Cosplay, canines, and charities came together at the Lethbridge Expo Centre last weekend.
Last Saturday, Lethbridge was host to its own first annual Comic Expo and Pet Expo.
The two events shared a venue and many people went to both events to enjoy dressing up and interacting with animals.
The Pet Expo featured local businesses, handmade pet supplies, clothes and adoption centres.
Every two hours, the adoption centres dressed up their dogs that were available to be adopted and showed them off to the people in attendance.
Other booths were selling handmade cat scratching posts or little hats and ties for cats and dogs.
Pet store employees brought their personal pets to show off their animals.
Dogs, rabbits, ferrets, snakes, and turtles were among the animals on display.
The reptiles seemed to be the biggest hit with the crowd.
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One of the more striking animals to make an appearance was a piebald ball python named Cash, named after the American singer songwriter.
A piebald animal is one that is mostly white with a few spots of pattern or colour on its body.
On the other side of the room, other businesses and artists made an appearance, including Brock Hamilton, a scroll saw artist with 18 years of experience.
“This has been something I’ve been doing to just relax,” Says Hamilton, “I can sit at the saw for a couple of hours, relax and not really have to worry about anything else”
He has been selling his art across Canada and the US for seven years, and has even given a piece to Stan Lee.
The Comic Expo capped off with a costume contest for the people cosplaying at the event.
The winner of the best female costume, Angel Wishowski, dressed up as a take on an undead Ariel from The Little Mermaid.
“I was just kind of going through YouTube and I found this really cool dead mermaid costume. I was sitting there and making my Halloween costume, then I heard about the cosplay contest. I thought if I buy a red wig I’ll have the perfect dead mermaid costume, and I’ll just cosplay as The Little Mermaid,” said Wishnowski.
The event lasted for five hours and had an attendance of almost 2,000 people.
The combination of costumes and animals seemed to be a pretty big hit.
“I just wanted something fun to bring to the community and something that people love. People love to dress up, people love animals. For the first annual, I decided to split the hall because I wanted to start out small and in the future grow from there,” Said Courtney Stanyer, the organizer of both expos.
Stanyer added the event was a success and she hopes to bring it back next year.
