Day Two of the San Diego Comic-Con proved to be non-stop fun. You can’t get the full comic convention experience without at least one day in costume so at borg.com that day was today. Elizabeth C. Bunce and I took to the floor as Tenctonese visitors from Alien Nation who happen to work at the local Buy More, including Elizabeth as a member of the Nerd Herd from the TV series Chuck (with screen-used prosthetic heads from the series courtesy of Prop Store of London, also at the Con). Our favorite costumes are the most obscure and we got about 1,000 fans and press stopping us for photos, several saying we had the most creative costumes of the day and interviews by four TV stations including G4.
You certainly get noticed in costume and that also means you sometimes get an extra chance at meeting your favorite celebrities and childhood idols. Chuck himself, Zack Levi, said he loved our outfits and stopped to say “I really appreciate that you’re representing both Buy More and the Nerd Herd.” Sweet! Levi was hosting his own offsite mini con of sorts called the Nerd HQ, where you could skip lines and for a $20 donation to the national Smile charity you could meet Zachary Quinto (Star Trek’s Spock, Heroes), the stars of TV’s Psych, or as we did, get to spend an hour with Quantum Leap, Men of a Certain Age and Star Trek Enterprise’s own Captain Archer–Scott Bakula in a small conversational setting of about 100 people (Scott also gave us a thumbs up and signed autographs). Bakula was more down to Earth than you can imagine, talking about the ups and downs of acting and singing an improvised duet with Zack Levi onstage.
My own childhood hero, Mark Hamill, was signing autographs and we had our own alien to Jedi chat with Mark. Every bit the classy Jedi!
We lucked into a conversation with Saul Rubinek, star of SyFy’s Warehouse 13, and we talked about all his past shows including Nero Wolfe, and how much we loved him as our all-time favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation villain, Kivas Fajo. A super gentleman. More on Saul in future posts.
We headed off to lunch and ended up at an Italian eatery with none other than Jim Lee and his lovely wife. Jim is pretty much the monarch of this year’s Comic-Con and was taking a rare and much deserved break from from all his panels and signings. He and his wife were having a great time and you can tell the pressure of the new DC Comics 52 re-launch is only providing him with extra excitement and energy to roll out a great new line of comic titles for fans this fall. Here’s a photo of us at lunch in the Gaslight District.
We also got to meet the ubiquitous actor Mark Sheppard (Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica), his wife and four kids. I will post separately about our chat with Mark later. We had great conversations with the guys from Profiles in History, too, who currently star in the SyFy reality show Hollywood Treasures. Very fun to see these guys are fans like the rest of us! Profiles in History was selling photos in one of the Back to the Future DeLoreans for Michael J. Fox’s charity. A great idea and a great cause! This was a Comic-Con favorite of the day.
And here is Elizabeth with our friend Kevin Dilmore at the Hallmark booth. Kevin (along with his writing partner Dayton Ward) is THE favorite Star Trek novelist of fans.
And we had a blast roaming with borg.com writer Jason McClain! We’ll post more photos in the coming days, but please let us know if you see us on any other websites!
C.J. Bunce
Editor
borg.com
