C2E2 was proudly back to full strength in Chicago this year. And the cosplay winner is ...

CHICAGO — The cosplay wrangler walked to the center of the conference room. “OK, anybody worried in here?” she asked. She was surrounded by fairies and monsters, one Batman, a Snow White, a Beetlejuice and super soldiers shouldering guns so large the barrels teetered above them. They were on the fourth floor of McCormick Place on Saturday night, preparing to be ushered into the Cosplay Central Crown Championships, one of the key events of the annual C2E2, Chicago’s largest comic con. It’s an elaborate, nail-biting, goofy international competition. Say what you will about the World Series, the Cosplay Central Crown Championships actually has competitors from around the world.

The room quieted down.

“What I mean is,” the wrangler continued, “is anyone worried about getting on stage?”

It was a fair question. Cosplay — if you’re unaware — is amateur costuming, paired with a tinge of method roleplay. Some costumes take hundreds of hours to build and thousands of dollars. Hardcore cosplayers make everything. Less committed ones turn to Amazon. The Cosplay Central Crown Championships then, in its 10th year, is something like a reality fashion show, crafting contest, sporting event and open acting audition, all squashed together. Picture a cake competition but the people are the cakes, and they often take just as much care to move around. The contestant from Spain wore a grand homemade gown the British royals would have approved. One man’s “Fantastic Four” arms extended many feet before him. Beetlejuice walked slowly, ensuring the working carousel on his head didn’t topple. A Demogorgon from “Stranger Things,” head splayed open like a lethal flower, was so long and spindly, stairs were its kryptonite. Sara Jones of Urbana, dressed as a forest god from Dungeons & Dragons, wore a woodsy floral headdress so large it could have made a perfect Thanksgiving table centerpiece.

“I have no peripheral vision,” she groaned, her face hidden behind black fabric.

Among them, waiting for the contest to start, stood Stephanie Slone of Bloomington, Indiana. By the end of the night, she took the regional competition, the national competition, then, for the hat trick, the international competition. Her prizes included $6,000, a real crown and a trip to London, where she was already invited to serve as a cosplay judge. Her costume was so smart, and subtle, I’ll make you read on to know all the details, but in a nutshell: She cosplayed as Aloy, hero of a video game named Horizon Zero Dawn, draped in natural fibers, layered with so much color and detail, captured through traditional basketweaving techniques, it looked both industrial and preindustrial, with a bit of Aztec intricacy and a nod to Native American tribal wear. Think post-apocalyptic Fat Tuesday.

Slone hadn’t been cosplaying for long. She began in 2018 and only got serious during the pandemic, spending quarantine online getting to learn the bottomless cosplay ecosystem. At 32, she felt like came to cosplay too late, but she also thought she had a chance. She described herself the next day as not having a snarky or competitive bone in her body, but as soon as she learned she was accepted into the contest, she built a spreadsheet on her competition — not to get a competitive edge, she insisted. Still, when she walked into that conference room filled with cosplayers, a desire kicked in: “Like I told my husband, you don’t want to acknowledge what you want in your heart, because it hurts when it doesn’t come true. But right then, I felt there was a possibility.”

There are several ways to measure the health of a comic book convention. Kristina Rogers, vice president of comic-book events for ReedPOP, the Connecticut-based convention producer behind C2E2, Star Wars Celebration and the New York Comic Con, said C2E2 “felt this time, to me, like it’s back. Finally — at last.” Meaning, though ReedPOP slipped a C2E2 in just before the pandemic closed the nation in 2020, since then they have held three C2E2s at McCormick in the past 15 months, to keep some momentum going. Attendance was down for the first two. But this time, “It feels we have come full circle,” Rogers said. “The energy is there, the names are there. And people came out.” Three-day passes were sold-out; Saturday itself was completely sold out. Attendance for the weekend was 75,000, the biggest crowd for the 13-year-old comic con in a while.

Chris “Captain America” Evans showed up. The cast of “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” was there. Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s boyfriends came out. The show floor was dizzyingly jammed at times. Collectors trawled Radio Flyer wagons full of comics and Funko Pop figures behind them. Dense archival boxes of vintage comics were crowded with fans, flipping, flipping, looking, looking. There were a number of panel discussions on horror writing, and on the need for mental health in fandom, and more than a few conversations about LGBTQ+ representation in genre fiction. A Wonder Woman sat on the floor beside a rib cart, so exhausted her jaw hung wide and eyes smiled, in happy shock. Even security, as of Saturday afternoon, always eager to oh-no-way a toy sword or realistic-looking grenade, had only confiscated (real) pepper spray and nail clippers.

But arguably the best metric for the health of a comic con is the richness of its cosplay.

“Yo! Kite-Man! Hell yeah!”

That was a Spider-Man giving a shout to a Kite-Man, a deep-cut Batman villain. (There were many Spider-Men and only a couple Kite-Men.) The Holloway family of Appleton, Wisconsin, waited at an elevator, dressed as the cast of “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” Ed Saco, 63, of Memphis, as Speed Racer, in a motorized scooter, glided past Steven Moreno of Plainfield, assembling a tank of a costume with shoelaces and cardboard.

Maggie Hofmann, the head of costume technology for the Theatre School at DePaul University, a sometime cosplay contestant and C2E2 veteran, said: “I have been to this a lot, and somehow, despite the pandemic, it feels so big — probably a bit bigger even.”

Another measure of this: Hofmann and students from her department sat behind card tables all day, offering complimentary cosplay repairs. “And from 10 a.m. on, there’s been a line.” Alien fungus needed zippers fixed. A Spider-Woman from Bolingbrook needed the fingertips of her suit snipped off so she could use her phone. A student in a maid costume (and animal tail) asked a man with a pyramid on his head: “Need help?”

The pyramid nodded. He needed glue and a safety pin.

A few booths away, a staffer at Harrison Design & Concepts — a Chicago fabrication shop that gets about half its business from cosplayers and half from TV and film productions — glued together alien technology. Helmets were shined. Swords constructed with 3D printers needed adhesive. Wigs did, too. Thread-work wants to come loose after a day of cosplay. Faux-metal armor was the trend for years, Hofmann said. But that’s given way to needlework, meaning cosplay is now more female than ever.

Indeed, the competition at the cosplay championships was at least two-thirds women. There was not a lot of trash talking, at least backstage. Hannah Gootzeit of Minnesota, dressed in orange paint as Ahsoka Tano of “Star Wars,” smiled at her mother and said: “I don’t think I have a very good chance. I mean, the level of detail ....”

Gabriela Wozniak, her face painted in thick lines to resemble an animated character, had never competed outside her native Poland: “I’m terrified. I feel like every single person in this room would win this.” The contestant from Spain, who goes by Alisyuon, stood buried beneath jewels, crystals, a crown and a hoop skirt that’s removed to reveal a second, action-centric skirt. Valerie Jelnikova of Latvia looked at Alisyuon from across a table. “Realistically, when I come in here and see a costume that is so much better, I feel bad about what I have on. But truly, I want everyone in here to succeed.”

In front of an audience of a few thousand, they walked across the stage, one by one, before judges. Two judges were fixtures of the cosplay scene; two were professional costume and prop makers from Toronto. They sought attention to detail, impeccable sewing, fresh ideas. The regional contest was followed by the winners of other comic cons around the country, paired down to compete with international winners. “By the time we reached the end,” said Robin Careless, a judge whose props have appeared in “The Boys” and “Suicide Squad,” “you could put this stuff in movies, with no changes.”

To be on this stage, contestants studied wire soldering, leather working, sculpting. Some contacted creators of the characters they played. They worked with buffalo hides and kimono silks, beads and denim and kilts. They wore tiny pagodas on their heads. Some distressed their costumes so impeccably, they mimicked convincing frost. A contestant from the UK, said judge Ian Campbell, figured out a way to do electroplating “using nonconductive materials, which really shouldn’t be possible.”

Slone — who won it all, regional, national, global — captured an ages-old, influence-rich folk art, with a chest plate and headdress that recalled both feathers and shells. She played the video game with her character endlessly, and studied and researched ways to capture the clothing tangibly. She worked with wood, and for her cape, she used irises from her backyard, then soaked and preserved them, to give an appearance of vibrancy. She embalmed eucalyptus leaves and wove them into the mosaic. Careless said that, in the end, her costume was so good, they couldn’t find a fault. She had even worked in stray threads to suggest the character, a warrior, was not the finest weaver.

When she won, Slone looked floored.

Her face contorted. Her husband cried. The contestant from Latvia rushed up and shouted: “I knew you would win!” Then the Michael Jordon of cosplay, the out-of-nowhere phenom from Indiana, raised her makeshift bow above her head and smiled.