Poster photo - Sofia sivan as the venom symbiot

Interview by: Young Jeohn (YJ)
Cosplayer: Sofia Sivan (SS)

YJ: You have quite a unique costume that I'd like to ask you about. What's your name and where are you from?

SS: My name is Sofia Sivan and I'm actually from Canada. I'm living in the NY area now but originally I'm Canadian.

YJ: And how long have you been in the city?

SS: I've been here for about a year. When I first became American, I moved to Miami, then came to New York and it's awesome. I got my green card and everything, and now I can cosplay ALL over the states. *laughs*

YJ: And is this your first comic con?

SS: No... (thinks back) I think New York Comic Con is my third one now. But I've done others like Wizard World con in Toronto and went to the first Wizard World con here last summer. I always wanted to make it to California for, obviously, San Diego Comic con. I haven't yet though, but I'm working on that.

YJ: And how long have you been cosplaying?

SS: Hm... maybe five years now?

YJ: Only five?

SS: It's hard to say because people start cosplaying before they know what cosplaying is, you know? It's like they throw on a wig, saying "oh I look like my favorite character" and they don't even realize what they're doing - that they're cosplaying. So yeah, then probably longer than five years because I didn't even know the word "cosplay" when I started cosplaying.

YJ: How'd you find out about it?

SS: I don't even remember, it was so long ago. I'm really not sure.

YJ: Do you watch anime or read manga? Did somebody turn you on to it?

SS: I'm trying to get more into anime. I have a few friends that are super into it, so they're trying to get me into the basics from the beginning, starting me off with Titan. I mean, when I was a kid there was the standard stuff - Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z. But that's not real anime so I want to get more into it...

YJ: That's not real anime? *laughing*

SS: It's not "real". Well... I love it, I'm a huge Sailor Moon fan by the way, but it's "nice" and mainstream for American type kids, you know?

But it's not like REAL anime. I just re-watched all of sailor moon as an adult without it being dubbed - just with subtitles, which is so different already (that's how I prefer to watch it) to get the real meanings.

Anyway, I got started off on Titan and worked my way through that..., Gundam... (thinks)

YJ: oh wow, the real stuff.

SS: real stuff, yeah.

YJ: I hear ya. You're serious about this kind of thing. Or you want to.

SS: I want to be, yeah. I wanna get an anime education. *laughs*

YJ: So tell me about your costume; about the character, where it's from - is it from an anime, a comic book - for people who don't know.

SS: I'm Venom, and Venom can be just Venom or he can let the symbiot take over. This symbiot can attack anything and transform them. There's been a few instances where even Mary Jane, Spiderman's love interest... in one comic, I remember she was on the cover and she says "face it tiger, you just lost the jackpot" because it had attacked her, this symbiot.

So I'm doing a play on that. I tried to make it look like a symbiot's crawling all over me, like its taking over. But it's in mid-transformation, not fully done yet.

YJ: So you're playing Mary Jane with...

SS: Not Mary Jane, I'm still Venom, I'm trying to focus more on the actual symbiot transformation.

YJ: Now how long did it take you to put this together? And where did you find this latex thing that you've stuck on your face - which is really cool by the way.

SS: You know what sentai suits are? Chinese manufacturers sell a lot of them; they're basically full body suits with no eyes, no mouth, no nothing - a full body cover in whatever color of whatever material.

I got one with a shiny feel to it so it would look like the goupy stickiness of the symbiot. And since I sew, I started altering it - once I got the base done, I obviously removed the head and all that... there was a zipper, which I removed and just sewed shut, and I started cutting it to get the effect of the symbiot crawling over me.

The rest was just like painting - you look at it, slash a little bit here, sew something there... and try to get the whole feel.

But before I did that, there was the Venom emblem. I didn't have paint, so I had to use nail polish... white nail polish. I know (she says seeing my disbelief), I sat there with all my nail polish tubes and I just drew it. Freehand, yep! FREEHAND!

It was very MacGuyver of me, cause I didn't... *laughing* ...I didn't know what else to do. I'm thinking it's too late now, this is the day before Saturday, the day before the con - there's no more time to waste, so I thought to myself I'm just gonna do it.

YJ: And apparently it worked.

SS: Yes it actually worked, I got so many compliments on it. People think I bought it because the emblem looks screenprinted.

YJ: That's what I was thinking too, I thought you'd bought it somewhere and cut it up.

SS: Yeah, a lot of people did, so that's good. It means I did a good job. "Bought it like that?" they ask. Nope, *I* made it.
.

YJ: She's taking a bite of her chocolate bar because she's finally on her break, believe it or not...

SS: She's starving. She is STARVING.

she's finally on a break at NY comic con - don't forget the protein!

YJ: For you folks who aren't here at New York Comic Con, let me tell you how popular this gal is. We've been trying to move 10 feet to do a photo shoot -that's it, a 10 foot goal- and before we can actually move, she gets crowd mobbed with a "can I get a quick photo" from just about every attendee in this section of Javits.

With so many "quick" photos that she hasn't been able to sit down and relax even a little bit. But I will say this; it's a positive testament to her creation. Well done! Now are you going back out there to the crowds?

SS: Yup.

See more of Sofia here:
Instagram: @SofiaSivan
Twitter: SofiaSivan

Photo credit: http://photos.YoungFromNewYork.com

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