Another May Bank holiday in the UK means another trip to MCM Comic-Con at the Excel in East London. The weekend saw Entertainment Guests such as What We Do In The Shadows duo Harvey Guillen and Kayvan Novak, Our Flag Means Death trio Con O’Neil, Kristian Nairn, and Nathan Foad, some of the original voice cast from Pokemon: The First Movie including Veronica Taylor, Jay Goede, Eric Stuart and Rachel Lillis. There was also appearances from David Bradley (Game of Thrones), Kevin McNally (Pirates of the Caribbean) and Curran Walters (Titan) amongst others. There were authors and comic book guests a plenty including Ram V, Una McCormack, and Jock.
Attending on a Friday (usually the quieter of the three days), I noticed that this time it was busy. Almost as if most fans had realised that if they wanted to look around on all the vendors sales items then doing it on the Friday provided more room for them to browse and spend time on each stall. There certainly was a lot to look at this time as it felt as if there were more individual one-off vendors than the usual items for sale across most stalls.
I’m always impressed with the Pop Asia section at MCM Comic-Con. I feel like it brings a bit of something different to a standard Comic Con/pop culture event and hopefully people who have never seen it before are interested enough to explore what is on offer in that area.
Having attended Star Wars Celebration in the same venue not two months ago (and finding it to be very poor all round), I was shocked and also delighted to see Star Wars memorabilia etc on display at MCM. In fact, there was more entertaining Star Wars things to look and do at MCM than there was at Star Wars Celebration.
Bandai Namco turned up to offer a lot of different types of gaming options. Heck, even I was tempted to try my hand at some of the old GameCube games. There was even the option to use VR headsets in a safe space for what looked like Tennis (?).
This event, over the May bank holiday weekend, proved to be another successful venture in terms of entertainment for a pop culture event. It really feels like MCM is now being fan driven a lot more. If you aren’t in cosplay then you are in the minority (The cosplay on display was amazing from start to finish). The value for money was good too. This London event for MCM has had it’s ups and downs over the past several years. However, now it’s finding it’s feet again and yet also evolving into giving fans of all different forms of entertainment a little something.
Photos by Samantha Payne
