Costume play dresses up sci-fi convention

Free parade begins at 10 a.m. Saturday at Woodruff Park and continues north on Peachtree Street to Baker Street, then east to Courtland Street.

Looking like a cross between a garment district sweat shop and the Star Wars cantina, Katie George’s sewing room is in full pre-Dragon-Con flower.

A sword from She-Ra and a breastplate from Wonder Woman are among the props pushed to the side, as George works steadily on the fur skirt, micro-fiber trousers and blue top that will turn her into the heroine from the Legend of Korra.

At her elbow in this semicircular sunroom at her Brookhaven house, Cliff Tunnell waits for her assistance, knowing that he needs to rip the seams out of his double-breasted military jacket to correct a problem before he adds another stitch to his Prince Phillip get-up.

It’s DEFCON 2 for the cosplay crowd, but that’s the way it always is before Dragon-Con. Says Tunnell, 33, “Everything ends up taking 20 times longer than you think it will, it’s always much more expensive, you screw up a lot, you waste five or six hours and a bunch of material, and then you realize, ‘That’s how I should have done it!’”

But the rewards, said George, 23, are enormous. “Dragon-Con is a completely different experience in costume.”

Dressed up as a mutant butterfly or a Disney princess, a person can finally be themselves, Tunnell said. “When the costume goes on, the mask comes off.”

Thousands feel the same way. Some 46,000 attended downtown Atlanta’s four-day pop culture and sci-fi marathon last year and about 40 percent came in costume, according to Dragon-Con spokesman Dan Carroll. And by that he means “actual costuming — not just wearing ears.”

That’s why this year’s Dragon-Con, which runs today Thursday through Monday, filling up the guest rooms and ballrooms at five downtown hotels, includes seminars on sewing and fabricating props, plus a variety of costume contests and masquerade balls, including a Star Trek beauty pageant.

Every year the convention’s costumed cast parades up Peachtree Street on the Saturday before Labor Day, creating a wild floor-show for the many folks in town for Labor Day events (which include the Chick-fil-A kickoff games at the Georgia Dome and the AJC Decatur Book Festival). This year’s parade begins at 10 a.m. in Woodruff Park.

As always, this year’s Dragon-Con features appearances by pop-culture icons, including those old war-horses William Shatner and Adam West. But costume play, or cosplay, is also a significant part of the comic con experience, and Atlanta, home to such cosplay celebrities as Alisa Kiss and Yaya Han, has a reputation as a cosplay mecca.

George, an Anne Hathaway look-alike who has a degree in costume design from Auburn University, is doing her best to burnish that reputation. This summer she competed in the World Cosplay Summit in Nagoya, Japan, and she has constructed about 70 costumes over the last eight years, severely taxing her closet capacity.

This weekend she’ll debut six new designs, including the Korra costume, a Briar Rose outfit and a goofy wearable version of the leg lamp from “A Christmas Story.”

George met Tunnell at Dragon-Con in 2008 when he dressed as Ash from “Army of Darkness” (complete with chain-saw prosthesis) and she was a bodacious Caprica 6 from Battlestar Galactica. It turned out both lived in Auburn, Ala. — he was working as an attorney and she was in college. He was smitten. She was impressed.

“I immediately had a crush on this guy,” she said. “A cosplaying geek in Auburn? That’s something I never thought I’d find.”

Both relocated to Atlanta and will be attending Dragon-con this year in couples-themed costumes: Korra and Mako from “The Legend of Korra”; Briar Rose and Prince Phillip from “Sleeping Beauty”; the leg lamp and Ralphie’s pink fuzzy bunny costume from “A Christmas Story.”

Costuming has drawbacks. Tunnell, who works in intellectual property law, created a Monarch costume (a rather boneheaded butterfly bad guy from an Adult Swim cartoon) and was enjoying Dragon-Con 2006 when he came to an abrupt realization: There was no way he could use the facilities unless somebody else helped him take his costume off.

Clever redesign fixed that shortcoming, but other problems are perennial. Skill and originality in costume design are frequently trumped by skin. “You can bust your [rear-end] on a costume and a girl shows up in a bra and panties and she gets more attention than you,” George said.

Still, connoisseurs appreciate the effort. “You hear a lot of slow claps,” Tunnell said. “This is a discrete moment in time where everyone has a blast.”