WonderCon is the sister convention of the the iconic pop culture event Comic-Con International. It returns this weekend to the Anaheim Convention Center.
WonderCon delivers everything Comic-Con does only on a smaller, less crowded scale. And with the added benefit of being able to buy a badge onsite at Hall D.
So attending WonderCon means less waiting in massive lines for panels. Giving you more time to enjoy the elaborate cosplay and smaller crowds as you explore the exhibit hall, which has more than 900 exhibitors.
WonderCon does not tend to have the big Hollywood panels that draw thousands of attendees camping out overnight at Comic-Con each summer, but it still offers hundreds of hours of delightfully geeky and informative programming.
The Legal Geeks
One of my favorite panels at both WonderCon and Comic-Con have been the ones hosted by the Legal Geeks, a group founded in 2012 by Jessica Mederson and Joshua Gilliland. Both are electronic discovery attorneys, bloggers and unashamed, self-proclaimed geeks.
Gilliland said it started because "as lawyers, we are trained to issue spot. It's hard to turn it off. So you watch a TV show and you're thinking, 'Is that child endangerment? Would that marriage be valid?' So those are the type of things that lawyers think about while watching TV shows, or at least I do."
And the Legal Geeks were born.
Its mission is clear and simple: to use pop culture to help people understand the law and make it more accessible.
Steven Chu is another attorney who proudly calls himself a member of the Legal Geeks.
"You're going back to sort of the fun you had as a child. It evokes memories of reading comic books on my carpeted floor in third grade as I'm playing with my transformers and G.I. Joe toys and contemplating, 'why did they do this in Star Wars?' And 'what about that Star Trek episode?' It's just so much fun. And I think the part of the mission is to try to make the law fun and accessible. And I think that's better for the legal profession and for society as a whole when we can do that." Chu said.
I have learned about civil rights through the X-Men, experienced the court martial of Poe Dameron, and discovered who was responsible for the death of little Maria in "Frankenstein" (and it was not the poor creature's fault) — all thanks to the legal and pop culture savvy of the Legal Geeks. Their panels are always entertaining, enlightening, and thought provoking as well as serious geeky fun.
These guys do intense research not only into the legal issues but also to make sure they have their pop culture down pat.
"We play to win," Gilliland said with a smile. "We don't go to court unprepared. And it's the same mindset with doing these panels. People are at WonderCon because they want to see good panels. They go to be entertained, to learn something and have a good time. So we all work very hard to make sure that the material we put together has useful information. We break down the law so it's manageable. Kind of like the way that you would do it with a jury instruction, that what do you do to help a juror understand what the issue is, what the rule is and what the conclusion should be if they agree with your version of the facts. A lot of those lessons work their way into the types of presentations that we do in order to help people understand. We'll break it down so you can see what the letter of the law is and then apply it to the facts."
WonderCon Panels
Chu hosts a panel on Saturday called "The Legal Mysteries of Netflix's 'Wednesday.'" The panel uses the Netflix series, which is set at the private boarding school known as Nevermore Academy.
"As someone who went to boarding school, some of this really resonated with me," Chu said. "We found so many legal issues throughout the series. Things about how a school runs itself, this conspiracy between the school and the mayor, the cover ups, and up to grave robbing, digging up old corpses and solving decades old mysteries. We just want to have a lot of fun with this."
On Sunday Gilliland hosts a panel on "Civil Rights in the Time of Star Wars." He takes examples from the Lucasfilm shows "Kenobi" and "Andor" about force sensitive people hunted by inquisitors and trials where one’s guilt is predetermined.
"That's bad because it's race and genetic based laws to persecute others," Gilliland explained. "Jump to 'Andor,' there is a horrific trial for Andor that's like a Soviet era stamp process of you're charged, you're guilty, there's no defense counsel, and you're sentenced to life of hard labor. All of those things are incompatible with a republic. So they don't fit our legal system. So it's a way to talk about how those violate our sense of freedom, our constitution, and this is why this is bad, this is why this is scary. Here are some historical comparisons that we can make as well. And 'Star Wars' does a very good job at those issues."
The Legal Geeks panels are just a sample of the hundreds of hours of diverse, geeky, wonderful programming at WonderCon.
