by Bolt Vanderhuge

A Crash Course Con Report

Pictured: Monica Rial.

I recently attended another year of Anime Detour.  While last year it was kind of a disappointment, this year was pretty awesome, and half of that was ironically due to an Evangelion 2.0 panel, featuring Greg Ayres, J. Michael Tatum, and Monica Rial.  Tiffany Grant was originally slated to go, but apparently she found out I was coming and decided to cancel.

The panel was loads of awesome, and it was all thanks to those three voice actors.  Half of the time they weren’t even talking about the show, but about random stuff from their lives and trolling each other at work.  Apparently Monica Rial really gets into her work, as she’s broken some rather expensive equipment while performing some of it.  Of course if you’ve heard any of her roles, that shouldn’t be too surprising.

So there I was, sitting there in my Ai-Kon t-shirt with the pink-haired anime girl, and the thing that never happens in a panel with guests happened – an awkward pause where no one had a question.  So the guests asked for a random question, and guess who they picked on?  Of course it probably helped that I was sitting right up front and that Greg Ayres is going to Ai-Kon this summer.

I honestly wasn’t sure if I should ask the question, because they’d all said they were big Eva fans, and I had visions of Tiffany Grant giving me her best impression of Asuka.  So I put my best troll face on and timidly asked if Shinji would still be a whiny, useless bitch in the reboot.  Thankfully I got laughs instead of scorn.  Greg Ayres and J. Michael Tatum both claimed that he still was, but I’m hoping they were just trolling me. I also got to bring up Spike Spencer’s rant from the end of the series DVD set, and was amused to learn that he apparently totally hated playing such a whiny, useless character.

Another satisfied fan.

The cherry on the cake, though, was that Monica Rial was awesome enough to autograph the article I wrote about Evangelion.  Then J. Michael signed the Oreimo article in the same issue, while he thanked me for asking the Shinji question.  So I can honestly say that even if I’m not a fan of the show, I’m a fan of the people who lend their voices to it.

Then to finish off an awesome day at the con, I got to troll a Cartoon Network panel with the article about Anarchy Panty.  Basically they brought up Johnny Bravo and how he never got laid, and I ran up and showed the panel the lovely shoop that got featured in Punch Rockgroin’s article.  The panelist showed the audience the picture and described it for the people in back of the crowded room, then sarcastically asked me where I got the picture from while I went back to me seat with a huge grin on my face.  Then it got better, because as he tossed one of the last January issues we ever printed to the ground, a guy cosplaying as Brief leapt into action, awkwardly stumbling over the people sitting in the aisle to rescue it.