This week on The All Worlds Traveller, we’re thrilled to show the Megoosa and Branto portraits from cosplayer and crafter Brownie Knight, taken at Gen Con 2025 in Indianapolis, Indiana.
We met Brownie at our first Distant Era Cosplay Posing Workshop at Gen Con in 2022, where Brownie came as Skeletor from Masters of the Universe in her first cosplay. In my time working with Brownie, she’s played other characters from stories I recognize, including Poison Ivy from Batman and Mystique from X-Men.
But lately Brownie has been creating fascinating, whimsical mashups like Battejuice—an armored version of Beetlejuice—or the subjects of this year’s sessions: Megoosa and Branto, based on the gorgon sisters of classical mythology… only with geese!
Yes, that’s right: Megoosa is Medusa, only instead of snakes, she has geese for hair. Playing off the scientific name for Canadian geese, Megoosa’s sister Branto has Canadian geese for hair. Simple, brilliant, hilarious.
But there’s more! Brownie has a whole backstory cooked up for the sisters (as well as their third, as yet unrevealed sister). Not only that, but Brownie took Branto to a whole other level, stamping gold maple leaves into Branto’s leather armor and wearing a maple leaf belt buckle, as in the picture below. I greatly admire this kind of commitment to artistry in the details. And so did the Gen Con cosplay contest, who awarded Branto the prize for the Potluck category.
Photography
At Gen Con, I travel with a small portable studio. I try to bring enough gear to be flexible while still able to set up, shoot, and take down quickly. I try to determine the mood of each character and light the character for that mood, as different characters should have different lighting. With Megoosa and Branto, I shot several different looks. While they’re comedy characters on the surface, there is a story that Brownie’s telling through the characters. Part of that story is that Perseus cut off Megoosa’s head, and Branto hunts him down to get revenge. So we wanted to make some portraits that reflected a dramatic mood as well.
In our conversations prior to Gen Con, Brownie said she was interested in doing a composite featuring Megoosa and Branto together. We discussed possibilities for the shot, possibly with Branto holding Megoosa’s head.
We photographed all these possibilities at Gen Con. Since Brownie played Megoosa and Branto on different days, we made sure to set up our lights, lens, and camera angle the same for both shots in our composite.
In the shot of the sisters together, Branto is exasperated with the more carefree Megoosa, so we photographed eyerolls and facepalms from Branto, with Megoosa wondering what the big deal is.
Editing
When I returned from Gen Con, I had a ton of work to do between headshots, theatre shoots, and a bounty of Gen Con images to edit. After turning over the Dimension 20 event photos, I started my Gen Con edits with Megoosa, the first shoot of this year at the convention. Because I’d been shooting theatre, headshots, and events for months while longing to get back to my Gods and Heroes of the Aegean series, I was eager to experiment and practice compositing skills again. I tried putting Megoosa’s head in Branto’s arms and then placing frames and borders around the portraits, and so on.
I finished editing Gen Con with the last subject of the convention, which was Brownie as Branto. Here, I finally placed the sisters together and put them in an appropriately Grecian setting. I found some painted backgrounds of classical Grecian scenes, as well as some public domain images of Greek pottery. I ended up making two composites—one with Branto holding Megoosa’s head and the other with the scene Brownie and I had discussed. Perhaps I went a little wild with the editing on Megoosa and Branto, but Brownie has been a friend and patron for years, and I’m a big fan of her work, artistry, and clever ideas.
It was an honor making these portraits for Brownie Knight. I can’t wait to see what’s next for Brownie’s brilliant designs in the Gen Con cosplay scene!
Special thanks as always to photo artist Chris Koeppen for teaching, tools, and advice on textures and borders that I experimented with in the making of these portraits.
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