In pursuit of the kitschiest, gaudiest and obscurest memorabilia from a nerd-centric convention in the deep, deep South.
By: James S.
CultureDestroyer@gmail.com
@CultureDestroy
Let me tell you kids something about Cartersville, Ga. – it’s country. No, not country as in Cracker Barrels and Woolworths, we’re talking country as in Confederate flags on every truck, loaded rifles by every nightstand and moonshine stills and/or meth labs in every neighborhood. This is the kind of town time simply forgot, where men are still men, women are still women and the high school football team mascots still resemble slave owners. This is a place where gun shows are held year-round, convenience stores sell live bait next to the beef jerky and the middle school buses have Skoal stains underneath the windows. Needless to say, it’s not the first thing that comes to mind when you think “nerd nexus.”
But the times, they are a-changin’ in the exurbs of Atlanta. Once a town known for its Native American burial mounds, vintage outdoor Coca-Cola signage and passing mention in the 2000 Martin Lawrence vehicle Big Momma’s House, Cartersville has recently become an unlikely hot spot for big budget Hollywood productions. Remember near the end of the second Guardians of the Galaxy movie, when all that funky, glowing alien death gas was eating up the small hamlet? Well, that was filmed in Cartersville, as were portions of Spider-Man: Homecoming and a whole slew of other triple-A, summertime popcorn flicks (and also, the occasional Netflix original about Selena Gomez hitching a ride with Paul Rudd and a wheelchair-bound kid.) And with so many superhero adventures being made in and around town, why wouldn’t somebody eventually get around to hosting a full-fledged comic book expo there?
Enter the 2017 Cartersville Comic, Horror and Toy Expo. I’m not sure if it’s the inaugural event or not, since I literally heard about the thing just a day before it happened, but for a con with pretty minimal advertising (it didn’t even have a website), I was surprised by just how many people showed up at the civic center on Aug. 12. The entire parking lot was jam-packed, and I’d venture to guess there were at least 100 people squeezing their way through the show floor when I got there – apparently, I had vastly underestimated the local interest in all things geek, nerd and dork.
Compared to something like Dragon*Con, of course it felt a tad picayune. Still, the number of people who showed up – not to mention the out-there wares the vendors were hawking – really impressed me. But who wants to just sit there and listen to me ramble when we can take the photographic journey together? Make sure your Copenhagen can ain’t gonna’ spill all over your pocket protectors, lads—it’s time to take a trip to the nerdy South.
Like every other convention, the place was pretty claustrophobic. The entire building holds about the same volume as one of the larger-scale gas stations out there – imagine two McDonalds buildings super-glued together and you have a fairly decent idea of the capacity threshold. Thankfully, the attendees of this event demonstrated better hygiene than the visitors at most cons I’ve been to – although I did catch a whiff of more than one person who decided “who needs deodorant?” despite the outdoor temperature being north of 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
Naturally a couple of cosplayers showed up, but not as many as I anticipated. Excluding the kids zipping around wearing Wonder Woman capes and Sonic the Hedgehog Halloween costumes, you could count on one hand the number of attendees who came to the expo in full character regalia. Then again, perhaps that isn’t too surprising – it being the ass-end of summer in Georgia and all, I reckon decking yourself out in a foam latex suit probably wouldn’t have been the most pleasant of experiences.
I’ve always thought you could judge the overall quality of a con by the bric-a-brac in its value bins. Evidently, this one was going to be a good one from the get-go; I mean, if these guys consider vintage The Tick bendable action figures and 17-year-old X-Men toys economic expendables, just imagine the sort of stuff they thought were valuable!
And it did not take long at all to find the good stuff. The very first table I spotted had these old-ass Toy-Biz Spider-Man and X-Men monster toys, complete with a big old bulky plastic facsimile of the Generation X baddie Sugar-Man. But what really grabbed my attention was the staggering number of Venom toys these guys had for sale …
I can’t tell you folks how much fun I had with that “talking” Venom figure when I was a kid (good God, my mom must’ve been plum sick of hearing “I want to eat your braaaain” emanating from the backseat all the time.) Granted, the one figure with the “living skin” slime pores was my absolute favorite, and if they had that on sale I probably would’ve bit the bullet and bought one. Still, you can’t complain about all the Venoms on display here – sigh, if only they had the version with the giant flicking tongue …
Some vendors were hawking stuff I literally haven’t thought about in 20 years (which, I suppose, is the reason why these little shindigs are so appealing in the first place to helpless nostalgia/kitsch junkies such as myself.) For example, who would’ve thought that in the year 2017, somebody would STILL have a near-mint, in-box Spawn Air Cycle? I mean, it’s still a total waste of money, but come on – simply the fact that somebody’s been able to refrain from opening the packaging since the first Clinton term of office is reason enough to keep flocking to these kind of things.
As I walked by mound after mound of Power Rangers and Ninja Turtles memorabilia, I kept wondering what it would be like to be an archaeologist in the year 4558 A.D. The same way today’s historians comb over every fine detail of ancient Sumerian pottery and Babylonian statues, will there one day be humongous museums and art galleries celebrating Coneheads action figures as great relics of human history? What if there’s a nuclear war and it wipes out every piece of infrastructure in the country, but somehow, a collection of V.R. Troopers action figures become the only pieces of human artwork that survives? Hell, maybe that actually was the case with all of those old Egyptian monuments – here we are thinking those pyramids were holy sites, when all they really were were the pre-Jesus equivalent of KB Toys.
If old-ass toys weren’t your thing, the expo certainly fulfilled its nerd quotient in other domains. You had your (most likely unlicensed) pop culture-themed tee-shirts merging Spider-Man and Descartes into a singularity, this one dude selling what I’m pretty sure were knockoff reproduction carts of Japanese Super Nintendo games and my personal favorite, a whole bevy of “vintage” VHS tapes of such all-time cinematic masterpieces as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and Halloween 4. And hey, speaking of horror classics …
…you really can’t say anything bad about a show that had not only the infamous Freddy Krueger water squirter toy for sale (time for an aside: when I was a kid, this local gas station had one perched atop their magazine rack, which meant I never dared check out the latest issue of TV Guide out of the fear of the thing coming alive and eating me while making extremely dated pop culture references), but perhaps the only piece of The Gingerdead Man memorabilia ever mass produced – well, assuming the guy wearing the G.G. Allin t-shirt operating the booth didn’t make it in shop class and tried to pass it off as legit, anyway. The Puppet Master toys, though, are definitely the real deal, and that very Frankenstein-ish Hulk statue is undoubtedly a commercial product, too. So yeah – when these people told you they were giving you a horror expo, you can’t say they didn’t deliver what they promised you on the marquee.
I understand collectors are a quirky sort, but you REALLY have to wonder if some of this stuff really has that much appreciative value. Yes, I get the idea that Return of the Jedi toys are rare and all, but just how much secondary market demand is there for remote-controlled toy robots shaped like Coca-Cola cans? I realize they’re can’t be that many R2-D2/soda hybrid toys out there still in such pristine condition, but does the iron law of scarcity really extend that far?
That said, I can DEFINITELY grasp the inherent worthiness of an over-sized Sly Stallone action figure modeled after his character in Over the Top. That’s the kind of thing you put on a mantle underneath a protective glass case, like a signed football or your mother’s ashes.
Being a regional event and all, a couple of local artists and authors were on hand to pimp and promote their latest works. There was also this one booth stocked with tomes penned by a guy named Carlton Mellick III, whose general oeuvre is about as NSFW as it gets. Now, I’m not entirely sure what a book called Cuddly Holocaust is really about, but that front cover alone ensures 99.99998 percent of the literary market will never, ever find out. That the table was situated between a homemade Minecraft jewelry stand and a bookcase filled with dismembered Star Wars action figures made it all the more disturbing, I assure you.
Another weird thing about the expo? There were like three or four tables dedicated to real weapons – i.e., actual knives, swords and shurikens. There was also a pretty good amount of replica arms as well, including this imitation of Thor’s hammer that had to have weighed at least 20 or so pounds – which I guess would actually make it viable as a working sledgehammer, thus making it a real weapon after all, wouldn’t it?
And this thing right here just speaks for itself. What could be more painfully 1990s than a big old yellow landline phone shaped like Wolverine? Not going to lie, I almost opened up my wallet for this one. I mean, can you possibly imagine anything more awesomely kitschy and obscure?
…well, except for a 12 inch tall X-Force action figure modeled after Kane, a character so obscure even I didn’t know who the hell I was (and keep in mind, *I* could easily pinpoint the visage of Shatterstar underneath the Marvel Comics imprint on the upper left corner of the box.) Also, I just LOVE that the marketers had to put “weapon” in quotation marks on the bottom right hand corner – you know, because even for an eight-year-old having a Hampton Bay fan for right hand is really stretching the definition of the term.
So what more can be said about this, the – um, second, I think? – Cartersville Comic, Horror and Toy Expo? For a small town con, it wasn’t too shabby. There was a ton of weird, kooky stuff on sale and the turnout was much larger than I anticipated, but it was just missing … something. There were no guest speakers, no grandiloquent costume contests, no concerts, no live video game competitions, no movie screenings – heck, there weren’t even that many food vendors on the premises. It didn’t really have that transcendent, major event feel that a lot of other geek-catered festivities in the metro-Atlanta, but that’s no slight against the fine folks operating it. Even Dragon*Con took years and years to become established, and it was at least a decade before it became a “mainstream” success (and even longer than that before attendee money stopped being funneled to the defense fund of a convicted child molester – you might want to give this one a read sometime.)
Still, the Cartersville expo was a neat little affair and it definitely has some long term potential. And if that Wolverine telephone makes another appearance next year, I’m definitely scooping that sucker up the first chance I get.
Culture Destroyer 
