When Noah Kluball got to WonderCon in Anaheim on Friday morning, he spotted Michael Bigay cosplaying as Jamie Tartt from “Ted Lasso” and realized he’d made a mistake.
Rushing back to the Hilton next to the Anaheim Convention Center, Kluball changed out of the Wall-E cosplay he’d put on minutes earlier. He slapped a fake mustache onto his upper lip and slipped into a blue V-neck sweater, khakis, and sneakers, and – voila – the Livermore construction estimator had transformed himself into Ted Lasso.
“It was a happy accident,” Kluball said as he stood next to Bigay. “I walked in wearing something else, saw Jamie Tartt, and said, ‘I have to change!’”
Bigay decided to wear Tartt’s AFC Richmond soccer kit in honor of the character’s transformation from jerk to pretty good guy, the Stanton physical therapist said.
“I love the show, and there’s a fourth season coming, so I’m celebrating it like this,” Bigay said.
“Ted is such a positive person and I’m all about being a positive light for the world,” Kluball added.
In and out of the convention center, fans of comic books, movies, cosplay, anime and every other imaginable kind of pop culture entertainment gathered together to celebrate their fandoms on Friday.
We jumped into the streams of superheroes and fantastical creatures, fans and vendors, and looked for the new, unusual and unexpected. This is what we found.
The Rabbits and the Mouse
At a booth cleverly constructed out of cardboard boxes, Nathanael Alessandroni, the co-founder of The Rabbits Los Angeles clothing company, did a brisk business in T-shirts and hoodies.
Shoppers seemed particularly drawn to a trio of T-shirts featuring Mickey Mouse and several other Disney characters along with the slogan “Park Essentials” and a red-and-black flannel jacket with the slogan “Disney Design Studio Est. 1928” on the back.
“Originally, we would go to Disneyland and we didn’t see stuff that we wanted to wear,” Alessandroni said of the decision that he and a friend made 11 years ago to screen print their own streetwear-inspired shirts. “When we would go to the park, people would ask us, ‘Where did you get that?’ and we’d tell them we made it ourselves.”
When they created an online store, the products caught the eyes of Disney officials, who told them they had to change at least 60 percent of the character designs. So they put Xs over their eyes until the version of Mickey Mouse from the 1928 cartoon “Steamboat Willie” entered the public domain in 2024.
“We really just make what’s popular in pop culture,” Alessandroni said of the designs inspired by Disney and other influences.
Old-school gamers
Tony Nevarez worked the flippers on a Metallica pinball machine as his 12-year-old daughter Alyssa looked on. He seemed excited; she not so much.
“Trying to be a good dad,” Nevarez said when asked what brought him and his two kids to WonderCon for their fourth consecutive year. “I’m their Uber and their ATM.”
The Stern Pinball booth had a pair of Metallica machines lined up next to a pair of Dungeons & Dragons: Tyrant’s Eye machines. No quarters necessary, just press the start button and fire off the first steel ball.
“We were walking by and it caught my attention,” Nevarez said. “This is what I used to play, and I’m trying to teach them how. They have Nintendo and Xbox and all those things. They don’t know this.”
Another father and child, Robert and Wyatt Drake of Tustin, played side-by-side on the Dungeons & Dragons machines.
“Pinball’s old school, but it’s lots of fun,” Robert Drake said, adding that he’s been playing the D&D role-playing game for about 50 years, almost since it was created, and his son has taken it up more recently.
Far outer space, man
The helmeted spaceman dressed in black played Jimi Hendrix riffs on an electric guitar as Shaunt Sulahian and Anna Gevorkian sat behind a table offering their Spacewalker comic book, an album and CD of their band Satellite Citi, and merch for both.
Sulahian and Gevorkian, who are married, are the founders of a Los Angeles hard rock band – she plays the drums and sings, he plays guitar – and when they play live they recruit friends to wear the spaceman suits and join them as the semi-anonymous Spacewalker backing band.
“We’re just having fun with it,” Suluhian said of the Spacewalker comic book he and his wife wrote and then found comic book professionals to ink, color and caption it. “It’s a different industry that we don’t know too much about.”
WonderCon is their second comics convention. They debuted the comic book at LA Comic Con last year.
“It was incredible, man,” Sulahian says. “I gave away a lot of things, which she scolded me about.”
Gevorkian smiled and shook her head at that.
“But I don’t really care about selling, I just want to get our name out,” he added.
Enter ‘The Tomb’
At The Tomb booth, four members of an artists’ collective working mostly with LGBTQ themes, shared close quarters.
“I think it’s everyone’s first time tabling at a comic con in California,” said Ren Strapp, who like her boothmate En Nelson-Correia, traveled from Portland to Anaheim for the con.
“We make a lot of lesbian and queer and trans art,” she continued. “Fantasy is a big part, too. Werewolves, tree-trimmers –”
– I’m sorry, did you say tree-trimmers?
“– shapeshifters!” Strapp repeated as everyone laughed.
You never know, they did come from Oregon, after all.
Strapp works largely with risograph prints, a technique originally created in Japan that uses a limited color palette to beautiful effect. Nelson-Correia does primarily digital prints, though they’ve been getting Strapp to teach them risograph work, too.
Though they haven’t worked at many comic cons, compared to those Strapp attended while growing up in Baltimore, the world seems welcoming to LGBTQ fans and artists alike.
“In Baltimore, it was very girly, very standard guy stuff,” she says. “I don’t feel as out of place now as I did.”
Have you seen this man?
Lucius Washington, the crew chief for NASCAR racer Ricky Bobby, wandered outside the Anaheim Convention Center on Friday with a photograph of Ricky and a megaphone through which Sherman “Tank” Blakeley, the cosplayer portraying Lucius, asked WonderCon attendees if they had seen this man.
Blakeley, who’d driven down from Big Bear for WonderCon weekend, was dressed in a Wonder Bread shirt and yellow ear protectors like the late actor Michael Clarke Duncan had worn when he played Lucius opposite Will Ferrell as Ricky Bobby in the 2006 comedy “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.”
About a dozen years ago, people started telling Blakeley that he was a dead ringer for Duncan, though at first he resisted the comparison. Then a friend convinced him to enter a look-alike contest in Hollywood, which he did in the costume of John Coffey, who Duncan famously played in “The Green Mile.”
He won, and since then has continued to appear as Duncan characters at comic cons and other events.
“If you google ‘Green Mile cosplay,’ it’s only me,” he says. “I’m the only professional Michael Clarke Duncan cosplayer.
“I love it because of the way it makes people feel,” Blakeley says of the John Coffey cosplay. “Sometimes they need a hug, and we’ll hug it out. They often leave in tears.”
Then he sticks his lower lip out a bit, and says in a lowered voice, “It’s gonna be all right,” one of Coffey’s famous lines in the film, and – what do you know? – it delivers chills.