The Fashion Nerds Who Drop $$$$ on Comic Con Costumes

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This morning, the world was introduced to six NYC-based cosplayers—all of them appearing totally normal IRL—who have dropped thousands of dollars to look just like comic book characters. In preparation for New York Comic Con, which takes place at the Javits Center this weekend, the New York Post spoke to the city's nerdiest fashion obsessives, and the results were, well, super.

↑ First up, there's 36-year-old Williamsburg resident Ruby Taki, whose three jobs are: working in a real estate office, DJ-ing, and building this incredible Metal Gear REX armored robot suit, which reportedly cost $7,000 and took eight months to build. And though Taki herself wears it (that's her inside the suit), it takes three people to move and assemble it.

↑ Next, there's 30-year-old Cici James from Dumbo, owner of the sci-fi bookstore Singularity & Co. At Comic Con, she'll be dressed as Molotov C-ktease, a Russian mercenary on the cartoon The Venture Bros., in a $350 costume. James also has a wonderful take on men's reactions: "I've actually made an anthropological study of people's reactions to my costumes," she told the Post. "They generally follow a specific pattern: people—men—falling into soliloquies about the character I'm dressed as, info-dumping everything they know about it, and then simply falling silent and walking away when I ask them a non-topic question like, 'And what is your name?'"

↑ And on the far opposite end of the Disney—NSFW cosplay spectrum, 18-year-old FIT student Amanda Gazzola said her Elsa costume took 130 hours to make and cost $400. "I had to remake the cape, because someone actually stepped on it and ripped it, and I had to purchase a ton of sequins from England, which was expensive," she said.

· Meet the Fans Who Spend Serious Cash on Comic Con Costumes [NYP]
· Comic-Con 2014: 54 Looks That Upstage Your Best Halloween [Racked]