New York Comic Con is a Mecca for the pale-faced and enthusiastic of the East Coast.
With the rise in popularity of the 2005 reboot of “Doctor Who,” there’s been a lot more Whovian action at the Cons. For every Power Ranger, Manga or Anime character and Slave Leia, there was someone wandering around in a tweed jacket and fez referring to things as “cool.”
Granted, there were quite a few Amy Pond, River Song cosplayers to go around (and one really cool Vincent Van Gogh costume from the Season Five episode “Vincent and the Doctor.” There were few people dressed as David Tennant’s incarnation and fewer dressed as Christopher Eccelston’s. Their companions were also few and far between.
This became pretty easy to see when a large group of Whovians gathered in a corner just ten feet away from the “Doctor Who” store’s booth (where there was both a life-sized Dalek and Ian McNeice, the actor who plays Winston Churchill in Moffat-era episodes) to take pictures. The fans who had clearly gotten into the series post-2005 were giddily comparing costumes and lines from the show while some the more seasoned fans, dressed as Tom Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Jon Pertwee or Peter Davison’s incarnation, stood off the side.
Many of the newer fans were unable to appreciate the cosplayer’s of the older era as they’d only been introduced to the show in the last year. It was a bit lame to watch the clashing of the fans because the unending pissing contest tends to ruin the pure and un-ironic enjoyment that’s associated with nerdom. It gives nerds a bit of a bad name when fans for-go their enjoyment of something in favor of the elitist nonsense regarding who had liked it longer or more.