In Pictures: Fan Expo Canada 2024

If it’s almost Labour Day, it must be time for the Fan Expo Canada at Toronto’s Metro Convention Centre. On this weekend, downtown Toronto is almost overrun with colourful cosplayers and pop-cultural purists on the hunt for their favourite celebrities and creators, the missing toys and comic books plaguing their collections, and the manifestation of the latest media darlings that TV and internet have to offer.

Your brave reporter braved the fire-hazard like conditions and the presence of a mob that, under less benign conditions, might actually scare him through its sheer size and potential threat of violence, in order that he might take and present to you these lovely pictures. The presence of KITT and a somewhat diminished David Hasselhoff immediately calmed his anxiety and stoked the nostalgia for childhood and the plentiful TV memories that went with it.

Just a reminder, people, that cosplay does not equal consent so your reporter would appreciate it if people would stop grabbing him by the suspenders and snapping them, telling him they “really like his Steve Urkel” costume, and asking him if they can take a photo with him. My wardrobe is not your costume, people!

And what’s a convention without comics I’ll never be able to afford?

And a little vintage original comic art (a very small drawing of Concrete by Paul Chadwick) that’s less expensive than the comics above but which I still can’t afford:

Hello – what is Harper Collins doing here? Those books don’t have any pictures in them! Seriously, my heart melted at the sight of a booth with just old fashioned novels on its table, but no one was lining up at this table. Instead, they were all lining up at the eBay booth across from it. Why – was this like that scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin where Jonah Hill tries to go into that eBay shop run by Catherine Keener and buy a pair of boots, but she won’t sell them to him because you can only buy the items online? Well, whatever’s going on here, it’s enough to get Zorro interested.

Did I mention toys? There seem to be a lot of toys…

And yet, paradoxically, the Kids Zone is eerily empty. It looks not unlike a scene from The Shining:

Enough fooling around. Let’s get serious and check out the Artists Alley:

I think that’s Nicola Scott, the Wonder Woman artist…

and Dan Parent, who draws Archie:

A few high profile guests like Marc Silvestri and Geoff Johns don’t seem to be here yet:

Stephen Platt will only be here on one day but his art rep will be here for the entire show and they’ve got pages by Platt that cost thousands of dollars each:

Luckily, Carl Potts was here and I got to chat with him. He edited the Punisher titles (among other things) back in the late 80s and very early 90s when I was collecting Marvel comics.