An Unexpected Journey

Welcome back, readers.

So, I mentioned this like eight months ago, back at Christmas (if you'll recall), but Kris bought me tickets to some random Comic Con in downtown Chicago for August. I'm not really anywhere close to being at the 'Comic Con' level of Nerdery, mind you - I enjoy some fantasy and sci-fi franchises, sure, but I would never like dress up like characters from an intellectual property and walk around in public like them. That's just beyond lame to me.

Anyway, one of my favorite aforementioned franchises is Tolkien's legendarium, of which the most famous is The Lord of the Rings. I watch the movies probably once a month, and read the books basically every other year (I'm currently re-reading The Return of the King. . . again.) Anyway, my wife obviously knows this all too well, so she added onto my Comic Con tickets a photo op with the four actors that portrayed the four, main hobbits in the film trilogy: Elijah Wood (Frodo), Sam Astin (Samwise), Dominic Monaghan (Merry), and Billy Boyd (Pippin.) She also took it a step further and added on a pass for a limited seating Q & A panel with the four actors later on in the evening. 

. . .AND she collaborated with BP's (now ex) wife, Sam, on this so that the two of us dudes could go together (because our wives sure as hell didn't want to go.) Furthermore, seeing how this was going down in Chicago, they split the cost of a third pass/ticket/whatever so our Chicago-based friend, Kimmel, could come along as well. And so, eight months after receiving these awesome gifts, we were finally able to cash them in, driving out to Chicago and attending what was, by far, the nerdiest (and saddest) shit I have ever seen in my entire life.

Was I glad we were able to go? Absolutely, it was awesome. Would I ever want to go to a Comic Con again?

Hell no. You'll see why in the pictures and captions below.

Behold, dear readers - the New Fellowship. . .

I left Friday afternoon for Rockford, arriving around 4pm when BP was wrapping up work for the day. After settling in, we decided to head into downtown Grand Rapids to hit up his local record store, Vertigo Music.

This store is incredible, and while the prices are high across the industry these days, their prices are fair for what you'd find on Discogs (not a huge mark-up by any means.)

The selection here is bad-ass, too - lots of new and used punk and ska, which my own, local record store (Radio Wasteland) doesn't stock, seeing how those genres aren't very popular in smaller towns compared to everyone's go-to, classic rock and the crap you find on the Billboard charts.

I ended up spending around $85 on five albums, but three of them were new and two were pressed on colored vinyl. Considering the scarcity of some of these releases, I was pretty stoked about it.

After our successful record store run, we came back to his house and worked on some DnD stuff with leveling up our characters (our next session is scheduled for next weekend, so we wanted to help each other with the confusing task of bumping all of our stats up correctly.) To ratchet up the ol' nerd scale even further, we streamed The Two Towers in the background while we did so. You know, just to chase away any single girls in the neighborhood that were prowling around.

The next morning, we rolled out of his house around 7:30am and hit the road south towards Chicago, arriving at our hotel around 11:00am. Took us about a half an hour to turn right onto the hotel's - and convention center's - street, right off the highway exit ramp, due to the insane amount of car and foot traffic. We were already spotting crowds of dressed-up nerds amassing on the sidewalks, and knew we were going to be in for one hell of a day.

Our room was pretty bad-ass - we paid a little extra for today due to the hotel, which was definitely fancy, being connected directly to the convention center via a glass walkway (though taking the sidewalk took about two minutes of walking.)

We had this weird, L-shaped hallway at the front door of our room, which I've never seen before - usually it's just a simple entry way - with this bathroom door off of it.

This mirror was ridiculously bright.

Coming out of the hallway from the bathroom.

We were up on the third floor of this hotel, which had a massive, open-air lobby/dining/drinking area in the center that was like ten stories or something. It was massive, and the pics don't do it justice by a long shot.

As we dumped off our stuff into the hotel room, Kimmel texted us and let us know he was here and walking around trying to find us, so we made our way back down to the main floor of this gigantic lobby/whatever. 

This place would be awesome for laser tag or paint ball or something. Whole place was like an old N64 GoldenEye level.

Briefly returned to our room to grab the convention passes, then we once headed downstairs to head out for our long-ass day full of nerdiness.

Walking from the hotel across the street to the convention center.

The Convention Center (I took this pic later on in the day as we were walking back from lunch - which I'll talk about in a bit - but figured I'd show you here what the place looked like.) Our hotel was connected to the center off to the left side of this pic.

Heading into the pits of Hell. . .

Although it doesn't look like it here in this pic, this place was PACKED - like, early 2000's house party level of packed. You were pressed in on all sides and had to shuffle instead of walking, often times being stuck in a thoroughfare as the people ahead of you stopped to check out random booths and whatever.

The main draws of these places are merch vendors and celebrities (and the opportunity to dress up like a frickin' douchebag and not have people point and laugh at you.) The merch aspect of this weekend consists of different people setting up booths and selling wares to the gathered nerds art work, comic books, figurines/collectibles, clothing, home decor, weapons (both real and fake), and all kinds of other super-dorky stuff. As for the celebrities? Well, that entails famous people (mostly from sci-fi, fantasy, and cult properties) sitting behind tables signing autographs (usually only signing pictures or artwork that you had to buy from them first.) We had zero interest in 'meeting' anyone while we were here (outside of the Hobbits, of course), but BP knew that his daughter would like the autograph of some guy who voices a character on some, random anime show she watches. So, being the good dad that he is, he jumped into line and paid $20 for a piece of art and $85 for an autograph. I don't love my kids that much, I guess.

Hey kids, look - it's Mouth from The Goonies.

Kimmel and I grab a quick pic while BP was busy getting his expensive-ass, anime signature. We did a quick walk around a few stalls, but it was so crammed with people - they had to have been tens of thousands of people over capacity in this joint - that we couldn't get far.

Doc Brown from Back to the Future.

Eomer of Rohan, from The Lord of the Rings (he's been in tons of other stuff, though.)

BP, still waiting in line. Once he had paid out the ass for this random dude's autograph, we high-tailed it over to the photo op staging area, as it was getting close to the time for us to get our picture taken with the Hobbits. This whole photo op thing with celebrities was not organized at all: they had a screen displaying the photo taking times, the available celebrities, lineup/queue report times, etc. - very similar to what you'd see in an airport for arriving and departing flights - but it wasn't being updated regularly. Furthermore - and I feel the need to emphasize this - there were actually two, different photo op locations (the one we were at downstairs and a VIP area up on the second floor), but this wasn't communicated to anyone, and the folks trying to wrangle the growing throngs of people standing around lost had no idea where folks were supposed to go. It was a giant clusterf***. Eventually, Kimmel asked somebody nearby who actually knew where we were supposed to go, and, sure enough, it was in the FAR CORNER, up on the second level. We had ten minutes to spare, and were crammed in an overly-packed convention hall, as far away from our destination as we could be. What followed was the most frantic, elbow-throwing, gauntlet that I think I've ever been involved with - we had to run around people, shove past people, ask multiple employees where to go, and otherwise scramble in a frantic dash towards the upstairs staging area (where the top-tier celebrities were singing autographs and taking pictures.)

But in the end, we made it, just in time. After queuing up in line for our turn to take the pic, we had to wait for like a half an hour or so (the ol' 'hurry up and wait' thing.) We weren't anticipating getting much of a chance to talk to these actors, considering there were literally thousands of people waiting to do so, but the reality of the encounter was even worse. They moved people through the line like cattle: a group would walk in, stand in a certain spot (the actors never moved), the photographer would take a picture, and you were ushered out. Maybe ten seconds, tops. When we walked in, Sean Astin and Billy Boyd were seated in chairs, facing forward (they didn't even bother turning around to greet us when we walked in.) Dominic Monaghan (standing to the left of Kimmel) was talking with the photographer, and didn't turn around when we came in. I walked in first, so I filed in directly behind Billy Boyd, and consequently locked eyes with Elijah Wood as we took our positions. He was like, "Hey man, what's up!" to which I replied, "What's up dude, how's it going." These guys were all so Goddamn short that it wasn't intimidating at all standing next to them, you kinda forgot how famous they are. He put his hand on my back, the photographer snapped a pic, and we filed out. I gave them all a 'Thanks guys, have a good one' on the way out, and yet another group filed in after us. 

After our photo op, BP wanted to drop off his autograph back at the hotel room, and considering it was only a two-minute walk we left the convention and returned to the room. I kinda felt bad because BP and Kimmel hadn't had the opportunity to talk to any of the Hobbits like I did, but we were all more than happy with the pic (which, as you saw above) turned out pretty bad-ass.

Kimmel snapped this pic of me sitting in the chair, being the sophisticated gentleman that I am.

We all decided it was high time for some lunch (and a few drinks) so we set off for a nearby restaurant BP and stumbled upon.

It was a three-block walk from our hotel, so not terrible - the weather was decent so nobody minded.

We're always down for a brewery, folks.

Tried a few of these during our time here. We weren't necessarily in a hurry to return to the convention, considering how frickin' crowded it was inside, and seeing how we had already gotten the day's big to-do objective out of the way. Definitely took our time with our meal this afternoon.

BP and Kimmel, wrapping up lunch.

BP was overly-stuffed following lunch, so he asked if he could take a quick, 45-minute nap back at the room before we returned to the convention. Kimmel dozed off for a spell in the room's chair for a bit as well, but Yours Truly stayed up and touched up/whittled down the photos you've seen up to this point so far.

I don't get the appeal of the Food Network.

Kimmel takes a pic from his vantage point in the room during BP's nappy time.

Once Sleeping Beauty woke back up, we headed back towards the convention center, passing by this lobby bar that we'd be hitting up later on in the evening, following our scheduled panel.

This time around we took the glass walkway that connects our hotel with the convention center, coming in on the second floor. From there, we took the escalator down to the main level so that we could kill an hour or two checking out the various vendors and poking around before we had to line up for our panel (at like 6pm-ish.)

This entry room was lightly filled with people. Beyond this room, the place was so packed you couldn't take any pics whatsoever (hence the lack of more thorough documentation from today's adventure.) I guess if you were super curious you could search on YouTube or Instagram 'Chicago FanExpo 2026' and see what other folks posted.)

Kimmel stopped at one point to leaf through some comic books (I guess he collects them, which was news to me.)

Look at all those Goddamn dorks in the background. Top tier people-watching today, guys.

These were pretty awesome. I think Palpatine/Vader would be a better choice than what we have now, which is definitely saying something.

BP and I didn't see anything that really jumped out to us that much, at least not to the point where we'd pay the ridiculously marked-up prices folks were asking (you'd be better off buying directly from the manufacturer or otherwise hitting up Amazon, Etsy or eBay for better deals.) I did pick up ten punk stickers for my classroom podium (I'll show you guys how it turned out in my August wrap-up post, next time), for the insane price of 10 for $10. I would've bought more but they were limited on which bands they had. Next we hit up some Lego mini-figure vendor, and Kimmel bought five for $20 (he says for his sons, but I think they were for him and he was just embarrassed.)

After ambling around the merch stalls for an hour and a half, we headed upstairs to get in line for our 7:30pm Q & A panel with the four, Hobbit actors. We had to stand in that stupid line for nearly an hour, because they wanted to usher in everyone all at once to avoid the actors having to wait around for people - you know, 'cause they're better than us just because they're rich and famous and all that.

Kimmel take a group selfie as we wait for the Hobbits to take the stage.

I pulled some of these pics off of Instagram the following day, seeing how the official photographer was up front with an SLR and we were a hundred feet back with a couple of smartphones. The four Hobbits came out, took their seats, and some Scottish lady directed the conversation between them and the audience (though there wasn't a lot of questions taken from the audience, she more or less just interviewed them on stage - not what we were expecting at all, kind of a let-down.)

They had projector screens on either side of the stage, which made it easier to actually see the actors 'cause we were about halfway back through the room, all the way to the left. You'd primarily watch the screen, then make yourself look over to where you could see them on stage, just to remind yourself that you were actually experiencing them live and not on TV. Kinda frustrating, but, like I said before, the picture with them was what we had been most looking forward to, and we had that under our belts already - everything else was a bonus at this point.

The first part of this panel discussion, which lasted about ninety minutes, entailed the Scottish chick bringing out hot dogs for the actors to try. They had arranged hot dogs from three, local institutions that I guess are super famous for their Chicago-style hot dogs, and they had the actors do a blind testing of each one and then rate them. Here's Elijah Wood tearing into one.

Sean Astin.

Billy Boyd

To say this place was jam-packed with still-living-in-their-parents'-basements nerds would be an understatement. Like, anyone who's seen the behind-the-scenes extras DVDs from The Lord of the Rings boxed sets know all the inside stories anyway these guys could possibly share from the filming of the trilogy, so to hear the nerds all around us clamoring to hear Sean Astin say 'PO-TAY-TOES' and crap like that was beyond cringy. Nevertheless, they kept at it. For an hour and a half. The interviewer/host/whatever had the guys act out a scene from Star Wars at one point that broke up this monotony, but it was a short-lived distraction from an otherwise obnoxious panel.

These guys were at least up for humoring their fans, which give us genuine Tolkien fans a bad name.

You know this guy is the current president of the Actors' Guild? Fun fact.

This guy hasn't done much since the film trilogy. He's been in, like, two movies since 2005. But hell, he makes like $300,000 for a weekend of taking pics and doing a bullshit panel, so he's got that going for him.

Hey look, it's Charlie from Lost.

Kimmel took this pic of the screen that was about eighty feet in front of us. That was our vantage this evening.

After the panel wrapped up, we were all pretty much funned out with Nerdapalooza, and headed back down to the 'skybridge' to our hotel. On the walk out, we saw the empty convention floor - hours earlier this was packed with tens of thousands of dressed-up dorks (and it smelled just as bad as you think it'd be.)

Back in the lobby, we decided to hit up the bar for a couple last beers (and a snack for BP, who wanted dinner still) before Kimmel had to catch an Uber back into downtown Chicago (where him and his fam live in an apartment right on Lake Michigan.)

We ended up staying here for about an hour or so, closing out the night, before finally calling it a day. After Kimmel took off, BP and I crashed for the night, then got up relatively early before getting back on the road for our lengthy drive back to Michigan. All in all, we were more than happy to hang out with one another and do some serious people-watching, and although the picture-taking with the Hobbits was a bit chaotic, we were super stoked we got it done. That being said, there's not a snowball's chance in the fiery pits of Hell I would ever do something like this again. Like I said before: I might have a couple of nerd-adjacent interests, but JESUS CHRIST. . . .

- Brian