Toronto Comicon 2024 was the biggest version of the convention yet, spread over three packed days, with exciting guests from around the world. I made my yearly journey to the convention, alongside occasional WWAC contributor Monita, aka, my twin.
I always look forward to conventions, but Toronto Comicon 2024 could not come fast enough. Not only because the guest list was exciting, but because this weekend of the con will be the first time in months when I get to be normal. My last convention was Fan Expo Canada 2023, where I had a wonderful time; only to learn barely a week later that I had been unceremoniously laid off from my day job. Suffice to say, I’ve been unsettled since then. Though I’ve been getting back on my feet, I haven’t felt quite right. I desperately needed a convention where I could be with fellow geeks, and listen to people talk about the movies, TV shows, and comics I love, so I could start heading towards normalcy.
March in Toronto is usually still cold and often rainy. But this March has been surprisingly warm. Not having to worry about our coats made prepping for the con easier and we arrived on day one earlier than expected. Which means little in Toronto because the time you save gets taken by queuing.
Anyhow, we picked up our badges from the ever-friendly Touchwood PR team, who now recognize us instantly. I love how smiley they are and it’s great to kick off the con with such a warm welcome. This year, alongside picking up badges, the con also instituted an activation system. Most attendees were rather thrown by this additional step because they just milled around waiting for direction. Honestly, I couldn’t figure out where to go after picking up my badge either. I’m assuming someone saw the lost-looking crowd and realized what was happening because suddenly there were crew and volunteers yelling at everyone to activate their badges using the QR codes. Because there were so many people around, the codes were obscured and we ended up walking around people to scan the code. Once the code was scanned, we were taken to a site to input a unique activation number on the badge. But that wasn’t the end of it! We also needed to fill in our personal details so the badge would belong only to us and nobody else. That was a long process and I’m not sure that much information was needed.
Nevertheless, we were finally able to start our convention experience. We decided to begin with a recce of the area. Toronto Comicon used to be held in the South Building of the MTCC but since last year has moved into the more spacious North Building. It isn’t surprising considering how big this convention is becoming. I generally reserve Saturday and Sunday to visit the convention, but Friday had enough panels for me to realise I’d have to attend.
A lot of people had had the same realization as us because the hall was packed and it wasn’t even 11am. As much as I was enjoying going through the kiosks, I did want to visit the Artist Alley as soon as possible. We were on the hunt for everything X-Men and it wasn’t hard to find. With the return of the animated show, the X-Men love was strong at the con. I wore my X-Men t-shirt and the number of comments I got on it was unreal. I’ve never had so many people stop to chat with me, let alone about the X-Men!
As we made our way through the Artist Alley, we stopped at a table with some lovely X-Men art, particularly from the animated show. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be the table of Larry Houston, director and producer of the X-Men animated show. But as we spoke to him, we noticed his giant table banner featured other familiar works— Captain Planet, TMNT, Amazing Spiderman, Thundarr, Jonny Quest. Houston had effectively made our childhoods! The two of us and two young women beside us collectively lost our minds. Houston was very understanding of our fangirling since we couldn’t help ourselves. I finally regained enough composure to ask him which show was his favourite, and he said X-Men, because he had a lot more creative control than on other projects. He also had control on Jonny Quest, but not at the level of X-Men. We hung around a while longer until we were able to buy a couple of his prints, which he kindly signed for us, and we got a lovely, happy photo with him.
Meeting Houston was such a delightful surprise but I’m not sure why he wasn’t more widely advertised by the convention, considering he’s worked on over 200 projects in his career. I get that the live-action stars have more recognition, but the behind-the-scenes creatives have such a hand in building pop culture.
Which brings me to my main mission at the Artist Alley—Heather Antos. I’ve been following Antos’ work for years and when I reached her table, I tried to be normal, pretending to look through her art. But finally, I confessed that I really wanted to chat with her because she is the creator of Gwenpool and I love Gwenpool! I asked her about how Gwenpool came to be. “Gwenpool was a fluke! She wasn’t supposed to exist.” Marvel had made several variant covers of Gwen Stacy amalgamations with other characters for Secret Wars, and one of the covers merged Gwen Stacy with Deadpool. And it took off.
People loved this Gwen-Pool version so Marvel, “loving money”, asked the Deadpool team to work on a story about it. However, there were rights issues to navigate. Deadpool belonged to Fox. Gwen Stacy fell under Sony. There was no way to create a Gwen Stacy who was a Deadpool. Effectively, the team needed to create a separate character. Oh, and they also had to introduce her in a Marvel-owned comic so only Marvel could have the rights. “Naturally” they decided to introduce Gwenpool in Howard the Duck (Vol. 6) #1.
Talking about what makes Gwenpool different, Antos said she really wanted to make a character who was us, all of us Marvel fans. And she liked being able to have Gwen know about comic storylines and Marvel events. But there’s also a point when Gwen no longer knows what’s going to happen in these events because she’s in the Marvel universe now.
While Antos created Gwenpool, others have been writing and drawing her for a while. I asked Antos what it’s like to hand over her character. She told me it was very hard, but she acknowledged that she got to create a section of Gwenpool’s life and that now she is in the hands of others. “She doesn’t belong to me,” Antos said, which is a very mature way of dealing with IP. Couldn’t be me, I can tell you that.
Interestingly, the Marvel higher ups wanted Gwenpool to be more like Harley Quinn and Antos had to fight back against that. Admittedly, I have struggled with some of Gwenpool’s character arcs since Antos left her and this explains why.
Our chat was brief but a highlight of my year. I bought a Gwenpool sketch from Antos, took a joyous picture of her with her creation and bid my goodbyes. I’m kicking myself for not taking Antos up on her offer to take a picture with her, but sometimes I get awkward and say no. Well, now I have to live with that decision. Perhaps I’ll meet Antos again. Fingers crossed.
Next stop was our first session of the con. Tom Cavanagh played multiple roles on CW’s The Flash and was quite the tour de force each time. I was curious to learn how he created these character variations. But the session went in an unexpected direction when Cavanagh spoke about his charity work with Nothing But Nets which raises funds and distributes mosquito nets across Africa. Cavanagh and his sister both contracted malaria as children when they were living in Africa, so it’s a personal cause. It’s equally personal to my family. My grandmother died of malignant malaria. I was completely unprepared to hear someone talk about the disease so out of the blue. I didn’t hear the next few minutes of Cavanagh’s talk because I was overcome by weeping. Fortunately, nobody noticed so Monita and I hugged it out and tried to focus.
A lot of what Cavanagh said about his basketball life and interests were lost on me. I’ve only had a fleeting interest in the game and didn’t understand his references. But he was extremely charming and absolutely came alive when he talked about how basketball and making film and television are team efforts. He was also out-of-his-seat exuberant when talking about the craft of acting when a fellow actor asked him about his process. Cavanagh made some astute points about centering the character in an emotion, and not the emotions we see on screen, but real human emotions that we ourselves have felt, because that’s the key to making them feel authentic to the audience. What a fascinating way to think about characters!
Following the session, we headed outside for a hotdog lunch. We’d prepared well enough to have protein bars before the session but we still needed food. The queue was long, but felt increasingly longer because we were accosted by an X-Men fan who had never met a full stop. Monita and I couldn’t even discuss our lunch order because this man kept interrupting us. We encountered a similar issue at TIFF last year and it was happening again. Take the hint! If people are giving you one-word answers, that is not an invitation to keep on going. Had there been other food trucks around, as there used to be, we’d have got out of there, but our options were this truck or starve. And why should we have to leave anyway?
We at least got to eat in peace in a corner before rushing back in to catch the X-Men voice actors session. I was delighted to learn that many of the voice actors on the show are from Canada and continue to work here. Houston was also a speaker and it was fascinating to hear the self-confessed X-Men fanboy talk about the show. The writers on the original show had no idea about the X-Men which Houston said made for a good mix since he was brimming with knowledge. Lawrence Bayne, who voiced Cable on the show, said that during his audition, he tried to make his voice gruff but was actually instructed to just use his regular voice. Houston explained that that was what they were aiming for—actors speaking in their usual register. Considering that the Supernatural actors have all suffered for using gravelly voices for over a decade, the X-Men team’s decision was a wise one. Catherine Disher, the actor voicing Jean Grey, shared insights into how much the voice acting world has changed. They used to have the entire cast physically come into the studio and they’d do their lines together but now it’s done over Zoom. While some of the actors said they missed it, they did acknowledge that going back to in-studio work now felt strange, and even uncomfortable.
Our final session of the day was Denis Lawson, who played Wedge Antilles in Star Wars. Lawson clearly has a wildly different experience with the franchise than the main cast, and almost entirely positive. He spoke about being gobsmacked when he saw the first film on the big screen, and shared a couple of anecdotes about Mark Hamill, who he still considers a good friend, Harrison Ford, who he praised for his dry humour, and the late Carrie Fisher, who he was very concerned about because she was so young during filming, but who he described as having a “wonderful personality”.
We made one final stop to grab dinner and then made the long trek home, knowing another geeky day awaited us.
