On Sunday 29th May I attended my first MCM convention in London. Over the last three years I’ve been attending quite a few events however, for reasons that have escaped me I had never considered attending MCM. Over the last few years the event has had some guests that would have interested me including some of the cast of Warehouse 13 and other shows that I enjoy. I’ve been told in the past that MCM is a crazy event, it’s really busy, the queues go on forever and you need to have a lot of patience when attending. This year I decided that I was going to give it a go and see what it’s all about….
MCM London took place over the weekend of Friday 27th – Sunday 29th May at the London Excel. The guests included stars from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, Arrow, Gotham, and NCIS: Los Angeles, The Big Bang Theory, Being Human and many more. The guests that interested me were Erin Richards from Gotham, Katrina Law from Arrow and Daniela Ruah from NCIS: LA. I would be collecting autographs from the three but if I wasn’t trying to save money for “The Ultimate’s” in June I would’ve have also collected autographs from Eric Christian Olsen (NCIS: LA), Elizabeth Henstridge (S.H.I.E.L.D) and had photo shoots with Katrina Law and Olsen and Ruah. I’m hoping that in the future I will be able to meet these guests again.
I have to say I was really glad to have purchased the “Sunday Priority Entry” tickets for myself and my friend. After hearing about all the queuing issues I was really pleased that we arrived just after 9.30 and were able to get straight into the event. The next step was to collect the “smileys”, these are used to pay for autographs rather than pay at the desk like many other events do. Of course this involved more queuing but again we must have been lucky since it only took 30 minutes for us to reach the front and collect ours. I first encountered this system at Fedcon and then later at Destination Star Trek London. I think overall it works well and I didn’t encounter any problems while queuing for my autographs. Most probably attending the event on Sunday helped and the next time I attend this event I would do the same since I can imagine the Saturday was manic and I have no interest in attending something too hectic.
After collecting our autographs we then spent the next couple of hours exploring the event. MCM had pretty much taken over the Excel so there were lots to look at. Like most events there were loads upon loads of mechanise to look at however, I did see a lot of new products of which I had not seen before including some brilliant prints, t-shirts and much more. I’m not a big fan of Manga but you could certainly see its influence at the event and of course there was a large number of Cosplayers. People were dressed as everything from Green Arrow to Star Trek to Star Wars to Lara Croft, in fact there were so many costumes that I didn’t recognise, these were from either games or were Manga related or so I’m told.
Overall it was a really good day and if the guests are right I would certainly want to return later in the year.
