Kaila White

The Republic | azcentral.com

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For more than a year Valley women Jessica Nigri and Lindsay Elyse have had full-time careers out of dressing up.

Both are paid to cosplay at comic conventions and also make money by selling posters of themselves.

It was the sixth day when Jessica Nigri and Lindsay Elyse realized they weren't working fast enough. The close friends had been sewing, gluing, carving and molding for endless hours, and their costumes — a dungeon warrior and horned beast — were nowhere near completion.

Elyse had abandoned and restarted her armor multiple times, and Nigri still hadn't painted a body suit to resemble an orange-red lizard. So, from 9 or 10 a.m. until well after midnight for three straight days, they holed up in Nigri's workshop in her Phoenix home, slamming energy drinks and plowing ahead.

"We would be so tired we were just insane. We had stopped having conversations, we were just making noise at each other," Elyse said, laughing.

Nigri wrapped Elyse in plastic, put her in a white bodysuit and airbrushed it as Elyse sweated inside.

By the end of the third day, all was done. They packed their intricate costumes in suitcases and flew to Boston for PAX East, one of the biggest comic conventions in the country, where gaming companies paid them to represent their characters as a gleeful, pink-haired warrior and an elaborate beast with glowing swords for hands.

For more than a year, Nigri, 24, and Elyse, 22, have been cosplayers, making full-time careers out of dressing up as fantasy characters.

Cosplay, which is a mash-up of the words "costume" and "play," is a popular hobby in which fans dress up as characters from video games, comic books, graphic novels, movies and cartoons. It originated in Japan, gaining popularity there in the 1990s and becoming a full-fledged pop-culture phenomenon in the U.S. in the following decade.

The hobby has become more viable as a career as the video-game market has exploded. American consumers spent more than $15 billion on video-game content in 2013, according to data compiled by the NPD Group, a global market-research company. In comparison, the National Football League has an annual revenue of about $9 billion.

As the video-game industry expands, cosplayers are finding ways to become its celebrities. Nigri and Elyse have made their own way, one piece of body armor at a time.

International fame

Jessica Nigri is one of the biggest cosplay stars in the world. She can be found on any list of the best, the top or the hottest people in cosplay. She makes dozens of elaborate costumes by hand and attends about 20 comic conventions a year. She has made a lucrative career out of dressing up as fictional characters, all by the age of 24 and out of her bedroom in her parents' home in Phoenix.

She spends 12-hour days crafting complex costumes out of fabric, chain mail, foam and Worbla, a plastic sheet that can be heated, molded and layered into just about anything. Each costume requires about $500 and 50 womanhours.

"You're likely to stab yourself with a 6-foot-long sword and get electrocuted by some heat-gun thing. It's very dangerous in there," said her father, Cory Nigri, laughing.

The house is in a state of disarray thanks to nearly 1,000 online orders for posters, which come from around the world. Recently, she has gotten orders from members of the British military in Gibraltar and U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Orders from military personnel are common: In the era of Xbox, women in cosplay are the modern version of the pin-up girls who once adorned the noses of heavy bombers. Nigri has been told that a Marine Corps team named their Stryker vehicle the Nigri, and that everyone inside survived when an IED exploded under it.

Nigri's workspace is off-limits because it's littered with armor and weapons that technically belong to video-game companies; because she's paid for her costumed appearances, her costumes are proprietary materials.

"It's my little sanctuary, and it's where I go to be, like, 'Ah, let me creative juice all over the place,' " she said.

The family is careful not to reveal where they live.

"We're very protective of our space because we've had stalkers. She's internationally recognized," Cory Nigri said. "We were in Nepal a month and a half ago in a tourist market, and these people came up to us and were like, 'Oh, are you Jessica?' They were from Canada, and this happens all the time."

Nigri has been a huge gamer since she was 5, playing Duke Nukem with her father.

Her ascent from average Phoenix teen to international celebrity started in 2009, when a friend encouraged her to go to the San Diego Comic-Con, one of the biggest comic conventions in the world. She had never heard of cosplay but did a little research, made her first costume and attended as a "sexy Pikachu."

"It was at a really pivotal point in my life where I was feeling really insecure about myself," she said, "and all of a sudden I went to this culture, to this world, and it was like, 'You are awesome' and, like, instant acceptance."

Someone at the convention asked to take her picture. Within 24 hours, she had more than 1,000 friend requests on MySpace and Facebook.

People had zoomed in on the Pikachu picture to read her convention badge, which listed her name. The picture was posted all over such popular image-driven entertainment websites as Reddit, Imgur and 4chan.

"They tore me to pieces because I was just doing a 'Playboy' version of a Pokemon; I was having a good time," Nigri said. "When I learned about cosplay, it was like, cosplay is about having fun and you're a fan and I took that — having fun and being a fan — and I ran with it. I didn't realize that there was the whole hierarchy behind it."

Nigri was overwhelmed. She deleted her MySpace and created a Facebook fan page.

"I wasn't like, 'Oh, I could totally make something of this'; I was like, 'Sweet Jesus!' "

She didn't cosplay for months after. Later, she would cosplay, get berated for it online and take a break again.

"It was like each time I was getting stronger," Nigri said.

It was in early 2012 when she first got paid to cosplay: $10,000 for 10 appearances as Juliet Starling, the protagonist of the video game Lollipop Chainsaw. Nigri said Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment hired her over several other women because, although they looked like Starling, she was Starling when she got into costume.

"It was awesome because I felt like the nerd kind of won out," she said.

Since then, Nigri has been hired by numerous video-game companies to represent their characters. She was offered a spot on Syfy channel's reality show "Heroes of Cosplay," though she turned it down. She has been to Germany with Ubisoft and recently represented Carbine Studios' new game, WildStar, with what she calls her best costume to date, the one she worked on with Elyse and wore to PAX East last April.

She was a Draken, which required her to craft elaborate armor, feet, claws and horns, as well as spray paint that bodysuit. She completed the getup with a bright-blue wig, painted-on makeup and hands made out of LED-lit swords that her father helped rig.

"I've never felt so proud of something," she said. "I've been in it for four years and just now really kind of earned my place."

Aside from paid appearances, the bulk of Nigri's income comes from selling posters of herself, a practice she pioneered. She started selling autographed photos of herself in cosplay online in 2010, and received endless criticism for it, she said, from people saying that she "sold out" or was too self-absorbed.

Now, it's commonplace for cosplayers to sell posters of themselves. She also changed the game in terms of timing: Most cosplayers fall in love with a game, work on a costume for six months to a year and then debut it at a convention long after it has seen its media limelight. Nigri starts working on a costume as soon as she hears word of a new game. She plays the game the day it comes out and, if she likes it, wears the costume to a convention or sells posters of herself as the character as soon as possible. That has attracted work with video-game companies, she said.

Nigri was able to quit her job at Trader Joe's a year ago to make cosplay her full-time job.

"We tried to make it work, but one time they (Trader Joe's managers) called me at 10 p.m. when I was in Japan and were like, 'Are you coming in for a 6 a.m. shift?' And I was like, 'I'm in Tokyo eating sushi at some really cool restaurant and there is a sushi guy staring at me because I'm not supposed to talk on the phone in this restaurant!' "

She makes much more than she did at the grocery store, she said, and has invested heavily in stocks.

"I'm front-end loading because I know everything is going to go south eventually, of course, you know, literally," she said, laughing and gesturing to herself.

The evolution from nerdy, game-loving kid to successful cosplay model has been surreal.

"In elementary school, my friends were popular but I was the one drawing Goku from Dragon Ball Z," Nigri said, laughing. "I still don't know how to talk to a guy. I'm still Jessica at my core, but when you get into cosplay, and any cosplayer will say this, you just feel like, 'Yeah!' "

Especially when the costume includes armor or a sword, she said.

"You can escape. You can be someone so much cooler than yourself and you get to kind of disappear into a world and come out and be like, 'That was great,' " she said, pretending to rub her eyes as if waking from sleep.

"It's the creativity and the freedom to be yourself but not yourself. You get to express your fandom for something that's helped you cope with real life."

The rising star

Lindsay Elyse is something of a Jessica Nigri protege, following in her footsteps but with an entirely different approach. Elyse's day-to-day income comes almost exclusively from selling posters of herself in cosplay, the business model that Nigri pioneered.

She works out of a bedroom-turned-workshop in a Chandler apartment she shares with three men, one of whom is her fiance. The living-room walls are plastered with video-game posters and fake swords; one whole wall of the room is lined with four desktop computers for gaming.

Elyse, who also is a big fan of video games, has been cosplaying since she was 13, when her mother encouraged her to attend a convention as a way to socialize. After spending nearly a decade around the same dozen or so kids in private school, she was ready to branch out, so she dressed up as Edward Elric from the anime Fullmetal Alchemist and her mom drove her a convention called AniZona.

"I have no social skills and I was horrified," Elyse remembered, laughing. "Then this group of girls walks by and they have bright-blue hair and big swords and my mom looks at me like, 'Are you ready now?' "

She got her cosplay break the same day she met Nigri at Phoenix Comicon 2010. Nigri complimented Elyse on her costume as a blood elf from World of Warcraft. It was unlike any of the boyish getups Elyse had worn before: It had a long skirt, glitter and bikini top.

"The first time I met her, I wasn't scared of her, but I was like, 'Whoa! Calm down!' We are totally opposite," Elyse said of Nigri.

Later that day, Elyse was hired by a tabletop-game company to do fantasy modeling. She didn't make much, but she's not one to market herself or ask for more money, she said.

"I don't care about the money. I just want the experience, I want to say I've done it," she said.

But last summer, the cosplay push came to a real-life shove when Elyse wanted to attend the San Diego Comic-Con and E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.

"I wanted to go, would sell my soul to go to these conventions, and Starbucks wouldn't give me the time off, so I quit," she said. A friend encouraged her to sell posters of herself online, but Elyse was hesitant.

"I was like, 'That's such a weird thing. Who would buy my picture?' That's the strangest thing to me," she said. She knew it worked for Nigri, though, so she reluctantly opened an online store selling 10 photos.

"By the end of the third day, I passed the $1,000 mark, so I'm like, bawling my eyes out," Elyse he said. She attended both conventions using the money she earned from the prints and has been supporting herself on cosplay ever since.

Every month, she spends three weeks more or less constantly in her workshop making costumes. As her roommates bring friends over to party, she stays in the room, listening to TV shows as she sews and paints. She makes six or seven costumes, shoots photos and opens her online store for a three-day sale with the new photos. Then she spends a week printing, packing and shipping the posters before starting the process anew.

Since she quit her job as a barista, Elyse has traveled for free to conventions in Florida, Massachusetts and New York, and even has left the country for the first time, traveling to Canada. A few months ago, she signed a contract with Atomic Hype, a marketing agency that manages four other professional cosplayers. Elyse was happy just to attend conventions for free, but under Atomic Hype she has started getting paid for appearances.

"It makes us sound crazy, like, 'We need our own chefs. We need you to take all the blue Skittles out of the Skittle thing,' " she joked.

For the moment, Elyse is thrilled about an upcoming convention in Mexico, where she not only will be paid to appear but also gets to bring her fiance and have a few extra days of paid vacation in Cancun.

Where Nigri is bold and direct, instinctually willing to network and look for inventive ways to capitalize on an opportunity, Elyse is more sensitive and shy, working meticulously on the task at hand as she waits for success. Nigri loves the cosplay community; Elyse loves the costume-making process.

The two women became friends in 2011 and best friends last summer.

"It's so strange to go from being yourself, in your room and no friends and no social skills and stuff, to having to be in front of a bunch of people who know who you are and you have to present yourself," Elyse said. "It's hard to deal with that, and she's (Nigri's) been doing it for so long that I'm like, 'I'm sad, what do I do?' and she's just like, 'This is how you handle it; you're fine.' She's seriously guided me through every aspect of it, from costume making to asking for money for stuff to booking jobs and dealing with the Internet."

Last year, she and Nigri worked a booth together at Phoenix Comicon, promoting a cosplay calendar from Los Angeles cosplayer Toni Darling, and they regularly get coffee together and go to the pool "like regular people," Nigri said.

Nigri and Elyse plan to attend Phoenix Comicon this year, possibly as themselves and possibly in full-blown costume — since it's their home convention, it's the one place they can wear and carry not-so-travel-friendly costumes and props, like a gigantic sword or two.

As for the future, the pair are preparing for one of their ultimate cosplays: Nigri is going to be maid of honor at Elyse's wedding this fall. It's a "Pirates of the Carribbean"-themed wedding, and everyone has to come dressed as a pirate.

"You only ever meet a couple people in your lifetime you really, truly connect with, and when you do, it's like magic," Nigri said of Elyse. "It's kind of perfect because we're grown adults, getting married, having a pirate wedding. It's ridiculous. It's beautiful."

Phoenix Comicon

Mark Bagley, Eliza Dushku, Bruce Campbell and Mark Sheppard are among those who will attend this mecca for comic books and pop culture. The festival gives fans an opportunity to meet and get autographs from and photos with comic-book creators, film and TV stars, and anime voice actors. Comicon also includes a film festival and has expanded to offer satellite programming at surrounding hotels.

Details: June 5-8. 6:30 p.m.-11:30 p.m. Thursday; 10:30 a.m.-11:30 p.m. Friday; 10:30 a.m.-11:30 p.m. Saturday; 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Sunday. Phoenix Convention Center, Washington and Third streets. Programming hours vary at off-site locations. $15 to $85 per day; free for age 12 or younger with a paying adult. 602-635-1711, phoenixcomicon.com.

Cosplay-related events at Phoenix Comicon

Out of Phoenix Comicon's hundreds of events, more than 100 are costuming-related, ranging from Q&A sessions about cosplay to demonstrations of prop-making to full-on fashion shows. Here's a sample of some of the best and biggest events to look for.

A full list of events can found at phoenixcomicon.com/programming/category/costuming.

Amtgard LARPing Demo & Games

More than a dozen panelists from the Arizona chapter of this group, which does LARPing, or live-action role playing, will play with and answer questions from ages 8 through 18.

Details: 1:30-2:30 p.m. Friday, June 6. Phoenix Convention Center South Building, rooms 155-158.

Arizona Avengers 5th Anniversary Celebration

This group of cosplayers is dedicated to the Marvel Comics universe. They have about 50 members in Arizona and 200 countrywide, and are looking for more who love comics and costuming.

Details: 6-7 p.m. Saturday, June 7. Phoenix Convention Center North Building, room 232BC.

Avenger Boot Camp

Too intimidated to attend Arizona Avengers' party? They're inviting potential cosplayers to see whether they have what it takes throwing Thor's hammer and Captain America's shield and using Hawkeye's bow.

Details: Noon-1 p.m. Friday, June 6, and 1:30-2:30 p.m. Sunday, June 8. Phoenix Convention Center South Building, rooms 155-158.

Mark Greenawalt and Friends Body Art Extravaganza

A team of professional body-painting artists will transform four models into villains in this live demonstration. Must be 18 or older to attend.

Details: 7:30-10:30 p.m. Friday, June 6. Phoenix Convention Center North Building, room 231BC.

Masquerade Costume Contest

Impressive costumes will be on full display for this contest, which is sponsored by Easley's Fun Shop. Those interested in participating can register at phoenixcomicon.com.

Details: 8-11 p.m. Saturday, June 7. Phoenix Convention Center North Building, ballroom 120.

One Night Only: Rhythm & Blues Cosplay Mixer

Wear a full-on getup or simply a jazzy hat and glasses for this mixer, which will have live blues music, cocktails and a costume contest.

Details: 7-9 p.m. Thursday, June 5. Renaissance Phoenix Downtown Hotel, Pueblo room.

'Predator'-Themed Wedding

Kurt Colin and Caitlin Fluck will be getting married in a public wedding at Comicon, and although costumes are not required, it's highly recommended to fit in with the extravagantly costumed bridal party.

Details: Seating opens at 6 p.m., ceremony is 7-9 p.m. Saturday, June 7. Phoenix Convention Center north building, room 229AB.

Steampunk Ball

Dress in your science-fiction-meets-Victorian-era best for this ball, which will have "tea dueling," a costume contest, live music and more.

Details: 5-8 p.m. Friday, June 6. Renaissance Phoenix Downtown Hotel.

Zombie Beauty Pageant

The creators of the 13th Floor and Fear Farm haunted houses will judge this costume contest, which is a guaranteed bloodbath.

Details: 9-11:30 p.m. Thursday, June 5. Sheraton Phoenix Downtown Hotel.

Cosplay and LARPing-related groups in metro Phoenix

Arizona Amtgard

Amtgard is a nationwide organization dedicated to free, medieval-fantasy sport combat. Participants fight with soft, padded weapons, as well as sometimes practice costuming, cooking, painting and theater. There are group meetings every Saturday at Encanto Park in Phoenix; check the website for details. azamtgard.com.

Arizona Avengers

Members of this Marvel Comics fan club celebrate the Marvel universe through costuming, and often dress up as part of volunteer and charity events. For example, they recently starred in a calendar with photos of the costumed members, with profits going to Kids Needs to Read. Facebook.com/ArizonaAvengers, avengershq.com.

Dune Sea Garrison 501st Legion

This is the Arizona chapter of the international Star Wars costuming club, which has more than 5,000 members worldwide. They create high-quality costumes of the "bad guys" from the series, such as Boba Fett and Darth Vader, and often attend charity events in costume. duneseagarrison.com.

Justice League Arizona

Fans of the DC Universe come together in this group, whose only qualification is that members have at least one good-quality costume of a DC character. Facebook.com/JusticeLeagueArizona, justiceleaguehq.com.



Reach the reporter at kaila.white@arizonarepublic.com or 604-444-4307.