First of all, I finally got around to verifying the proper spelling of the con, and it’s apparently Geek.kon. I’ve seen it other ways on other forms, and for some reason had fallen into the habit of writing it as “Geek-Kon”

If this has caused immense personal hardship to anyone I deeply apologize.

So, how did Day 2 go? Pretty well, overall. We did some spiffing up for the booth, hanging our mighty ZRC banner high above the table for all to see. We had a number of intriguing conversations with people and were confronted with very different questions and a very different set of biases and levels of Zombie knowledge than the ZRC gets at, say, a horror convention or a film festival. It’s shocking just how little the average American ‘geek’, as it were, knows about Zombies outside of America, even just the stereotyped violence and aggression found in foreign films. Truly, for the American pop culture, Romero is king of a demented realm of hate, to the exclusion of all others.

Thus you have a different set of challenges at a geeky convention. First, one has to broaden the horizons about the basic, widely varying nature of Zombies; their widely differing origins, the cultural backgrounds at play. Voodoo Zombies have their own unique set of issues, as I discussed with one convention-goer in some depth. Often when it comes to Voodoo Zombies you’re dealing with economic matters; hours of labor, monetary compensation, working conditions. Yet, to an average anime-loving Joe or Jane, they apply not just a stereotype about Zombies, but about the wrong SORT of Zombies, and assume that a Zombie raised from the dead by black magic is hungering for their brains.

Sometimes you have to deal with these problems in stages, advancing from the categorically wrong prejudice to the applicable, but factually inaccurate prejudice, and then from there on to Enlightenment.

All in all we’ve learned a great deal here at the ZRC. In some ways we’re a year early to Geek.kon; next year it looks like the odious Highschool of the Dead will be a big hit, and Zombies and anime will intersect in a big way in America for the first time. The ZRC will be ready though, having learned the ropes of an anime con the hard way early, and sharpened our rhetorical and merchandising skills in preparation, thanks to Geek.kon.

Tags: Anime or Manga, Public Appearance, Romero, Social Justice

This entry was posted by John Sears on Saturday, September 4th, 2010 at 10:24 pm and is filed under ZRC News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.