Saturday, December 13, roughly 1:30 PM. It’s a brisk December afternoon, the kind where the sun warms you but the cold air bites the skin. I’m sitting in the backseat of my friend’s SUV, his wife is sitting in the passenger seat. We drive past MetLife Stadium, and I tell them about seeing WrestleMania XXIX there last year.
Going to the convention, I didn’t know what to expect. Walker Stalker as far as I knew was a convention tour started by two dudes of The Walker Stalkers podcast. As a moderate fan of The Walking Dead, I was looking forward to being amongst other fans of the show and meeting a few of my favorite stars. I thought it would just be a fun way to spend the afternoon. I was looking forward to just kick back a few weeks before Christmas.
Yeah, no.
In hindsight I was an idiot. The Walking Dead is the highest-rated basic cable show today, and I live in a major metropolitan area. Did I actually expect to kick back and have a relaxing chat with Lauren Cohan about, like, Rutgers fat sandwiches? What the fuck was I thinking?
As the sole New Jersey/New York resident of Geekscape, it was practically my obligation to attend the first-ever Walker Stalker NYC/NJ convention at the Meadowlands Expo Center last weekend. I went in expecting a fun convention in the off-season. I came in to a live episode of The Walking Dead.
People are pouring out of the entrance. It’s a mess. On the far end there is a line wrapping around the edge of the sidewalk. On the other, another chaotic line wrapping itself on the ramp. In between, people are crowding around, standing and looking over each other’s shoulders. People are calling friends still parking blocks away. I sought someone who was a volunteer to ask where press registration was. Three words and my heart sank. “Inside the building.”
This was my view for thirty minutes.
https://twitter.com/EricTheDragon/status/543830058390269953
I don’t have a problem with waiting. I do the occasional midnight release, I wait in tons of lines at Comic-Con, and I once waited two hours under a burning San Diego sun to take an awful picture with Jessica Alba. But what I saw from others was frustration, demands for refunds, and the worst side of people trying to get in. Perhaps because I’m used to conventions running like poorly-oiled machines, but it was clear my fellow attendees were not as experienced. I felt sorry for the lone volunteer who had to man the door, who you can see in my tweet is the gentleman in the navy blue baseball hat and brown jacket. He had the unfortunate job of maintaining order. “Fire marshall just locked out the building,” he said. “I can’t let anyone in unless people come out.” Yeah, that won’t happen for a while. Minutes later, police were posted behind the doors.
It sounds worse than it actually was, but I stress that I’m an idiot and did not expect this kind of attendance density. No one was killing each other trying to get in, but when everyone is trying to get Norman Reedus’s autograph you can bet people will bring out the worst of themselves.
Soon enough, somehow, we were allowed in. I planned to bum-rush to media registration and waltz my way into the con.
It would be another half hour before that could happen.
Shoulder to shoulder like it was Vietnam, I become uncomfortably comfortable with fellow New Yorkers and New Jersiyans sweating through my jacket, feeling the body heat of cosplayers, families, and hormonal teenagers. The media registration booth was empty, only a volunteer there and no one else registering. I was twenty feet and 500 people away. Welcome to hell. Fate, you cruel bastard.
I looked behind me, through the heads and shoulders to the entrance. Hordes of people were in front waiting to get in and being stopped by security. It was then that it hit me: This was an episode of The Walking Dead. I skipped that day in junior high English, but does this qualify as irony?
The Walker Stalker conventions are pretty akin to Wizard World, right down to the relentless touring, but their laser focus is on the AMC television show and tangentially related interests. Like Wizard World, the attraction here are the stars, and Walker Stalker had them in spades; almost all of the actors who play or have played a crucial part in the show were in attendance signing autographs and doing photo-ops. Noticeably absent were Andrew Lincoln (Rick Grimes) and Danai Gurira (Michonne). I stood in line only for Lauren Cohan, the English actress from Surrey who plays southern belle Maggie and was now signing autographs off Exit 16. (Just did some quick research, apparently she was born in Cherry Hill. Huh.)
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When I finally got in, winter coat draped over my arm, I began to see shades of what I expected before becoming an involuntary extra on the show: a medium-sized fan convention. The usual stuff was there, like the toy vendors, custom t-shirts, overpriced hot dogs, and long lines to meet the stars. But the flavor here was different, and even now I fail to accurately capture it. This wasn’t Comic-Con for sure — this is a dwarf to the giant that is Comic-Con. It was something else.
There was a noticeable absence of anything related to the comics. Outside of a few vendors selling issues and trade paperbacks, it is clear that the television show has dwarfed anything Robert Kirkman originally penned (and still continues to). I reiterate that I’m not a major fan of the franchise in any way, be it the comic book or TV show, and so perhaps I failed to recognize any comics-original cosplayers (in my defense, due to the seasonal weather any sort of cosplayer was easy to spot and the vast majority were TV-inspired). I say this not to mourn the diminishing value of comic books in pop culture, rather I see it from an almost anthropological perspective. It’s utterly fascinating.
The true legacy from the monster success of The Walking Dead television series will be its masterful marriage of two seemingly disparate communities: horror fans and survival enthusiasts. The pop lore of the zombie monster started by George Romero nets all the horror fanatics, while the apocalyptic premise promises a nihilistic wonderland for those who feel typing on a laptop before bed is too boring. These communities were never that far apart; it wouldn’t be uncommon to encounter an outdoorsman with a taste for the macabre, or a horror fanatic who likes to be close to nature. Chris Jericho talked in his second memoir about Eli Roth’s creepy home on the outskirts of a woodland area. Yet, The Walking Dead has managed to make these communities more than just friends. In the middle of Walker Stalker con, I’ve noticed just how much they have become lovers.
As far as the convention experience itself, it is about what you would expect for a niche fandom in the off-season. No, this isn’t Comic-Con, and I reiterate as only a moderate fan of anything Walking Dead that I’m kind of bummed the comic series that started everything is only passively remembered. Instead, space is devoted to autograph booths for maybe the two dozen actors who played a zombie for an hour.
Panels are a waste. There is only one big space for the entire convention, and there are no separate rooms or anything. Panels took place on the main stage, which was roped off with approximately two or three hundred folding chairs for attendees. There is so much noise happening at once, even with the microphones and loudspeakers it was extremely difficult to make out anything anyone was saying. Having experienced something like this at Florida Supercon this past summer, I didn’t even bother. It was a great-looking stage, however.
Lines for autographs were long, but if they were what you wanted they were manageable. Norman Reedus had the biggest line of the entire convention, which legitimately shocks me considering how many Wizard World shows he goes to. Prices were high, but not unfamiliar if you attend conventions. I paid $60 for Lauren Cohan’s autograph (and it’s personalized), but it would be another $60 for a photo op and I wasn’t allowed to take any cell phone photos with her. Policies change from guest to guest, all depending on their manager. Some of the bigger marquee guests, for example Manu Bennett (The Hobbit, Arrow) had management that wouldn’t allow it, but you totally could with Jon Beranthal (Shane) or the dudes from Comic Book Men. Again, if you attend conventions on even a semi-regular business you know what to expect. I didn’t bother with photo-ops, I kind of wanted to eat that weekend.
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Overall, if you really love The Walking Dead attending Walker Stalker isn’t a bad way to spend a weekend if they pass by your city. I wouldn’t kill to go, but if it happens to be in town and nothing else is going on, it’s a cool thing to check out. The convention organizers probably still don’t know what kind of a beast of an event they have, and so their choosing of medium-sized buildings for a growing convention may cause some crowding problems like I experienced in the near future. But if you can stand that, it’s a fun time. Besides, I said if you really love The Walking Dead chances are you don’t care and actually want to pay an obscene amount for your favorite characters’ autograph anyway. So treat yourself.
December 13th, roughly 6:30 PM. My friends and I regroup and our feet hurt. This isn’t the most time I’ve spent at a convention nor the worst, but I had enough of zombies and people who would wish the apocalypse would occur just to kill a few. Some of the speciality food vendors like the empanadas restocked maybe an hour ago and are officially sold out. And here I am standing, ready to buy a dozen. My friends take one last look through the artist’s alley — by that I mean like three booths — before we call it quits for the night. We would spend the rest of the day drinking at their place, playing giant Jenga (that they made themselves from Home Depot wood) and watching WWE NXT on the WWE Network.
Pro tip: Go with friends.
Check out the gallery below for more of Walker Stalker NYC/NJ 2014!