No Spoilers: Talking ECCC and our love for cordyceps

Emerald City Comic Con has a new home, and we’re all crazy for cordyceps.

It’s time once again to take a trip to the nerdier side of pop culture with our panel of geekonomy experts, who have promised to follow one very important rule: NO SPOILERS!

Soundside host Libby Denkmann is joined by KUOW Arts and Culture Reporter Mike Davis, along with KUOW newsletter author and producer of the independent podcast/magazine NW NERD, Dyer Oxley.

First Topic: Emerald City Comic Con!

An estimated 75,000 people packed downtown Seattle in their cosplay best over the weekend for Emerald City Comic Con 2023.

This was the first Comic Con in the newly expanded Seattle Convention Center, and the first ECCC to return to the spring schedule, after the Covid-19 pandemic canceled 2020's convention outright, moved 2021's to December, then 2022's to August.

Our first impression: the new venue has lots of windows.

Dyer Oxley: "I was talking to an artist friend of mine who goes there every year. And at one point, we just stopped in our conversation because there was sunlight coming through and we just kind of had to comment ... I'm like, 'Wow, like, no vitamin D deficiency this year.'"

For Mike Davis, it was all about time with his daughter, who he taught how to play Super Smash Bros, and introduced her to the author of her current favorite book. She even got an autograph and a personalized drawing!

One notable absence from the convention though, the "Homegrown" area. Dyer wrote about that last week before the show opened.

Soundside Producer Jason Burrows was at the convention this weekend too, and he’s put together an audio postcard of folks talking about what’s great about being a geek in the Pacific Northwest.

Second Topic: Has "The Last of Us" finally broken the curse of the mediocre video game adaptation?!

With "The Last of Us," the fine people at Home Box Office, Incorporated are proving that video games can make for incredibly moving television. The show has taken over Sunday night prestige TV, inhabiting our brains like a post-apocalyptic cordyceps.

It’s elevated by impactful performances from leads Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey as world-weary smuggler Joel and teenager-with-an-important secret Ellie. The finale of the critically acclaimed show is this Sunday.

Why is it so good? Dyer Oxley says it's because it is being written and produced with maturity.

"I feel the key to this show — as it has been for other successful video game, comic book, or pop culture transfers into film and TV — they treat this with the maturity it deserves. They treat it like literature, which is what it is."

Mike says it's an amazing time to be a story teller.

"People want story. It's the best time in the world to be a storyteller. Take it from the guy that read every single book in the "Wheel of Time" series, one of the longest series ever written. I love that Amazon Prime show, and I was so afraid at first, but they put the resources behind it to actually tell the story, and it's amazing."

Let us know what geeky things you're enjoying these days. Send us an email to soundside@kuow.org or leave us a voicemail at 206-221-3213

We'll be back with another installment of NO SPOILERS next month, where we're going to take a closer look at the longest running Sci-Fi and Fantasy Convention in the Pacific Northwest, Norwescon, among other things.

Listen to the full NO SPOILERS discussion by clicking the audio above.