Cosplayers

"I love this book. Cosplay is a portmanteau word combining costume and play or player. For someone who has never encountered or seen it, ‘cosplay’ means people dressing up as various characters. It’s an incredible show of creativity from the ground. Some people buy costumes, but a lot of people spend hours and hours and hours creating costumes themselves. It’s a form that is open to anybody. When I was at Comic-Con , there were people dressed up as all sorts of different things. It was three days where people could just let their freak flags fly in a space of total permission. I’ll always remember being in a café, right near the convention centre, and seeing a man walk in in a full metal suit of armour, including a face grate, opening the visor, and ordering a latte — and the barista not even batting an eyelash. There’s something really moving, to me, about this creation of a certain kind of popular culture that anybody can access. Yes, there are hundreds of DIY cosplay websites. There are some books coming out. It’s about people extending information to be better able to express themselves freely. There’s something very moving about it. There’s also a whole lot of stuff going on with cosplay and gender. There’s a form of cosplay called ‘crossplay.’ This doesn’t come up so much in Dash Shaw’s book. All it means is people dressing up in costumes to deliberately play with gender norms. For example, at the San Diego Comic-Con this past summer, there were several male-Princess-Leia-as-slave cosplayers. There was a whole group of female Wookiees from Star Wars in pastel colours, wearing go-go boots. Part of what I love about this book, aside from the fact that it is a moving narrative about two young female cosplayers—everything comics tends to be gendered male still, and here is a nice story of female friendship—is that it’s about media in a fascinating way. It’s about different forms of communication. They are making films and uploading them, so it is about film, it is about the internet, it is about photography, and it is about the printed medium of comic books. There’s this dramatic scene, at the end, when they look at comics in a comic book store. It becomes, also, about the self as a medium. You show up to a convention and you are the medium. You put on this costume and you become someone else. I feel this book is really savvy. It’s not pro-digital or anti-digital, but it shows the ways that different forms produce different versions of self. It’s about people creating their own media as opposed to being sold a life by somebody else. Yes, I love that about it. Cosplayers actually came out as physical comic books before it came out as a book, so Dash Shaw was really going for that angle."