If you’ve ever wondered what Darth Vader would look like in a corset, or where to get a stormtrooper onesie in a hurry, or what your options are if you identify with neither the dark side nor the light side, then Comic-Con, in the Excel exhibition centre in London’s Docklands, can unlock all this.
Twice yearly, catching out all the bare-chested warriors from an apocalyptic future with its autumnal weather, Comic-Con is devised like any other fan fest – giant, soulless exhibition centre, militaristic grey walls, autograph lines and everything almost-but-not-quite branded, from the sandwiches of “Trattoria” to the lightsabers which, for copyright reasons, we call light sticks.
But Comic-Con is the epicentre of cosplay, in which adults choose their screen and comic book heroes and reproduce their look down to the last weapon and buckle, and in the week when the trailer for JJ Abrams’ new addition to the Star Wars franchise – The Force Awakens – was released, there is a definite Star Wars theme at Comic-Con this year.
The actual film isn’t released until 17 December, but the trailer’s release this week has been an event in itself. Thirty million views on YouTube. Probably 40m by the time you read this. In a nutshell: “The force is calling to you. Just let it in.”
Lisa Hart, 26, told me: “I’m just going to rock up to the cinema locally, in full costume. People will love it. Because, in the end, we’re all there for the same thing.”
To the uninitiated, it looks like the other Star Warses (Stars Wars?), with more diversity and better CGI. But don’t listen to someone who’s only seen the trailer once. “Have I seen it?” said Matt, 37, with a rhetorical uplift. “Many, many times.” Yes, but how many? “Less than 10, but considerably more than five.” He has tickets to three screenings in the first four days, starting with a midnight one so he doesn’t have to suffer spoilers. The most important is the second.
“I’ve got a five-year-old boy who’s going to come and see it with me. I never thought I’d have the chance to see a new Star Wars film at the cinema with my own son.”
Nobody really had eyes for anyone but each other at Comic-Con. “It’s the chance to escape your normal life, and walk around with everyone terrified of you,” Hart clarified. She’s a chef and a burlesque dancer. I said, your normal life sounds brilliant. “Yes,” she conceded. “Maybe I didn’t mean escape, exactly.”
Bill, 25, arrived with his colleagues from an Asda in Bristol, dressed as a stormtrooper in a nylon one-piece (the answer is Argos, by the way). “There are people who’ve made less effort than me,” he insisted, but doesn’t inhabit his costume as fully as your typical Comic-Con goer, which is fair enough as it’s his first time. Initially Bill didn’t want his picture taken, until the photographer suggested that if he put his mask on, nobody would know it was him. “Oh yeah,” he said, the liberation of the masked life opening up before him like a fan.
By next year, he’ll probably be as committed as Ian Hammond-Stark, 37: “Just a generic Jedi. All the other years I’ve been, I’ve come as a Ghostbuster, so this has been like letting go of an old friend.” Like everyone, he has very high hopes for The Force Awakens. “If you look at what [JJ Abrams] did to Star Trek, he changed the temporal framework. So he could do anything with Star Wars, go anywhere. He can’t do any worse than the prequel trilogy, anyway.” I’d forgotten how much of the fan experience involves hating 50% of the output.
Richard, 43, dressed as a custom-made Old Republic Sith lord, was six when the first film came out. “It completely took over my childhood. I’m very, very excited indeed,” he said. “Am I allowed to say this without being jumped on by all my Star Wars friends? I love the films. All of them.” He was chilling – though no Darth – in his milky white contact lenses. “It interferes a bit with my peripheral vision, but it’s not too bad. I drove here. The woman in the McDonald’s drive-in wasn’t too happy.”
Ryan Gales, 32, is a bounty hunter called Koshin Kuat, in a costume he painted himself in February: he takes off his mask as a courtesy. “Drenched in sweat” doesn’t come close. He looks like he’s stepped out of a Timotei advert, a reference only contemporaries of the Star Wars first wave can hope to understand. “It’s a costume based on Boba Fett, neither dark side nor light side. It is warm in here, yes.”
From a cosplay point of view, Star Wars would be more popular if there were more women in it. Nobody wants to dress as Princess Leia, for some reason (actually I know the reason – it is the combination of complication and primness. It goes against the Comic-Con vibe, where costumes can be infinitely complicated but tend not to be prim). That doesn’t mean there are no female Star Wars fans, however. Charlotte, 23, in a black T-shirt with a skeleton on it, said: “The real reason I don’t dress up is that I’ve spent all my money on Star Wars figurines.”
“Will you just put,” said John Lowery, 19, dressed as a character from a completely different film that, whatever it was, I never want to see, “that if JJ Abrams messes up this film, I’m going to call him JJ Binks.”
- London Comic-Con is at Excel, London, until Sunday 25 October
