Friday, November 4, 2016

Grave Considerations: TFCon Chicago 2016





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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