Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Today's soundtrack: The Smiths "Ask" ::
Disclaimer: This post contains photos, so it may take a moment to load completely! It also contains details about some of my personal goings ons while I was away last week, and therefore may be completely boring. Thank you for your patience - Le management
I hear your massive outcry: "Just where the hell were you last week, Mr. the Bloody? Like you actually have a life or somewhere to go? Get real!" Yes, I know. And normally, you'd be right. I DON'T have a life or anywhere to go. Except that last weekend just happened to be the annual Wizard World Philadelphia Convention, and I thought that it would be healthy for me to get out there and mingle with my own kind for a few days... you know, once a year or so.
The ten hour drive to and from was far less hellish this year because I think I've finally found a practical route which bypasses New York City. Pretty much any Mapquest or Yahoo map thingie is going to plot a route to Philly through NYC, and that shit is just no good. You only need to actually be in New York for a couple of miles, but it lasts several HOURS and the people drive like Arkham Asylum escapees. And we only got lost once for about five minutes. In the past we've always managed to overshoot Philly because we've wound up on Bizarro 95 instead of Regular 95 and end up asking the toll booth guy where we are and how to get back. Not so this go round! So, already the trip was off to a good start.
On Friday, the first day of the convention, I spent most of the time hunting down back issues of comic series I like for cheap and in relatively good shape. Conventions are great for that and I found a couple of booths selling them for one dollar each. I did a lot of looking around and assessing what was there. I don't want to blow ALL of my money on the first day, yanno. And in my travels I came upon this lovely set up:
As the founder of the First Church of the Lego, I was quite pleased and squeed like a little girl at all of the stuff they had going on. This wasn't the whole layout. They also recreated Four Freedoms Plaza as well as some miscellaneous skyscrapers, with streets and rooftops littered with things like Nightwing and Catwoman racing motorcycles, the Legion of Doom up to no good, Harry Potter and his posse fighting off an elephant, The Spirit hanging out in a spooky cemetery, and:
The Punisher getting ready to do sniping from a rooftop. It was pretty sweet. Man, I wish I still had all my Legos.
That evening my brother phoned one of his old friends who lives in the area and he took us around South Street to do some local shopping. It was really wicked because South Street's shops go something like this: record store, tattoo parlor, lingerie shop, record store, hard core sex shop, tattoo parlor, leather goods, record store, sex shop, et cetera. I was able to find some rings that fit me at a place called "Armed and Dangerous" which is not easy to do with my catcher's mitt shaped paws. I half expected Armed and Dangerous to be run by an old Asian man who would say "we sell objects from places where men fear to tread... we also sell frozen yogurt, which I call frogurt!", but it wasn't. There is a totally awesome music shop called The Digital Ferret which is also renown in the area for hosting goth Wednesdays at a local dance club and putting on the quarterly Dracula's Ball event, so needless to say, I just wanted to shove the entire contents of that place in my suitcase and take it home with me to pet and love and keep and call George, but there was just SO MUCH musical awesomeness there that I could not afford it all. I mean, the USUAL music store will have, oh, under ten Cure CDs available or so. THIS place had upwards of THREE ROWS of it and they also had a reserved tab for Negativeland albums. Luckily, Digital Ferret is ONLINE so you should go there for all of your gothic/industrial/darkwave/death metal/80s new wave needs.
Saturday, as anyone can tell you, is always the biggest day of the convention. It has the longest hours, the best panel discussions, and the most visitors. I decided to do something that I had never done before. I, William the Bloody, showed up on Saturday in a costume. You may not know, but this past Halloween I had put together a pretty darn good V for Vendetta costume, and I decided that it was actually good enough to roam around in public in and not look like a complete ass. But, as you DO know, I am loathe to have my photo taken, but if you're going to wear a costume at all, you're pretty much sending out an open invitation to complete strangers and weirdo freaks to take your photo. I decided that I could either 1. be a bastard jerk and say "no" whenever people asked for a photo and get annoyed when I get stopped every ten seconds for this question and thusly have no fun at all, or 2. I could realize that this outfit covers me from head to toe and makes me completely disguised and therefore gives me a license to talk in an English accent and act like a totally different person and getting away with it because no one knows who I am or what I really look like. Yes, I settled on selection number 2, which is fortunate because I honestly WAS stopped every ten seconds and asked for photographs and when I stopped, literally CROWDS of V fans swarmed me. There were a lot of little kids who wanted pictures and one was frightened of me until his dad pointed out that he had a V action figure and then he wouldn't leave me alone. I couldn't believe how popular just wearing this costume made me. I fought Blade and got invited into a wrestling ring because the wrestlers were V fans. Local radio stations asked me to pose with signs advertising them. Wizard Magazine asked me to go the interesting costume photo shoot they were having upstairs with real professional photographers, and I did, so MAYBE a picture of little me will be in a future issue of Wizard. But MOST importantly, throngs of extremely CUTE GIRLS formed a queue for a photo with yours truly:
Yes, that is in hard cold fact, me, William the Bloody up there. Take a good look, because these are the best photos you'll ever see. As the line of hot girls progressed, I realized:
And don't you forget it! Oh yeah, she likes me. As this sort of thing continued throughout the day, I began to get more confident and started to beat people up for their lunch money:
Well, actually, he ASKED me to beat him up. Lots of people did. Apparently, getting a photo of you being beaten up by V is one to show the boys back home. Unfortunately, after a few hours that costume gets pretty stuffy, what with being completely covered and it being like 90 degrees Fahrenheit and all. Other than that, I would HIGHLY recommend going to a convention completely dressed up like this. It feels pretty good to have strangers come up to you and say they like your costume and BEG for photographs. When I went back to the hotel to change, I scared the living daylights out of the chamber maid (another bonus).
Since Saturday is the biggest day for the convention, Wizard held an after hours party, which I attended (not as V, awww). The Suicide Girls put on one heck of a show in one room, and in the other, well... If you've been wondering what Skeletor has been up to since he lost the Battle for Eternia, wonder no more:
Yes, Skeletor has a lounge act and it is every bit as ridiculous as saying those words makes it sound. He would sing stuff like "I will take your breath away... with magic powers... and you'll die..." and "someone saved someone saved someone saved my life tonight, Skeletor...", get bored half way through and say "that's enough of that one!" He got heckled a lot, but he would wave his staff over the audience and yell "Silence, fools!!" Once somebody yelled "You're gay!" at him to which Skeletor replied "How can I be gay? I HATE EVERYONE!" Man, that was hilarious and I would have stayed all night if it didn't end at eleven pm.
Sunday was the final day which stinks because many of the vendors have already started packing up their stuff, but it's also awesome because most of them have HUGE discount sales so that they have to pack less. In the end, I wound up with:
1 Jareth action figure (yes, there IS a Jareth action figure!)
1 V for Vendetta action figure
Cute little drawings of V and Ash from Army of Darkness
Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 hardbound edition
In the Puddle preview mini comic and a button
A Green Lantern ring and a hand full of free DC buttons
1 original Batgirl comic book page by Damien Scott (wicked!)
a large stack of back issues
2 Richard Kiel autographs (he signed my Moonraker!)
a small handful of independent comics
All in all, a truly awesome trip. I would like to close by saying that if you were molested my an 8 foot tall V at Wizard World Philly, I apologize because like Spider-man in the alien symbiote, my costume made me do it!
William (now with 60% more geekiness!)
