Now that conventions have returned since the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic (thoughts as to whether this is wise aside) it would seem inevitable that my costume-making itch would demand to be scratched. I attended Destination Star Trek in November 2021 (with costumes I had created prior to 2020), subsequently caught COVID just in time to spend Christmas in isolation, then attended MCM London Comic Con in May of this year, albeit not in costume.
Not long after my thoughts turned to what ambitious and ill-conceived idea to attempt for the following MCM at the end of October. Having delved further into another of my hobbies/all-consuming time-sinks: Dungeons and Dragons, my sets of math-rocks were never far from my desk, and the process of world-building never far from my mind. The thought inevitably occurred to me that the standard set of dice used for D&D consists of seven dice. If one ignores the duplicate d10 used as part of the d100, there are six fundamental dice: The d4 (tetrahedron), d6 (cube), d8 (octahedron), d10 (pentagonal trapezohedron), d12 (dodecahedron) and d20 (icosahedron).
Ever a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the concept of six “stones” that can manipulate reality conjured the obvious thought of the Infinity Stones and Thanos, the imposing and brilliantly executed grand villain of the MCU’s 20+ movie-spanning infinity saga. The thought of doing a crossover/fusion cosplay has appealed to me for a while, the creative freedom to try and merge different characters into something that has no canonical “correct” answer. (Though I’ve always considered my standard for costuming to be “can you tell what I’m trying to be?”) So I could hardly resist the temptation to try:
The Dungeon Master (from the Dungeons and Dragons animated TV show) crossed with Thanos (from the MCU). Unfortunately I couldn’t come up with a good portmanteau of the two characters’ names, so the working title I’ve gone with is “DMos”. The red/gold colouring of Dungeon Master also lends itself a bit to Iron Man, so I am mixing in some of that to try and blend the two together. (Specifically I am attempting to model the gauntlet after the Nano-Gauntlet in Avengers: Endgame.)
The plan is for this costume to incorporate a lighting circuit for the gauntlet. Whilst I managed to wire up some LEDs for my first cosplay (Cyberman, 2016) that was a very basic hand-soldered mess. With six LEDs and (hopefully) the ability to adjust the lighting level individually (to “activate” a given dice) a printed circuit board was going to be a necessity. Though I have some experience with designing/creating PCBs from secondary school, I’ve considered designing/acquiring and assembling the lighting circuit to be a “new” skill I’m effectively re-learning for the purposes of this project.
Another aspect of this project is working with metallic-effect fabric. A bit of internet research led me to spandex, seemingly the most cost-effective metallic fabric I could easily source. Being a stretchy fabric that I haven’t really worked with before I’ve considered this a new skill as well.
This project will also be the first opportunity I’ve had to incorporate 3D printing, another hobby I have recently dabbled in, into a costume project.
As of the time of writing I have been working on the project on-and-off for a few months, so the next few posts will be catching up to where I currently am. But with only a few weeks until MCM and a lot of the costume still left to make it is far from certain I will make the deadline.