The Armageddon Pulp Culture Expo

More than 25,000 fans of sci-fi, fantasy, comics, cartoons, videogame and wrestling are expected to flock to the annual Armageddon Pulp Culture Expo next weekend. PATRICK CREWDSON goes behind the scenes


Lawrence Makoare is hands-down New Zealand's most menacing actor.

Having played the bad guy in films such as What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? and Crooked Earth, he's now known overseas for his villainous roles in The Lord of the Rings trilogy - roles he played under heavy prosthetics and make-up.

He was Lurtz, leader of Saruman's Uruk-hai in Fellowship of the Ring, the Witch King and the horribly deformed Orc general Gothmog in Return of the King.

Like Peter Mayhew, who was Chewbacca in the original Star Wars series, and Kenny Baker, the actor inside R2D2, Makoare has sidestepped the anonymity imposed by his costumes and tapped into the lucrative sci-fi/fantasy convention circuit.

He can't predict how long The Lord of the Rings guests will continue being popular at conventions, but he's making the most of it while it lasts.

"You just have to jump on the gravy train while the gravy's hot," he laughs.

Last year Makoare was a guest at the Wellington Armageddon Pulp Culture Expo, alongside a panel from Weta Workshop.

He also went to the Auckland event, not to capitalise on his life as an Orc but so that his kids could see Japanese anime and trading card phenomenon Yu-Gi-Oh.

Many people still associate sci-fi/fantasy conventions with obsessive Star Trek fans - Trekkies - who think learning Klingon is a good use of time. But they have a much broader appeal than that.

Next weekend at least eight conventions are happening in North America, including gaming event ChimaeraCon and the Waco Comic Book and Sci-fi Show, both in Texas. Last week, San Diego hosted its annual gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered convention for science fiction, fantasy and gaming, Gaylaxicon.

Makoare has been to conventions in Australia, Britain, the United States and Germany (where he says Crooked Earth and What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?, are surprisingly popular). He will soon depart for two more in England: the London Expo and Collectamania 5.

He goes to conventions, he says, because he likes interacting with the fans - at one he met an 80-year-old woman who had seen The Lord of the Rings movies 50-odd times - and because the income tides him over between acting jobs.

At the best conventions he can earn a hell of a lot of money in just a few days, although occasionally - as with a make-up convention he attended in Britain as a favour to friend and Weta make-up artist Gino Acevedo - he can end up out of pocket.

His first event as a guest star was the San Diego Comic-Con, the world's largest sci-fi/fantasy convention (2003 tally: 75,000 people), a four-day event now in its 35th year.

The Armageddon Pulp Culture Expo, now in its ninth year, is New Zealand's equivalent. Jeremy Bishop, manager of Gotham Comics in Onehunga, says the crowd at the three-day event is a cross-section of the community. The organisers, the retailers, the guests and the fans all insist Armageddon is a family event.

"It has lost its fanboyishness and become more mainstream," says Bishop, who has been to every Armageddon in Auckland, as a fan for the first four years and as a retailer for the past five.

Males aged 12-35 still comprise the core audience, but it's expected that about a third of the crowd this year will be female. There will be kids, teenagers, twenty- and thirty-somethings, and entire families.

There are two annual Armageddon events: in Auckland in the first half of the year, and a smaller convention in Wellington. Last year they drew in 22,000 and 14,000 punters respectively.

Bill Geradts, who owns and organises Armageddon with his wife Adele, estimates that only three conventions in the US and two in England are larger.

This year they're hoping to get between 25,000 and 30,000 people through the doors of the Aotea Centre.

Conventions such as Armageddon usually break down into four types: literary events, where authors are the focus; media events, where it's about the TV and film stars; comic cons, which can also include animation; and computer and video gaming events. Armageddon is now a combination of all four, but it started life as a one-day trading card and comic book meet at Avondale Racecourse.

With help from Bill's sister, Julie Craig, the Geradts run Armageddon out of their Hillsborough home. When I visited, Star Trek Voyager was paused on the TV. The office walls were lined with DVDs and videos (Babylon 5, Xena, Red Dwarf, Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), toys from Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, and an impressive array of comics and graphic novels.

It is patently obvious that Bill Geradts loves the culture that Armageddon promotes. He says mixing comics, animation, wrestling, movies, TV, games, and music together under one roof not only broadens minds, it expands markets.

This year Armageddon has paid around $100,000 for its guests, all of whom will speak on the main stage at some point and most of whom will offer fans a glossy autographed photo for about $30.

In the past two years The Lord of the Rings cast and crew featured heavily in that roster, especially at the Wellington events. Geradts thinks one of this year's The Lord of the Rings guests, John Rhys-Davies (the Welsh actor who played the dwarf Gimli), is probably the biggest star the convention has ever had.

When Rhys-Davies attended the Wellington world premiere for The Return of the King more than 100,000 people saw him - from a distance. Armageddon is different, Geradts says. "You can walk up, shake his hand, get his autograph, pose for a photo and bugger off."

Makoare says Kiwi fans are more down to earth than those he has encountered overseas. "They look at you as more of a star out of New Zealand than in."

Geradts agrees: "Over in America they can get the weird ones. Over here, most Kiwis are pretty laidback. They're pretty casual about it, in fact. They prefer to go googly from a distance rather than up close."

Three more The Lord of the Rings guests will join Rhys-Davies and Lawrence Makoare: Australian actor John Noble, who played Denethor, the steward of Gondor; and local boys Mark Fergusson (Gil-Galad) and Bruce Hopkins (Gamling).

The most famous of the other guests is probably George Takei (Geradts: "He's a pussycat"), who played Mr Sulu in the original Star Trek series and the first half dozen movies.

Takei will be backed up by actors from Star Trek Enterprise, Lexx, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and Stargate SG-1, and voice actors from Transformers Armada, Yu-Gi-Oh, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Pokemon, and Dragonball Z.

Auckland IT worker Zeb Ahmed, 25, says the idea that Armageddon is just for geeks is a misconception picked up from specialist conventions overseas.

"There are a lot of closet fans out there and Armageddon says: 'Don't be ashamed of what you're interested in'," she says.

Ahmed was the president of the Auckland Anime Club until it closed down at start of this year. She says anime - Japanese animation - started gaining popularity here about four or five years ago.

It covers a wide variety of genres and styles, from movies such as 2002's Oscar-winning Spirited Away to children's television programmes such as Dragonball Z and more adult fare such as the vampire series Hellsing.

In 2001 the club starting running Armageddon's anime room. This year Ahmed and some other former members will continue that work, running screenings in two rooms (one showing dubbed English versions and the other, for purists, playing subtitles) and judging the cosplaying contest. Cosplaying - that's costume plus playing - is a phenomenon from Japanese subculture that has caught on at conventions.

This will be the third Armageddon Rachael Worboys, a 24-year-old Wellington school teacher, has attended. Her first was in Wellington in 2002, where she and five friends dressed as Sailor Scouts (from the teenage superheroine show Sailor Moon) to enter the first cosplaying competition.

The following year, she spent months sewing a costume from PVC to go as Light Speed Suzuka from Angelic Layer and was disappointed not to win. This year she'll go to slightly less effort to dress as a character from the crazy schoolgirl comedy Azumanga Daioh.

Worboys, who used to work at a Wellington comic store, attributes anime's increasing popularity to after-school TV schedules full of programmes such as Yu-Gi-Oh, Sailor Moon, Pokemon, and Dragonball Z. She says cosplayers are part of Armageddon's entertainment - they provide something else for spectators to look at.

Ask Bill Geradts about cosplaying and his expression stops just shy of a sneer. He seems to object to the image problem - if Armageddon has a geeky reputation, it's largely because of cosplaying.

"Whenever TV comes to the show you'll see interviews with the weirdest-looking people. Y'know, the tattooed freak or the fat guy," says Geradts.

"It's like the old stigma of the comic nerd who lives with his mother, doesn't wash his hair, is fat, is a 30-year-old virgin. And those guys exist but there's so few of them that they stand out like sore thumbs so those are the people you remember."

But Ahmed likens cosplayers to devout rugby supporters - the ones who colour-coordinate their clothing, paint their faces, and carry supportive signs.

Cosplaying is not the only formalised competition: there are also card game tournaments, an Otaking contest (that's anime trivia), a treasure hunt, and a kamehameha contest, in which entrants yell and scream in imitation of Dragonball Z characters.

Comic fan Bishop is predictably excited about seeing Brian Michael Bendis (the writer of Ultimate Spiderman and the city of superheroes comic Powers), Marc Silvestri (who drew the generously bosomed Aphrodite IX character on the Armageddon posters), and Alex Maleev (the present artist on Daredevil, which was made into a Ben Affleck film).

The presence of comic artists also goes some of the way to explaining one of Armageddon's seeming anomalies: professional wrestling.

"Comic fans are wrestling fans," says Geradts. "There's a connection there. Nobody understands it but there's a connection there."

Wrestling fits in at Armageddon because of its mix of theatrical and sporting elements, says Nick Ferguson, a director of Impact Pro Wrestling who also climbs into the ring under the moniker Daddy Kool.

"It fits that whole pop culture sort of genre," says Ferguson. "It's between rugby league and Broadway." All sorts of people turn up to watch the wrestling, Ferguson says, from kids to professionals on their lunchbreak to grandmothers.

His conclusion? Perhaps there's a little bit of geek in all of us.

Armageddon Pulp Culture Expo