The Wrap Party Convention

Originally published September 18, 1998, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1296

Assorted notes on “The Wrap Party,” a convention in the United Kingdom I recently attended:

Hours before I headed for the airport, it was announced that the US had fired tomahawk missiles at Afghanistan and the Sudan. “Americans traveling abroad are warned to be extra careful,” the radio intoned. Great. Just what I needed to hear.

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“Wrap Party” was originally conceived to be a sort of capper for Babylon 5, a convention that was to be held at the wrap-up of the entire series. Several things happened to undercut somewhat the intention of the con. First, the transmission of the concluding episodes was held up, so the series hasn’t actually ended yet for viewers. And second, rather than being an aspect of the past, B5 remains an ongoing concern since the creation of the series Crusade, which is to continue set in the B5 universe.

The convention went on, however, as originally planned. Unlike most other B5 conventions which feature any number of the actors, this one focused purely on the writing side, with such guests as Joe Straczynski and Harlan Ellison, plus such non-B5 guests as Bryan Talbot. Oh, and me.

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I have made an interesting discovery: Being laughed at derisively by someone with a British accent is even more annoying than being laughed at by someone who doesn’t have a British accent. The accent makes one feel—I dunno—even more like a dummy than usual.

You see, I had been given a simple assignment by my middle daughter, Gwen. She collects (sigh) Beanie Babies, and I had been told to bring her back a Britannia Bear, a Beanie Baby available exclusively to the UK. There’d been some confusion at first when she told me that it was a little brown bear with a lumber jack on it. I didn’t understand that at all, thinking that perhaps it was some sort of Monty Python reference, before I realized she meant “union jack.”

I had this delusion that the bears would be in abundance, that Beanie Baby fever had passed by the UK, and that the Brits knew better than to be caught up in all this Beanie absurdity. Apparently not. I asked around and was greeted with looks ranging from amused to, in the case of one person at the airport, near contempt.

“You must be joking,” I was told repeatedly, and greeted in a number of instances with the aforementioned condescending laughter. Apparently the bears are nigh impossible to come by in the UK, and those people who are carrying them are asking an average of around $300 for them. That $300 for a toy that retails at six bucks. There was absolutely no way in hëll I was going to pay that kind of money for a Beanie Baby. It’s like Mad Cow disease, but with Beanie Babies. Mad Beanie disease.

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Although the British fans knew of my work, they weren’t sure what to expect in terms of my convention appearance. Harlan volunteered to do my intro, and spent fifteen minutes extolling my virtues with (appropriately) a number of digressions into stuff that had nothing to do with me at all. Which was fine, because as long as the audience was entertained, that was good enough for me. As part of my presentation I did a dramatic reading of “Skippy the Jedi Droid,” the column that ran in these very pages some months ago. The hotel was right by Heathrow Airport, which served me in good stead, because at one point in the reading I got to the following passage:

“For one day the ground rumbled beneath his treads, and he saw coming towards him the giant rolling truck of the Jawas…”

Just as I read that sentence, absolutely on cue, a large jet passed overhead and caused the entire room to rumble. I was suddenly performing in Sensurround.

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Bryan Talbot and his lovely wife, Mary, were particularly hospitable to me. They wound up inviting me to dinner twice, which is certainly once more than duty requires and twice as many times as anyone should have to. Bryan, known to many for his Tale of One Bad Rat, is working on a follow-up to his Luther Arkwright series, which will be published by Dark Horse. He showed me samples of the issues already in progress, and it looks to be a winner.

One of the nights at dinner we were joined by artist Mike Collins. It is one of the odd realities of the comic industry that you can work with someone and never work with them, which was the case with Mike and myself. Mike was the penciler of the Babylon 5 comic which I wrote and was serialized in a British B5 fan magazine before being released as three individual comics (Joe actually wrote the first issue). The thing is, I wrote my two issues full-script, which meant that as soon as I was done with them, off they went to the artist and I never saw them again. So it’s as if Mike worked with me, but I didn’t work with him. It’s all very strange.

Conversation at dinner turned, of all things, to The Teletubbies. This bizarro series, which is aimed at toddlers, and which actually makes Bananas in Pajamas look like I, Claudius in comparison, is the single creepiest show I have ever seen. Since Mike has three quite young daughters and the series has been on in the UK for a while (having only recently started in the US), he’s rather familiar with it. Joe Straczynski describes it as having a drug experience without the drugs, and Susan Ellison once decided to “torment” a bedridden, ailing Harlan by putting on the show and absconding with the remote control so that he couldn’t make it go away.

In case you haven’t seen it, the show consists of four variously hued—creatures, I guess you’d have to call them—bopping about and having adventures that consist of forty-five seconds of plot plus twenty-four minutes of repetition. Mike described a particularly surreal one where the other three are endeavoring to force the fourth, amidst much squealing delight, to wear a tutu. For me, the most hair-raising aspect of the whole thing is the show’s incarnation of the sun, which consists of a drawing of the sun with the laughing face of an actual baby superimposed over it. For some reason, every time the sun chuckles down on the Teletubbies, it frightens me to the core. In the UK there’s a British narrator who has been redubbed for American broadcast, as if the target audience would have trouble understanding it otherwise.

There have even been odd Teletubby-related stories in the UK, some of which might or might not border on the urban myth. These includes guys dressed as Teletubbies robbing a bank—and one of the actors in the Teletubby outfits being fired over creative differences and getting a gig as a male stripper.

In discussing it with Mike, Bryan and Mary, we hit upon our own version of the Teletubbies. We dubbed them the Tele-Thuggees, a kiddy-version of the murderous cult seen in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. We envisioned them jumping about, laughing and dancing with their little knives, worshipping Kali, ripping out people’s hearts and then giggling, “Again!” Later in the convention, Mike obligingly drew a visualization of the dreaded Tele-Thuggees (which appears with this column).

Y’know, years ago I thought of writing the adventures of Indiana Pooh (“Woozles. Why did it have to be Woozles?”) Well, if I ever do, and I need opponents for him, I’m all set.

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I attend a midnight panel about Jack the Ripper and the continued hold and fascination he has for people. Several interesting points are made, including one fan who commented on the odd perversity that most people are capable of naming, off the top of their head, half a dozen or so serial killers—but just how many victims of serial killers can you name? It’s something of a truism that the victims simply serve to stack up in numbers, figuring into the equation only in terms of how many bodies they total and, consequently, how formidable that total makes their killer. It’s as if we lose sight of what’s truly important.

We also come to the conclusion that part of what made Jack the Ripper so formidable was his name.

If he’d been called Bob the Ripper, or Nigel the Ripper, it simply wouldn’t have struck as much fear into the hearts of Londoners. Almost makes one want to do a story about Jack’s frustrated kid brother, Bob the Ripper, who keeps trying to follow in big brother’s footsteps and just makes a muddle of it. Hmm. Maybe I will write that. Sounds silly enough to work.

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I made an interesting discovery. Saying, “Oh, my God! They killed Kenny!” or any variation thereof always got a big laugh. Why? Because South Park has only just started airing in the UK. A few months down the line, of course, it’ll get the mildly amused smile it generates here.

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So I was sitting around in a hallway at about one in the morning, chatting in a relaxed manner with a group of fans. And suddenly a fan announces to me in a very loud voice (implying over-indulgence in alcohol), “I have a major problem with your entire race.” Naturally I immediately assumed that he was an anti-Semite. I thought, “Well, this is certainly different. Two decades I’ve been doing conventions, and I’ve never had someone start railing against my being Jewish.”

It turned out, however, that he meant “Americans.” He’d served in the Gulf War and apparently was underwhelmed by what he bellicosely proclaimed as incompetent American soldiers. Oddly, I thought that we were a nationality, not a race. He then went on to challenge me on an assortment of American military and policy decisions and apparently expected me to defend them, while the other fans squirmed and writhed in discomfort and repeatedly begged him either to shut up or go away or both.

Naturally, I was never in the Gulf War. I wonder if any American soldiers got themselves loaded and harassed guys who were just sitting, chatting, and minding their own business.

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Many fans who’d learned that I’d seen the Avengers movie (which either hadn’t opened or just opened over there, I wasn’t sure) wanted to know what I thought. What was particularly interesting was the vote of no-confidence given by the studio which refused to screen the film for reviewers—never a good sign.

I hate to say it, because I know the film was flawed—not as airy as it wanted to be, heavy where it should have been light, ponderous where charm was required, and the chemistry of Steed and Peel not even beginning to approximate the original series. But with all that, I told the fans the same thing I tell you: any film which has Sean Connery dressed in a bright blue teddy bear suit—to say nothing of the best use of Escher-like scenery since Labyrinth—has me as a fan.

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The convention found itself running significantly in the red, to the tune of almost eight thousand pounds. Harlan and Joe decided to attend to this situation by holding an impromptu auction Saturday night during the convention’s big dance. They offered two groups of four—the two highest bidders—guided tours of the facilities at Babylonian Productions as well as Harlan’s house. Even though the bidders have to provide their own means of getting across the pond, that didn’t prevent spirited bidding which raised over eleven thousand pounds. Basically, Joe and Harlan put the convention into the black in under half an hour. Not bad.

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Overall, I like British conventions. The audiences tend to be fairly literate and enthusiastic, the panels are well-attended, and the fans (with the occasional exception) polite and friendly. I know I’d consider going to another. Just need airfare, hotel lodgings… and a Britannia Beanie Baby, of course.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)