This Is The Cosplay That Will Be Representing Australia Internationally

This weekend, C2E2 in Chicago hosts one of the largest and most prestigious cosplay competitions in the world — the Crown Championships of Cosplay. This year, the Championships are going international, with entrants from the US, China, Austria, Singapore, Indonesia, India, France and of course, Australia battling it out for over $10k in prizes — and of course, the crown. With barely a week until the competition, Australia’s representative has been showing off a very impressive costume in the works.

Brisbane’s Major Sam Cosplay, as you might remember from late last year, was the national winner of Oz Comic Con’s inaugural Australian Championships of Cosplay, and fittingly is now Australia’s first ever competitor to face off in C2E2’s major contest.

For the major competition Sam is going all out with a cosplay that’s based off Japanese artist Sakizou’s artwork — a character called ‘Julietta Necromancer’. While not the most recognisable character, the costume is damn impressive — which is the more important factor in a craftsmanship contest like C2E2’s. The costume features a number of impressive elements, including custom corsetry and foundation garments, hours and hours worth of intricate beading and sequining, a ridiculously huge wig/headpiece and a number of LED accented skulls and skeletons.

Sam has even made articulated skeleton hands to go with her gorgeous death-themed costume. She stresses that (no matter how good it may look already) the costume is still not entirely finished in these pictures, and I’m looking forward to seeing what it looks like when it all comes together.

Testing out the articulated skeleton hands. I haven’t done the tension correctly as it needs to be painted first but I think it’s going to be ok with some tweaking. You know, the “making a prototype 2 weeks from con” kind of ok. #cosplay #costume #skeleton

A video posted by Major Sam (@msmajorsam) on Mar 4, 2016 at 5:31am PST

Major Sam has been chronicling her build fairly exhaustively on her Instagram, if you want to see more of what it takes to put a costume like this together.

While Major Sam isn’t the first to represent Australia in international cosplay competitions, Japan’s WCS — the other international comp that Australia has a spot in — has been notoriously difficult for Australians to place in.

The competition is going to be fierce over in Chicago this weekend, with a number of impressively credentialed judges including a costume designer from Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, another whose credits include Daredevil and Jessica Jones, one of Weta Workshop’s senior concept designers, and cosplay’s own Yaya Han. Still, I can’t help but feel like Major Sam is in with a good chance at winning. Let’s just hope there’s room on top of that huge wig for a potential crown.

If you want to catch the competition yourself, it will be broadcast live this weekend on the official C2E2 livestream.