So Time Magazine set up a three way phone call with Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman, which you can read here.


On Joss directing Wonder Woman:

JW: In my head, it's the finest film ever not typed yet. It's incredible fun, partially because I was never actually a huge fan. I never really felt there was . . . there's been some great work, but never one definitive run on the book for her, and I'm not a fan of the show. I feel like I'm taking an icon I already know and creating it for the first time.

NG: She's such a character without a definitive story. Or even without a definitive version.

JW: That's how I feel. I hope to change that because I really feel her. Let's face it: She's an Amazon, and she will not be denied.

TIME: I'm really hoping her bustier will slip down a little bit further than it did in the show.

JW: You're just after a porno, aren't you?

TIME: Yes.

JW: It's all about priorities. Yes, it's very empowering for her to be naked all the time.

On being at conventions:

TIME: Tim Burton's Corpse Bride is out this month as well, making it effectively national Goth month.

NG: We are Goth icons. Joss and I. We don't have to be Goths, because we are Goth icons.

JW: I'm low on mascara. It's weird. I've made my bones with vampires, but I've never really associated anything I did with Goth that much, except that I've kind of made fun of them. I don't really see that as much at the conventions and stuff in the fan base. It might be somebody in Goth make-up coming up and saying, oh, this is for my mom.

The great thing for me about the convention is almost the little microcosm of every society of hardcores. The Jedis really represented this year. Actually a lot of Siths as well. And the anime kids and the indie-comic guys. You can always sort of tell what everybody is into, and there they all are. There is something both universal and totally marginal about the crowd. That's what I love.

NG: Last time I was at Comicom, there were like 5,000 people there, and the audience was going to try and cut me off with stuff to sign. They had to figure out how to get me off the stage. All of a sudden, I'm getting to the end of the conversation. Dave McKean and I were doing a Mirrormask thing and we're ready to leave the stage. I look up and they have a bodyguard line of 30 Klingons. They're six-foot six and four-feet wide and they have the foreheads and they had linked arms. We were being lead off behind a human wall —a Klingon wall—of Klingon warriors. And I thought, how good does it get?

If you want to be amused by a story about Harlan Ellison losing a war of words, go here and read about his behaviour when sharing the guest of honour spot with the Penny Arcade guys...

I spent the last four days in deepest Yorkshire, with 13 family members (including 3 under 6 years old) and 4 dogs.  You can thus imagine that I might spend a few hours sitting in my room with a PDA and a keyboard, writing up a Worldcon report.  I didn't mean to write 3,500 words, but such are the perils of young children.

Herein you will find mention of various people, including surliminal, nhw, coalescent, greengolux, the entirety of the Plokta Cabal, zarabee, swisstone, repeated Mike Abbott's and many more  - I know that I saw many more people than this, and can only humbly apologise for missing you out, but a 10,000 word write-up would seem extreme.  I've included mainly those people I was actually seeing at a panel, out to dinner with or otherwise thrown into extended contact around.  flickgc will undoubtedly complain that she's not mentioned at all.  I was writing this some distance from an internet connection (about half a mile, to the village shop), and thus have used real names, as my only reference was a copy of the Con Guidebook.  If you know the people you can undoubtedly match them up to their LJ tags - which is more than I can generally manage.

Looking back at my Eastercon write-up (handily at my side, thanks to its inclusion in Lilian's final (ha!) fanzine), I note that it finishes with me looking forward the Worldcon, thankful that it's significantly closer to Edinburgh than Hinkley is.  In hindsight I can now appreciate that this proximity is both a blessing and a curse. 

This was my third convention (not counting Corflu, which I didn't actually attend any of, the delights of Las Vegas far outweighing the pull of aged fanzine creators - with a few exceptions), and I was looking forward to chatting to The Plokta cabal, Third Row fandom, miscellaneous Cambridge people and the others who had repeatedly surfaced at previous events.

My brother Mike, on reading my Eastercon write-up, pointed out the obvious - which is that write-ups of events tend to end up as lists of "things wot I went to", so rather than attempt to find a way of subverting that format, I'll play straight into it, with a list of panels attended, meals eaten, etc,and then attempt to stick in some context and opinion at the end.
( Read on - if you dare )