Comic-Con 2015: Five questions with geek queen Felicia Day

Felicia Day’s star continues to rise in various media -- television, online content, books -- but it probably burns brightest at a place like Comic-Con.

When you can boast that you’ve acted in roles that include a slayer (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer�) and a scientist (“Eureka�), and are a bona fide romance novel enthusiast, hard-core gamer and Internet mogul, being what some refer to as a geek queen just comes with the territory.

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We caught up with the elusive Geek & Sundry leader, and soon-to-be possibly bestselling author, when she stopped by our photo booth. We had five quick questions for her.

How many times have you been to Comic-Con?

This is my eighth year.

What is different about it each year that you come?

Well, it’s certainly different because the first time I came I was handing out bookmarks for “The Guild� on the sidewalk, trying to get people to notice my stuff. And now I have a company that works with Legendary and they just rented out Petco [Park] for our co-carnival activation with Nerdist and Amy Poehler’s company. It’s certainly a different perspective, but at the same time I’m still really excited to try to fend people off and get to exclusives on the floor. So, it’s a little bit different, but it’s more and bigger of the same, which I love.

I’ve heard that you don’t even like to leave your house sometimes. What’s it like to be out and about and be recognized by so many people?

I’m very fortunate that my fans or people that like my work are not like, ‘Oh, that’s a celebrity,’ and then tweet about how short I am. It’s more of big sister or a little sister kind of thing where they’re like ‘Hey, Felicia, I like your hair! Saw that video. Sorry that you had a cold last week.’ That’s the kind of relationship that social media creates, and I love that more because every single person that likes my work is interesting to me as well. There are so many diverse backgrounds -- it’s like coming to a reunion each year, really.

Speaking of reunion, Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk are a few feet away from us. How do you feel being a part of the Whedonverse?

The Whedon family was the first family I knew, so it’ll always be the one that’s most dear and precious to my heart. Joss creates a family, really, of people who respect each other’s work and are good people, so whenever I see another person in the ‘verse, I know that it’s a friend I can just hang out with and someone I can have a drink with. It’s a real friendship, and that sort of family is something I want to expand in my own work. In my community under Geek & Sundry, I want any person who sees another person with that shirt on be able to be friends. That’s something that you have to work hard at, but I think that we do a great job, and the people that are in our community do a great job at helping build that family.

You have a book coming out -- a memoir. What do you want people to get from the book when it does come out?

So I have a book coming out on Aug. 11 called “You’re Never Weird on the Internet [Almost].� It’s about how I grew up as a strange home-schooled girl and came to this point where I wake up everyday and live the things I love. It’s a journey, and I guess the thing that I want people to take away from it is that embracing who you are, especially the weird parts, is how you find fulfillment, meaning and ultimately success. I think that sometimes we’re encouraged to round out our corners and be not who we are or be ashamed of the things we love because they don’t fit into the mainstream. But the beautiful thing about the world we live in now is that it’s a digital world where you can connect with people who love the things that you love or are the kind of people that you feel like you could be at home with in a way that we’ve never had in the past because we’ve only had face-to-face connections. I hope that people take that as an inspiration to create something themselves, reach out to other people and embrace who they are because that’s where we ultimately find our freedom.

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