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Yes, that's Six with an 'i', as in sixth time. The sixth CONS. Six years of dedication bordering on madness. Six events with a steady climb in attendance numbers and quality. Six get-togethers of Transformers fans from Germany, the Netherlands, and many other countries, as well as an estimated six million Euros changing hands in return for transforming plastic robots these last six years. Okay, the six million might be pushing it a bit, I admit. The rest of it, though?
To satisfy the statistic freaks first: our upward trend remains intact. It's not as steep as before, but we have still managed to set yet another European attendance record for a one-day Transformers Fan Convention with 538 visitors. And yes, even if some thought that attendance numbers felt a bit less than last year's July event, the final tally of sold tickets revealed that we had five more guests this year than last. Sadly not six more, that would have fitted the theme of this article really nicely, but you can't have everything, I guess.
And as has become tradition for these things - or so it seems - we began with ill omens, just like last year. Again we had people from the organisation team dropping out just days before the event. The weather wasn't that nice, either. And for me personally the question of whether I could attend was far from firmly answered, as I was down with a vicious cold just one week prior. Fortunately I recovered in time. Unfortunately I first managed to pass the bug on to my wife, who was thus unable to attend this year. Thankfully my father-in-law Karl-Heinz was able to substitute for her, making sure that the Transformers-Universe.com booth was always manned. But as I said: quite a few ill omens before the actual event. On the day, though, everything went very smoothly. Okay, this was the sixth time, so you kind of expect people to have gotten a hang of things by now. The organisation of the contests and interviews was nearly flawless and the attendees, too, were mostly familiar with how we did things by now and didn't need to be individually briefed on where the toilets were and what this exotic German cuisine called "Currywurst mit Pommes Rot-Weiß" was all about.
Our special guests this year brought their massiv comic competence with them. Artist Andrew Griffith and colorist John-Paul Bove from IDW comics, two very nice guys, who are living the dream of having graduated from mere Transformers fans to professional shapers of the franchise. Brownie points to both of them for giving their best effort in communicating with the natives in their own language to the best of their abilities. Yes, German is a difficult language, I admit, but they both get an A for effort. John-Paul and Andrew also gave us a hand drawing the raffle numbers to award the many items our sponsors had gifted us with this year. We had a few cool things in the raffle, such as four unfolding coolers from Paramount, a giant Masterpiece Grimlock from Actionfiguren24.de, and then there were quite a few comics from Pannini. We're talking many, many comics here. A huge bucket load of comics, to be precise. I'd go so far as to say there was a deluge of comics. Maybe as much as six thousand comics even, or so it seemed at least as we were handing them out. Suffice to say: a lot of comics. And it seemed that most our raffle prizes this year went to the smallest Transformers fan present, or at least the smallest one capable of walking on her own two legs. Said fan was tiny, female, blonde, cute, and dressed all in pink. And she insisted of always taking the long way around the tables and through the thickest crowd of people, even on her sixth run to the front to collect her prizes. Thankfully someone was on hand to help her as she won one of the big coolers, because that might otherwise have posed a bit of a problem for the little girl.
What else is there to say? We did a bit of streamlining when it came to the contests taking place, but what we lacked in number of contests, we made up in participants. There was our cosplay contest with no less than a dozen participants this year, handily won by Transformers Prime Soundwave. And we also had a live-on-location kitbashing contest with four people managing to finish their custom Transformers figures in time for our jury - made up of our special guests - to decide on the lucky winner. And since this much kitbashing is really hard, we fully understand it if someone needs to take a bit of a nap afterwards, too.
Thus we arrive in our sixth paragraph of this report of the sixth CONS for the sixth conclusion. Was it a great event? It certainly was. Tiring? Yep! With some hardships along the way? How else? And most importantly: was it fun? You bet it was! For the sixth time a hearty thank you to Lucy & Alex, who really came through for all of us the sixth year in a row. Also many thanks to all the people who helped us on the day and were always ready to lend a hand when needed. And maybe, just maybe, if we can just manage to somewhat pave that bumpy road leading up to the event, then I am fully certain that the CONS 2015 will be at least as good as our Super Six here was.
Until then,
Yours Truly, Phil
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