Chicago’s Own C2E2 2026 and the Adventures Our Team Chose For It

Who We Are:

 I’m saying this because ever since the first time we published a Choose Your Own Adventure preview for the first time, we’ve done things differently, worked harder and seen more things than it’d be possible to disclose in this format. We don’t do a human interest piece at 7:45 about local nerds getting their “comic” on and never come back to it - we go to the panels, walk the artist alleys and show floors, buy the merch (twist our arms) and shoot the cosplay.  We roll with about a 4 to 5 person crew, of which the majority are also our fantastic photographers and editors, stand in lines, kneel in photo pits, and meet in hotel lobbies between autograph signings for interviews. My name is Marielle Bokor, and I’m the man in the chair, making the previews and sending people to shoot tourneys, panels and cosplay and joining in the frey whenever I’m not taking notes and publishing social media posts from the back of a panel room in between panels.

For better or worse, the team of awesome nerdy friends I’ve come to rely on have been there for C2E2 as it went from “that new convention that’s actually in Chicago” to pulling guests like SDCC and NYCC and packing out Parking Lot C clear across Dusable Lake Shore Drive.  It’s given me lifelong Fellowship of the Ring-style friendships and insane day-after migraines. It kicked me out of shooting Holly Combs and gave me David Tennant, in the flesh, hopping around couches inches from me and my 20 new friends in the press photo pit. 

C2E2 2026 completely reshuffled itself physically, a move that was desperately needed as attendance seems to have increased exponentially through the years. Even for those of us living in the city limits, just getting to this convention went from simply “Drive to McCormick Place, empty your wallet to park in the garage, walk until your feet fall off, repeat next day” to not being able to get in via Metra, Uber, or braving the parking lot game, at which point some of us chose to stay at the “on-site” hotels that average about 1 mile worth of liminal space navigation just to set foot in McCormick proper on the way TO the convention.

Opinions Nobody Asked Us For:

Luckily, though we’re still suffering the absence of the red carpet, we are not suffering from super narrow aisles. It’s like someone from Reedpop finally hit the “Expand” button and the whole showfloor took a deep breath. Does that mean we didn’t feel packed like sardines and barely find anywhere to devour our Maxwell Polish at lunch time? No. But it would’ve been absolutely unbearable without the more or less doubled width out there.

Had they not decided to swap out the S100 ballroom that used to be reserved for will-call and press to pick up their badges on site and S406 as the main panel rooms, I’m fairly certain we’d be seeing a lot of angry articles and TikTok exposes. While it has its own set of problems—namely that it’s right at the entrance which means the largest panel queues are right where everyone congregates when they come in and leave—and that that requires another walk through the security lines to get from the Main Panel room and back to the show floor. 

That seems like a small complaint, but when you’re talking about a reported 100,000 people in attendance and guests like Charlie Cox, Elizabeth Olsen, Chris Eccleston, and Geena Davis, you’re talking intense fandoms, huge franchises who just had massive breakthroughs (Like Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary book becoming a runaway hit movie just two weeks before he appeared in a SIDE panel room on a Sunday, and that means there’s a possibility you won’t be able to see that panel you really wanted to catch on the Saturday at 11 because you’re stuck in a queue to get back from the show floor where you went to grab a bite. 

Because, and write this in your notebook for any convention you ever go to: 

You’re going to have to wait in line for a long, long time. 

Unless you’re at a smaller, more one-topic affair, the modern day “pop culture” convention features packed showfloors, mini aisles clogged with Wild Bill soda lines, cosplayers being asked for pictures, and some sort of inflatables around every corner, and there’s panel rooms that will fill up in literally two minutes because they started standing in line at 7 to see David Tennant at 11 am.

"There’s always someone who knows more than you, even about things you really love, and if you learn from them instead of try to one-up them, you win a lifetime friendship instead of a momentary round of trivia. The heart of any convention lies in its crowd and how they respect the safe place they’ve been given to express their love of the things they love.

"This IS a good place to make friends who you already share interests with, and a good environment to get to know different types of people and explore different interests.  Play Magic in the Tavern because you always wanted to but never learned how.  Enter a Mario Kart tournament even though you always lost to your siblings. Make tea or learn cosplay makeup techniques or go to drag story hour because as long as you show up, those are all things you can do with that badge hanging around your neck." - Marielle Bokor

All This Talk and What Did We See This Year?

I'm so glad you asked.

A lot of amazing cosplay. While this year we didn’t see the return of the World Championships of Cosplay as in past years, for reasons I think most can speculate, it did feature national championships, and honestly, even if it didn’t, C2E2 is no slouch on cosplay for a general pop culture convention. People don’t mess around. There’s oldies but goodies, current Chicago meme costumes, some kind of beer armor or Chicago-themed Pope thing, punk Spidey, and even the Rat Hole, believe it or not. I’ll leave this year’s gallery here:

Lookin' real good, C2E2 2026.

literally everyone with eyes

We also hit up a lot of pretty cool panels. Sad to say we did not defeat the beast that is “Getting into C2E2 on Saturday Morning” because we’d have to actually be at a hotel attached to McCormick Place to do that, and we’re Chicago journalists. 

Defeating the Main Panel Room Queue:

As a result, we’d missed Elizabeth Olsen. But what we lack in Wandavision behind-the-scenes, we make up for with Daredevil details from the SECOND big panel of the day, which we huffed and puffed our way into straight from Lot C. 

Charlie Cox is as delightful and charming as ever, and for this year’s C2E2 he was joined by Krysten Ritter, Wilson Bethel and Elden Henson. C2E2 has felt so current this year, with Project Hail Mary blowing out box office doors right before we got here, and Daredevil’s new season fresh from the tube. 

We might only be two episodes in but the entire cast, including those left behind, have nothing but exciting teases for Season Three. The whole panel was dedicated to fan Q&A, and a lot of very random questions were answered—we found out that Krysten Ritter’s currently obsessed with Project Hail Mary but somehow didn’t realize Andy Weir was at this very convention, and that she knits to shake off the darkness that so often accompanies the characters she played.  She also taught Charlie to knit, and he’s got at least two infinity scarves under his belt. 

Meanwhile, though a common question asked in panels, when the Daredevil cast was asked what character they’d love to play if not their own, literally everyone answered they’d try their hand at being Jessica Jones. Charlie Cox found out he was the Marvel universe’s ‘himbo’ and couldn’t decide if he was offended by it or not.

Also interesting were the answers given to the question “What do you want for your character next?”

Foggy aka Elden Henson decided he’d like his character to become a ghost and watch Matt Murdock everywhere. He . went. And yes, everywhere. Charlie, for his part? Well, he thinks he should be resurrected by Elektra and take over the Hand. That…would be something. Cox also at one point teased a Spiderman collab, which everyone’s been waiting for this whole time.

But if you ask me, one of the funniest things we saw in any con came from a question about the knife with the message etched in it from last season. Wilson Bethel answered our burning question- did he do that right before he threw it, on the fly, or did he prep for the battle far enough in advance to sit there and scratch that in for a few hours.  Bethel’s reply? Bullseye does this all the time, and has a variety of knifes with messages in them he can choose to bring to any occasion, from Bar Mitzvah to birthday and beyond. “I’ve got a lot of time on my hands” he said, in character. “I’ve got like, 30 of them.”

Poster Child:

Speaking of art projects - we’ve got to hand it to Julian Ramirez who really showed us the way by choosing his own adventure and heading to an even cooler behind-the-scenes from a poster panel he attended with artists Tracie Ching and Robert Wilson IV. 

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A post shared by Tracie Ching (@tracieching)

Traci started off focusing on her Andor commercial work for a zine that was a part of the acclaimed TV show's Emmy campaign. This being the most directly commercial work of the panel, it showed just how important creative work like this can be. It also highlighted Ching's tight work process, which is very close to the finished product right from the pitching stage. 

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A post shared by Robert Wilson IV (@robertwilsoniv)

Robert Wilson III alternatively spoke about his work on an Ultraman poster which he got the job for after creating an unofficial design. This was a persistent theme of the panel, that fan art often catches the eye of companies positively, occasionally being the spark that causes them to reach out for official work.

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A post shared by Tracie Ching (@tracieching)

Tracie obviously started out personal work like everyone and showed off her print of Kiki's Delivery Service. Tracie self admittedly uses lots of reference and even said that she simply is trying to recreate real world images. For that print she drew bread for weeks upon weeks, started with a specific palette and stuck to it (something she does not recommend), and made necessary changes to make the idea work (like dropping one or two of her lovely bread drawings)

The Andy Weir of It All

We also watched Andy Weir’s packed panel in S404 on Sunday teeter dangerously close to falling off the rails even though it featured an astrophysicist from the Adler Planetarium with a PhD as a host. Oh that’s right, on behalf of Andy Weir and Dr. Michael Zevin from the aforementioned Adler Planetarium: Go to the Adler Planetarium to observe and report on their impressive sextant collection. 

I was there, too, but this was Antal Bokor’s story to tell: 

Andy Weir was at this year's C2E2 and he really packed in the panel room, riding on the high of Project Hail Mary's second weekend of topping the box office.  As a Book Fan™ I had a particular interest in seeing this panel, and Weir did not disappoint. 

Weir acts like he's the smartest person in the room, and he's probably used to that being true, but his panel was hosted by a bonafide astrophysicist: Dr. Mike Zevin from the Adler Planetarium. Weir and Dr. Zevin nerded out about math and science while the rest of us only nodded along. Okay, I'm being a bit fatuous, as I have a STEM degree, but I'm not using spreadsheets to calculate travel times to other star systems using a fictional mass conversion fuel. But that's exactly what Weir did to get his scientific accuracy for the novel. Even though he made a mistake in the calculation and had to come up with a reason why it could still work out, even if it's not written that way: 

‘So the mass ratio you need to get up to cruising velocity is 20 to one. Um, but that means the total mass ratio to get to Tau Ceti should be like 400 to 1. So they wouldn't have needed 22 million kilograms of astrophage. They would have needed 40 million kilograms. That's a lot more. That's more than Earth 20 times.’

Cue Dr. Zevin in the background: “we all died! Earth died!” 

‘But it would work because you can kind of retcon it a little bit,’ Weir continued, unfazed, ‘ and say, ‘oh, instead of just constantly accelerating and then decelerating, you accelerate, (go into a cruise phase, (then) decelerate! It makes your inertial reference frame last about six years instead of four years. And with only one person on board that would have been feasible.’ 

There. He fixed it for you. 

-Andy Weir, Michael Zevin, Antal Bokor.

Weir is also great for making sure kids got to have their questions answered, ensuring that one kid got to ask a question for every adult that did. Even if he wasn't the most appropriate through the entire panel, he definitely got a few kids into STEM that day.

One such young audience member asked “what do you think of the relationship between Grace and Rocky?”

And that’s why, as Mike Zevin, supposes, Rocky might have surpassed Grogu for most beloved alien in sci-fi. 

Final Thoughts:

That means, no matter if it’s your first or your 50th convention, there’s brand new things to fall in love with that you just can’t get anywhere else, and that, along with the friends you make along the way, is what makes going to a convention priceless.

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