Holly Conrad: Small-Town Girl With Monster Dreams

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Holly Conrad, a designer of monsters and costumes, is almost as much in demand for interviews for the upcoming documentary Comic-Con IV: A Fan’s Hope as director Morgan Spurlock is. It could be because she’s got such an inspiring story or because in a male-dominated subculture, she’s kick-ass and charismatic. But she shrugs off the attention: “I think it’s just because I have a neato flashy costume,” she laughs—and to be fair, that much is hard to argue. “Morgan’s always so nice and supportive of me, telling me how talented I am, and I think everyone in the film is so talented.”

The new Spurlock documentary is a look inside the Mecca for geeks—Comic-Con, a four-day extravaganza of fantasy, science-fiction, superhero, and horror, as seen in comics, video games, films, toys and a myriad of other forms. Holly and her fellow principal subjects all attending in pursuit of a dream—to break into the worlds of costuming or illustration, to revive a sagging comic resale business or even to secure the hand in marriage of a fellow geek. The subjects and their famous director will be on hand for the world premiere of the film this weekend in Los Angeles.

It’s quite a long way from Conrad’s rural beginnings, some of which are chronicled in the film. “Where I grew up was a very small town,” she says. “Jessica from the movie and I went to middle school and high school together. I met Tank and Steph at a haunted house I worked at. But they were all from the area. And there was really nothing to do—it was just a small town in the middle of a desert. Most of the people there were old, retired, lots of orange groves and things like that. It was just a very calm, peaceful town. At the same time, though, we could walk around at night, we’d hang out in coffee shops, we were the nerdy neighborhood hoodlums. Everyone knew us in the town, that we were hanging out and doing nerdy things. We wore costumes around and things like that. It kinda inspired creativity to be in a place that was so boring.”

Conrad’s interests were cemented at an especially early age. “I had always loved videogames and monsters and things like that,” she remembers. “My dream was to do creature and costume design together. I love that stuff. As a kid I actually played DOS games—I was typing things in at five. And I loved Super Mario Brothers. One of my first costumes was a Koopa from Super Mario Brothers. I was six years old and I taped a green pillow to my back and ran around the house and said I was a Koopa. So I started at an unreasonably young age, dressing myself up as videogame characters and monsters.”

The obsessions for Holly became fantasy novels, role-playing games, videogames, comics, and the costuming and monsters that tied them all together. “I think for games it was definitely the artwork and the immersion factor,” she remembers. “I had always loved fantasy books. When I found Choose Your Own Adventure books and tabletop games I was completely hooked. Because those sorts of things you could customize—make your own characters, make your own monsters. And then …I really started loving games when I played Baldur’s Gate and I saw all the hand-done 3-D flash-painted backgrounds. Also, with all of the dialogue and everything, it was so immersive; it’s like you were really there because it was such a great story. I always loved that.”

Fortunately, her parents encouraged the madness. “My parents were always very supportive. They let me do pretty much whatever I wanted throughout my whole childhood. I was like, ‘Yay, Goth armbands!’ And they would be like, ‘Great, are you wearing them to the grocery store? Alright, just get in the car.’”

But her family situation is much more complicated than the movie has time to go into. “My Mom has had MS since I was born,” Conrad explains, “so she can’t walk and hasn’t been able to walk for my whole lifetime. And my dad was always working just to help us survive, so my dad wasn’t around as much. But when he was, he was fun and cheerful and all that. My dad is a great guy. But about two years before the movie was filmed, he left my mom, and left me with everything. He just left. So I was taking care of my mom by myself. It was right after I got out of college. For a while my mom lived on her own, but then she couldn’t. I started living at home and I worked a fulltime job at an animatronics factory. I cleaned out matrix molds the size of tables. Eventually I got to do cooler stuff, but at the time I was pretty much just doing manual labor.”

It was that feeling of being trapped that led directly to Conrad taking the steps necessary to build the life she wanted. “Yeah, that’s when I just thought, I’m just going to get together all my talented friends who are inspired by the same things that I am, and try to get our work out there. Because otherwise I’m going to get stuck here taking care of my mom and living in San Bernardino for the rest of my life. And my mom has always been so supportive. She played videogames with me; we used to play World of Warcraft together. She’s a really strong person. But you can only be so strong when you’re so sick. At that point, she was getting so bad that something had to be done. Eventually, after the movie, she ended up moving to an assisted living home, and I ended up moving to L.A., so it all worked out.”

Conrad is still close with both her parents. She monitors her mother’s health closely. “It’s always a struggle,” she says, “because she’s always having to deal with some injury or some new thing with her disease. But she’s really happy. She has a new boyfriend, and they play videogames together. I’m still on good terms with my dad, too. You only have one family; you can’t exile them for the choices they make.”

Conrad has a very specific hope for Spurlock’s cinematic treatment of the ComicCon phenomenon: “I’m hoping the movie will help my dad understand ComicCon. He’s a surfer dude and he doesn’t understand a thing that I do. I told him to come in costume to the premiere so that he’d fit in. We want it to be like a convention; we want people to feel like they’re at ComicCon. And a day later he called me and asked me if he can come as Hitler. And I was like, maybe if you have Captain America with you, but you can’t dress up as just Hitler. I can’t really explain why, but Hitler is not a pop-culture character. And he didn’t understand.”

She also hopes it will open up the culture to the rest of the world. “I think what people don’t understand most,” she says, “is that it’s a chance for us all to gather and have fun and enjoy being awesome. I think a lot of people don’t understand what an important career move it is, how important it is to the industry. Those of us that appreciate the content are the ones that end up becoming the content creators. It’s just a matter of time for us to transition from Padawan to Jedi. There are the people there who are experienced and know everything, and then there’s us who are trying to get there. And going there and meeting those people and interacting with them is so incredibly important for those of us trying to get into any kind of anything. There are games there, there are comics, there are movies. And in any of those areas, if going there makes somebody think, ‘Maybe one day I can be on one of those panels,’ that’s great. I always wanted to be on one of those panels, to be a content creator. And it was so inspiring to see it in person.”

And her experiences at ComicCon and with the film have, in fact, helped her to become a content creator. “We actually worked for [videogame developer] BioWare, doing costumes for ComicCon last year,” she says. “We made a bunch of suits for them, and we did a live-action trailer for them, where we made a bunch of creatures. My friend Jessica from the film is now their Community Manager. Right after the premiere we’re going to a convention for them. I also did a project with James and Se Young from the movie; we did a live-action Super Mario Brothers short that’s going to be coming out soon. I did production design and made a bunch of monsters for that. That was great. James is actually a really talented editor.”

But even with all her career dreams beginning to come true, there’s one aspect of Conrad’s life she doesn’t see changing. “I do love doing my own [costuming] stuff,” she says, “and I’ll never stop doing that. I’ll never stop making costumes for my friends. And I’ll never stop going to cons and wearing them. I really enjoy that, and even if it never brings me profit I’m not going to stop doing that.”

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