MCM London Comic Con 2018 – Event Report

At the risk of losing some of my credibility as a nerd, I’ve never been to an MCM convention. Truth be told, I don’t really go to conventions. Not because I don’t want to but because I’ve never found the time for it. However, if all MCM conventions are like the one that happened this past weekend then I have been missing out for a very long time.

First of all, the Excel Centre is massive so when I got inside (after hilariously failing to find the right entrance for over 30 minutes) I was overwhelmed by the amount of stalls, guests and panels that was there to check out. As it is a convention, there are attendees going in cosplay and the most common ones that I saw over the weekend was Deadpool (I lost count of the amount of Deadpools), Harley Quinn (same applies), Thor and Cloud from Final Fantasy VII. It was a pretty interesting way to start talking to very friendly strangers since I always said hi to a lot of them by addressing them as the character they were dressed up as. There were also a few attendees carrying signs offering free hugs which is something that I’ve only seen happen at Comic Con.

Nintendo had a massive area where you could casually bump into Donkey Kong, Pikachu or the Mario brothers. Additionally, there were tournaments taking place throughout the weekend so while you were resting in the bean bags, you could watch rounds of Splatoon happening. There was a bus not too far away that offered groups of attendees the chance to play CounterStrike for a short amount of a time. I did take part in that and badly embarrassed myself because I’m not a PC Gamer but it was a fun ten or fifteen minutes regardless. There was also one stall that was selling multiple handheld consoles like Gameboys, Nintendo 64s, Gamecubes and all of the classic games from that generation. It was a serious nostalgia bomb and it took a lot of self-control not to buy anything.

Other highlights had to be the comic village which is pretty literal in its name. Personally, I don’t read comics so there wasn’t much interest for me but if you were a manga or comic book fan then it would be like nirvana for you as it took up a third of the exhibition hall. There was the Pop Asia section which contained so many things from Japan and the most notable part had to be the food as there was takoyakis, yakisoba noodles, katsu curries and onigiris to eat. If you were a lover of Japanese culture like I am then drifting there for lunch was too hard to resist. More so when they dropped prices.

MCM also had an area dedicated to streamers called Streamers Connected. I drifted back and forth from here quite often and the game I often saw get played there was Fortnite. It’s safe to say that Fortnite is a game that has taken the world by storm so it shouldn’t be too surprising that gathered a lot of attention from gamers over the course of the weekend. Judging from what I saw, the hosts and streamers were having a lot of fun (even at their own expense) and it translated over to the audience watching in the stands.

Unfortunately, because I went to attend press conferences, I didn’t go to a lot of panels. The only ones I did go to were Letitia Wright’s (she’s hilarious), the Dark Rising presentation and The Walking Dead. The most interesting was Dark Rising as it isn’t premiering until next year. While I couldn’t film any parts of the pilot that I got to see, if I had to summarise it as best I can, it looks like a gritter version of Black Panther. It’s a show that looks like it’ll be filled with antiheroes and dark themes.

However, I did try the escape rooms that were at Comic Con. For those who don’t know what escape rooms are, they usually involve a small number of people inside a room solving puzzles in a set amount of time through teamwork and using their own wit. I got to try out both booths and each was thrilling as it is like taking part in the situations you see in movies like breaking into a safe or defusing a bomb.

If there was one downside to MCM Comic Con, it’s that it would be impossible to enjoy everything that it has to offer. I was there for the whole weekend and I can safely say that I didn’t make the most of everything however, I loved every second of what I did see.