To the dedicated, fandom doesn’t just mean watching or playing or experiencing. It means internalizing every single little thing about the properties you love to the point where you can remix, poke fun at, and personalize them. No place is this slice of fandom better displayed than at Comic-Con, where you can find everything from niche Rick and Morty shirts to R2-DPOO. Really.
Here’s some of the weirdest nerdery we’ve found on the floor this year, starting of course with the t-shirts:
Then you find the figures:
Sometimes, the “joke” is a serious point about people who ought to be honored.
For good or ill…
But even in the field of custom figure art, it’s not all about new sculpts. Sometimes, found object appropriation is the way to go.
And sometimes, it involves carefully skirting around copyrights.
Handmade one-of-a-kind items are their own thing.
Corporate re-creations of animated settings are another, but that’s not to say there’s no art to it.
Snuggling up to something soft at night is always nice…but who knew hot sauce fell into that category?
If that seems too harsh, maybe entrails are better. They are at least warmer, in a non-burning sort of way.
Keep them all healthy and you can be king. Ezekiel, that is. At The Walking Dead booth.
These are either walkers, or people who waited in line for fifteen hours to see our panel in Hall H. Either way we salute them.
Anyone mad about a female Doctor gets ex-ter-min-ate-ed!
Eff ett’s noat Scoattish, ett’s…a Comic-con booth.
Scarlett Johansson is apparently just able to sleep through all the chaos.
Hasbro will probably never mass-produce these, but the medieval Transformers movie dioramas are awesome.
And what toy is better than a humanoid pony girl in a sushi food truck? I for one have no answer to that.
Spike as a blowfish in the MLP movie? It’s cute, until you realize just how deadly and poisonous pufferfish are.
Toy sculptors the Four Horseman have their in-house line Mythic Legions on display, with figures funded by the power of Kickstarter and judicious parts reuse.
Entertainment Earth and Bif Bang Pow! are going all in on a stylized line of woodne toys that look like bowling pins, called Pin Mates. The Batman TV show is but one of many properties under this umbrella.
There are playsets, too.
I mean, they’re not totally into cuteness…they sell a blood-puking Gene Simmons toy too.
And these guys…
You can pet the Inhumans’ dog if you like, and want to wait in a long line.
If developments in the DC universe sometimes have you gnashing your teeth, you are not the only one.
The Tick universe, maybe not so much.
WWE wants to prove its women can be superstar athletes just like the men…so it’s licensing fashion dolls. Just please do a Goldust as well. He would want that.
OMG GIANT BB-8 HOT WHEELS!
Whew. okay then. Entertainment Earth has another style of wooden figure, and even though the resemblances of the Trek crew are pretty good, they still don’t count as actor likenesses for legal purposes, which keeps costs down.
Ummm…yeah. Moving on.
I’d go see that band.
Have you seen stranger things on heaven or earth? No, you have not. You have not seen Stranger Things until now.
Jessica Jones Jack Daniel’s is a nice touch.
Is that it? No. No. This is IT.
And we’ll all float on okay-yay, and we’ll all float on anyway…
What have you found at Comic-Con that amuses you? Let us know in comments!
Images: Luke Y. Thompson.