By Gene Ching                

"The Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is..." said Deep Thought, and paused. "Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

-          Paraphrased excerpt from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

April 2026 was rough on the SF Bay Area fan gathering scene. A new event, Silicon Valley Fandom Con, was announced for April but it was catastrophically bad. It was held at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, South Hall, the same venue where we held the Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com Championships from 2009 until last year (we went on hiatus for 2026). In the wake of SiliCon 2022 which collapsed horribly the year after Adam Savage rebranded it under his name, many fans expected Silicon Valley Fandom Con to be held in the main hall of McEnery. GalaxyCon San Jose has held space there since 2024 and will be there again this year. But at opening day, Silicon Valley Fandom Con got unceremoniously moved back under the South Hall canopy with no signage, no food and poor bathroom access. Many celebrity guests pulled out. Many vendors lost money. Most attendees were disappointed at the abysmal turnout, absent infrastructure and high prices. Fans dubbed it ‘scamdom con.’

A few days later, FanExpo SF announced that it was concluding its run at the Moscone Center. Initially FanExpo had committed to four years. Now that has run its course and once again, San Francisco is unable to sustain major fan gathering.

In contrast, Bay.con celebrated its 42 year this year. Unlike FanExpo, Fandom Con, and GalaxyCon, which are all franchises of national fan gathering network organizations, Bay.con is a local fan-run convention. It was founded by John McLaughlin and Randall Cooper to bring together the Bay Area’s science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts and has become the region’s longest-running convention.

Bay.con is now also connected to Westercon, which was founded in 1948 by Walter J. “Doc” Daugherty. Originally a Los Angeles event, it has been held from San Diego to Seattle over the last nearly 8 decades. I think Westercon was my very first con. That was in San Francisco in 1979, back when I was in high school. Bay.con 42 marked Westercon 78.  

I had been to Bay.con before too. By strange coincidence, the Tiger Claw Elite Championship and Bay.con 2008 were both held in the Santa Clara Convention Center. Back then, the Tiger Claw Elite Championships (TCEC) was a series of tournaments held in cooperation with Disney. The final year of that cooperation took place in 2008. Just eleven days prior to the event that year, China was hit by the devastating Sichuan earthquake. In response, Tiger Claw’s charitable organization, the Tiger Claw Foundation, mobilized prominent local martial artists to organize the Martial Arts Benefit for Quake Victims—a fundraising performance held at the conclusion of the tournament. The initiative successfully raised over $73,000, which was donated to help build a new school in Sichuan.

But back to Bay.con, Lori Ann White, a contributor and occasional copy editor for Kung Fu Tai Chi (as well as a longstanding Kung Fu sister of mine) led writing workshops at Bay.con. She graciously arranged my very first press pass for a con. TCEC occupied my attention for the day. I only popped over quickly during a break. But after TCEC was done, I was able to jump into a Bay.con afterparty. It was quite a night. Clad in my emcee suit, exhausted from the craziness of TCEC and Martial Arts Benefit for Quake Victims, all I can remember now was dancing the night away with some Romulan gals.

Fast forward 18 years later and another friend secured me a Bay.con press pass. Dave O’Shea and I volunteered as medics for Rock Medicine. For many years, I’ve led in-services on self-defense in crowds and restraining combative patients for that organization. There’s this old unspoken rule when demonstrating the martial arts – take the biggest guy out first. Dave is twice my size, a firefighter and a seasoned veteran, so he became my fall guy, my xiashou (lower hand 下手) or uke (recipient 受け) as we say in the martial arts. We’ve been friends ever since.

Later we bonded over our mutual love of fan gatherings. Dave has been part of Bay.con for over a quarter century. Last year, Dave and I connected at San Diego Comic-con. This year, he invited me to cover Bay.con. After nearly two decades, I was delighted to return.

Bay.con 42 – The Answer

Bay.con 42 was held at the Santa Clara Marriott in the wake of the FIFA World Cup, which was held just down the street at the San Francisco Bay Stadium (or the stadium-formerly-known-as-Levis but Levis didn’t pay FIFA for advertising, so the name was changed temporarily). Coincidentally, I worked 3 World Cup games for Rock Medicine the week prior. The Marriott was one of the official FIFA hotels, so being back in that area just added to the surreality for me. Held for four days over 4^th of July weekend, Bay.con 42 was themed on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. IYKYK.

Being fan-run, Bay.con is much more intimate than the large national gatherings. There’s less franchise influence, so cosplay leans away from Marvel, DC, Star Wars and the usual lot, and more towards individual expression. There’s more steampunk, more Renaissance Faire and Dicken’s Faire, Afrofuturism and furries (there was even a ‘headless’ room, a safe space where furries could unmask, cool off and hydrate in private).

The vendors were indie artists and craftspeople, not major fan brands like Funko, LEGO, Hasbro, Mattel ad nauseum. There weren’t any cosplay sword vendors. However, one of the craftspeople, Teri Davis, offered lovely handmade knives, crafted from bone, horn, and semiprecious stone. Davis doesn’t even have a website but can be reached for custom jobs at dqtreasure@ix.netcom.com.

Nowadays most ubiquitous martial arts presence at fan gatherings are lightsaber groups; it’s still the fastest growing martial art on the planet. Bay.con was no exception. Lightsaber Team, with chapters in California and Oregon, had a prominent table directly in across from the welcoming table. Lightsaber Team is unique in that it received permission from Lucasfilm Ltd. to use the copyrighted term “lightsaber” (on May the fourth, 2015, no less). It is also not a sparring group. Instead, it is centered on staged combat stunt choreography and athletic performance, not unlike Kung Fu forms practice or Wushu duilian (opposed practice 对练). To learn more, visit lightsaberteam.com.

Steaphen Fick and the Davenriche European Martial Artes School

There was another group propounding lightsaber at Bay.con, the Davenriche European Martial Artes School founded by Steaphen Fick. As the name implies, DEMAS centers around medieval and renaissance weapons and hand-to-hand combat. Fick is also the author of three martial arts books: The Beginner’s Guide to the Long Sword European Martial Arts Weaponry Techniques, The Secret Language of Conflict, and Be S.A.F.E.:  Practical Protection for the Modern World. Bay.con 42 marked Fick’s return to the gathering after about a decade away.

GC: For our readers unfamiliar with European martial arts, please explain your practice.

SF: I focus and specialize in English and Italian martial arts - armed and unarmed - specifically longsword from a manuscript, circa 1409. Rapier, circa 1609 and 1617 for English. Our dagger and our grappling is a combination of the circa 1409 manuscript, but also a Dutch manuscript from the 18th century.

I started fighting in 1989. I was put into a suit of armor that was too big for me. They gave me a sword that was too heavy for me. And the only instructions I got were, ‘They're going to try to hack you up and let them.’ This was full steel. Our swords were made of leaf springs, so they were 10 pounds. We didn't have access to the equipment that we have today. So I got the snot beat out of me. It was called the Tournament Players. And they're long gone. They broke up in, I think, ‘95.

But I spent the first three years just getting beat up, learning how to fight. And I continued doing that up until ‘99 when my wife and I went to Europe so I could go find a sword master. I spent six months in Edinburgh training with the sword master there to clean me up and give me more than just the physical side of it. So I could get the theory of historical fencing - 18th century, with rapier and also that's when I was introduced to manuscripts.

GC: Who was that maestro?

SF: Paul MacDonald. He also runs MacDonald Armory in Edinburgh and was the sword maker for the Sword of State for King Charles. And the Scottish regalia.

GC: How long has your school been going?

SF: 26 years this month. I started in my backyard in 2000 in July. We had a big quarter century celebration last year. And not a lot of martial arts make it 26 years, martial arts schools, and especially to be a European-based school.

GC: Tell me about your lightsaber program.

SF: What we do with lightsaber, a buddy of mine was General Grievous and Count Dooku's fight battle in Star Wars 2 and 3, Kyle Rowling. And he was also a Jedi in the arena fight. I’ve been working with him and I knew lightsaber was popular. And like any martial arts school - what's going to bring students into the school?

I'm still trying to build this up over at my school, but the way it's designed is it's a combination of the medieval longsword and the Renaissance broadsword with a flare. We can take the historical traditions, move them into lightsaber, but the cutting pattern itself is set up to be either theatrical or combative.

GC: Tell me about your weapon sparring.

SF: We do spar with all the weapons. It's probably steel. You start off with wood. Then you move into steel. And we wear protective equipment: a full mask with back of the skull protection, a throat piece called a gorget which protects the clavicle as well, heavy gloves to protect the fingers, and elbow pads. It’s so that we can hit each other and it's okay to get hurt. We just don't want to injure.

People ask me all the time, ‘Is there really a desire for people to do this?’ And my response to that is, ‘Look at all the games, and look at all the movies - all this money that's sunk into these projects says that there is a desire for people to do it.’ And so I and other instructors like myself offer a place for them to come and learn not just how to swing a stick. Because and monkey can swing a stick. And many monkeys do.

We want to learn how when, where, and why. And that's what makes it an art. And the science, in 1617, there's a manuscript called The Schoole of the Noble and Worthy Science of Defence written by Joseph Swetnam. It's a science because you have the practical. You have a problem. You want to hit me in the face with the sword. I have a problem with that. Create a theory, test it, go through the whole scientific process. Then the art is how I put it with other humans.

To learn more, visit swordfightingschool.com.

Author

Bay.con 43 will be held on July 2-5, 2027, at the Santa Clara Marriott. For more information, see baycon.org.

Gene Ching is the Publisher of KungFuMagazine.com and the author of Shaolin Trips.

Thread

https://forum.kungfumagazine.com/t/comic-cons/58640