This year, MomoCon will celebrate 20 years of bringing nerd culture to the greater Atlanta masses.
The gaming and anime convention will take place over Memorial Day weekend from May 22-25 and will feature meet and greets, gaming, cosplay, costume contests, and more. This year’s guest list includes a number of voice actors and entertainers, including Reed Shannon and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels.
For both Shannon and McDaniels, coming to MomoCon might be a little bit of a pivot from where they started out in their careers. Shannon got his start playing the younger versions of Michael Jackson, Berry Gordy, and Stevie Wonder in the first national tour of “Motown: The Musical.” McDaniels started out in the beloved hip-hop group Run-DMC.
Now, Shannon is probably best known as the voice of Ekko on the popular Netflix series “Arcane,” which is set in the “League of Legends” universe, and McDaniels owns his own comic publishing company, Darryl Makes Comics.
Shannon remembers “Arcane” as maybe the fifth or so job that he booked after he moved out to Los Angeles. He was around 18 years old, and remembers not realizing how big “Arcane” would become at the time.
“The whole time [I was recording] I was beating myself up, because I wasn’t able to book a series regular or anything like that,” he said. “Not knowing this whole time, I was recording ‘Arcane,’ you know?”
Shannon was excited to take on the role of Ekko, a smart and streetwise kid and a beloved character. In the show, Ekko is known as “The Boy Who Shattered Time,” but as Shannon grew with the character, he also began to see how Ekko could serve as a good example for young Black men on television – something that is very important to Shannon.
“When Ekko came around, I was excited to be playing a young street kid scientist. I was like, that’s the coolest thing,” Shannon said. “Over the years of doing it and seeing where the country went, it dawned on me and became really important to me that people saw this character as more than just ‘The Boy Who Shattered Time.’”
Coming from a musical background, Shannon found that he had a knack for voice work and was able to be expressive and stirring using just his voice. But he doesn’t want to get pinned down into one artistic medium.
“A lot of people get one success in one arena and they take that all the way up until they can pivot and turn it into something else. My real dream is to create this Reed Shannon universe,” he said. “I’ve been doing singing, acting and dancing since I came into this industry, and I don’t feel as though I should have to do one or the other.”
McDaniels doesn’t want to be pinned down either. But in his case, comic books have always been just as important to his artistic sensibilities as music, if not more so. Growing up, when he saw somebody like Peter Parker – a nerdy kid from Queens who was a little awkward, but still smart and able to save the day – he saw himself.
“Comic books were the only place I saw people like me who were powerful,” he said.
Even as McDaniels got older, comics still played a central role in how he saw the world and how he handled his own personal struggles. When he was 35 years old, he found out that he was adopted, and was struggling seriously with depression.
Around that time, he said a conversation with a friend about superhero origins helped him recontextualize some things. The friend pointed out that a lot of superheroes are raised by people who are not their biological parents. Spider-Man has Aunt May and Uncle Ben, Batman has Alfred – the list goes on.
“It blew my mind that I was so attracted to comic books since I was in kindergarten, not knowing my story was like a lot of those that I was inspired by,” McDaniels said.
Music executive Rigo “Riggs” Morales was the friend who convinced McDaniels to start his own comic book and also helped co-found Darryl Makes Comics.
“You could do the same thing you’ve been doing with your music all these years,” McDaniels remembered Morales saying. “Inspire, motivate, and educate people while you entertain them.”
The “DMC” comic book is based on McDaniels himself. In this universe – which artistically is inspired by 1980s New York City – McDaniels never became DMC the rapper, but instead is a teacher who one day discovers he has super powers and uses them to save the day.
“Within the DMC universe, I can talk about bullying, peer pressure, substance abuse, all the mental health circumstances that me and everybody goes through,” McDaniels said.
He said he loves going to conventions and meeting fans old and young alike.
“The comic book helped me to continue to knock down the wall that separates us generationally,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a generation gap. It’s a communication, conversation, and participation gap.”
The full guest list for this year’s MomoCon can be found on their website.
