enough to stay inside them,
and that lets our fandom continue. At bigger, more general conventions the new
fans are easy to see, because they are everywhere, and they are fans of many
things. But at a specific convention like TFCon, it was great to see newer
fans, because they were there specifically for Transformers. That warmed my
heart.
Having gone solely for the dealer room, my wife and I spent
a few hours and then left, after having made the rounds several times. A few
days later I started hoping to go to TFCon 2017, armed this time with a better
idea of what to expect. Now I just have to wait and find out if TFCon’s 2017 US
installment will be held in Chicago: after debuting here in 2014, the 2015
edition was held in North Carolina. I’m not sure if TFCon is going to be a
rotating convention like Botcon was, or at least rotating among limited
locations, or if its’ US wing is going to follow the lead of the Canadian
original and settle in one place and at one time of year. TFCon Toronto happens
in one place . . . Toronto . . . annually, and is always the second or third
weekend of July, making it easy to plan for in advance; unlike the now deceased
Botcon, which was always some place different, and was held in a window of between
Spring and Fall. I’m really hoping that it is back in Chicago next year,
because I’ll certainly go.
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