At this year’s New York Comic Con, held last month at Manhattan’s 3.3-million-square-foot Jacob K Javits Center, I stood before a dinosaur-sized inflatable Goku — the protagonist from the Dragon Ball Z franchise — with over 200,000 fanboys and fangirls swirling around me. Everyone was hunting for exclusive bobbleheads.
New York Comic Con is the East Coast’s biggest ode to pop culture. It's a four-day convention that is less about comic books themselves and more about accumulating pins and posters and hoodies and mystery boxes exploding with stuff you will never use. There are vendors selling replicas of Thor’s hammer. Life-sized glow-in-the-dark Slimers. Lightsabers that can power your house. It's geek fashion week, and everyone competes for who has the best cosplay, spending months and thousands to dress as their favorite characters. Those who don’t cosplay are decked out in geek swag, acting as billboards for their chosen properties.
