Leather & Lace: Comikaze and Halloween Horror Nights in Hollywood

We started off our Saturday by heading to the LA Convention Center in our miniature car (the rental company gave us a Chevy Spark and they are funny-looking!). Surprisingly, it wasn't hard to find parking, but when we pulled into the area it was very intimidating because people in cosplay were migrating en masse to the Convention Center for Comikaze, which is LA's version of Comic Con.

After snapping some selfies out front of the venue, we braved the crowd and headed inside. Neither of us had ever been to a convention of this nature before and it was certainly hectic! It was stimulus overload because every direction we looked there was something interesting and amazing to stare at - cosplayers, booths, events, stages, and replicas galore. A nerd's paradise. I felt like I had come down with a case of ADD because as soon as I started to investigate something, I would immediately get distracted by something equally as cool.

Across the street from the Convention Center as we were approaching it. Food trucks and cosplayers galore!

This is what greeted us as we entered the venue. So many people and fans of all sorts.

Meet Baymax from the new Disney flick "Big Hero 6." We saw a preview of this movie at Disneyland and it looks adorable. The Baymax guy is so cute. This replica was pretty big.

Kyle and some R2 units.

This is what we saw when we entered the main hall where all the exhibitions and booths were located. Just overwhelming!

What would a comic convention be without a giant wall of comics for sale?

R2D2!

I'm not enough of a Star Wars nerd to know this little droid's proper name, but he was black, so of course I took his picture.

All the Marvel super heroes were present. Here's the Incredible Hulk.

Iron Man, who is my favorite of the Avengers.

Thor and his hammer.

Captain America.

JURASSIC PARK!!!!!! Kyle and I are seriously soooooo excited for the new one. Hopefully it's a good reboot of the franchise.

A bust from "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back."

Horror movie busts!!! Yes!!

Shit Demon from Kevin Smith's "Dogma." More on Mr. Smith later.

A bust of Lucifer from "The Devil's Carnival." I have interviewed the creators and directors/stars of this film, so I liked this one a lot. It's also cool to see it because the second "Devil's Carnival" film is currently in production.

A bust from the newest "Thing" movie, which had good effects but sucked overall as a film.

After taking a quick tour of the floor and getting our bearings, we decided to take a photo with Tommy Wiseau, who is the director and star of the classic cult film "The Room." If you haven't seen the film, I recommend it. We bought a blu-ray copy of it and had Wiseau sign it for us. Awesome.

"To: Kyle + Chelsey. Love is Blind. Love, Tommy Wiseau."

Oh hai guys. Also, we were tossed a football when we approached his booth, which is an amazingly hilarious inside joke for if you've seen the movie.

Being that it was our first Con, we overall felt a little lost. We didn't have much time to wait in line hours to meet celebrities, plus we didn't really want to pay $20 for an autograph each time, so we skipped that portion of the Con and headed to some panels. The entire reason we were going anyways was to catch Kevin Smith and Ralph Garman's Hollywood Babble On/Fatman on Batman podcast.

Screen when we walked in. We got good seats because we sat in on the previous panel and moved up a few rows when the panel ended.

The room was full and people ended up standing in the back.

Mr. Ralph Garman. Garmy strong.

I caught Kevin mid-laugh.

Burt Ward, Ralph Garman, and Kevin Smith.

At the Q&A session at the end of the panel, Kevin kindly agreed to sign ONE dude's DVD or t-shirt or whatever, and he immediately got MOBBED by people wanting him to sign things.

The panel was very interesting, even to someone like me, who is a fan of Smith and Garman (and therefore HBO), but not too much of a Batman fan in general. Burt Ward had some very funny stories to tell about life on the set, getting sent to the emergency room each of the first few days of filming for completely different injuries, and about how he learned he had the part of Robin weeks after he had been casted for it. The three of them had some very humorous banter and the panel went by so fast. I'm sad I didn't get to hear many Ralph Garman impressions, but we will come back for HBO at a later date I'm sure. I've posted some videos below from the panel if you're interested in watching.

Directly following the Fatman on Batman panel was a panel on a documentary about the Superman film written by Kevin Smith and directed by Tim Burton that never happened. The film is called "Superman Lives," and Mr. Smith returned to introduce the panel of filmmakers. It was very interesting to hear the challenges the filmmakers faced and also to learn more about how much money can be thrown at something that ultimately never saw the light of day. The movie is to be released in 2015 and based on the previews and clips we saw, it should be very interesting.

Kevin Smith introducing the filmmakers of "Superman Lives."

Before we headed to Universal Studios for Halloween Horror Nights, Kyle wanted a photo with Slenderman.

We made surprisingly good time to Universal Studios where we met up with some old friends from Davis that now live in Southern CA. It was nice to see them and spend time getting scared and spooked in the haunted houses and mazes.

Kyle and I have gone to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal for four years in a row and I think this year was the second best year so far. My favorite haunted house was "The American Werewolf in London" one because there were a lot of oversized and scary animatronic werewolves (that looked just like the ones in the film I might add!) that jumped out at you as you turned corners. Runner up was the "Alien vs. Predator" maze because it had a 15 - 20 foot tall alien queen animatronic as well as animatronic aliens. I wasn't even really scared in that one, just in awe because it was so cool. We invested in front of the line passes and we were thankful we did because it was a sold out night and the lines were around two hours long per maze. Crazy!