Meet the Miami Gardens teacher who transforms into a cosplay champion for comic con
You might think that putting together a costume to wear to a comic convention is easy, but Miami Gardens teacher Matthew Harden knows better.
He knows the time-consuming and intricate work involved in making a character come alive. He knows how easy it is to spend hundreds of dollars on materials. He knows that if the costume is heavy it may take hours — hours! — of laborious plodding just to make it to the convention center floor.
He also understands that costumes don’t always cooperate. He’s got burn scars from hot glue. Sometimes getting through doors or up stairs is tricky. Once, he got overheated inside a costume and passed out. Another time, after putting on a torso piece, he got stuck and couldn’t get it off. Because it is a truth universal to each and every instance of personal humiliation, he was wearing only his underwear.
“I struggled for like 30 minutes, 40 minutes,” Harden says now, laughing. “And then I started to cry. I had to call my neighbor over to help me. I was so embarrassed. I didn’t want to break it, and I didn’t want it to be cut, but eventually we had to cut it off me.”
Happily, that mishap didn’t deter Harden, 34, from keeping up his 15-year streak of creating intricate and imaginative costumes for cosplay — or from attending this year’s Florida Supercon, which runs July 12-14 at at the Miami Beach Convention Center.
Created by Mike Broder in 2006 and acquired by the company ReedPop in 2019, Florida Supercon features a ton of events, from appearances by such TV stars as David Tennant (“Doctor Who,” “Good Omens”) and Ella Purnell (“Fallout,” “Yellowjackets”) as well as cast members from shows like “Our Flag Means Death” and “What We Do In the Shadows.” Other performers and voice actors will appear, too, as well as artists and writers, representing anime, manga, comics, video games and more.
There are autographing and photo sessions as well as panels and parties. But the lifeblood of the convention belongs to the cosplayers like Harden, who will have a booth at this year’s convention. They dress as their favorite characters, pose for photos and remind you why you started loving this culture in the first place.
“It allows you to be someone else,” Harden says of cosplaying. “You don’t worry about your bills or your job. You’re just there to have fun around people who are not judgmental. There, I can be someone else. I don’t have to be Mr. Matthew. I can be my inner child.”
Harden, who grew up in Kendall and attended John A. Ferguson High and Miami Dade College, took his first steps toward cosplaying while working at a summer camp and thrifting costumes for skits at Goodwill and other shops. A teacher of music and technology at Holy Cross Lutheran School in North Miami, the Miami Gardens resident is a big fan of action figures and video games. Once he learned what cosplaying was, he decided to try his hand at it.
Despite his affection for all things artistic — he originally applied for a job teaching art — Harden admits his first attempt was a mess. Trying to recreate Darth Revan from the “Star Wars” universe, he used a trash lid for a mask, plastic sheeting for armor. Tragically, a hoodie was also involved.
Nothing quite worked. “It was just really bad,” he says.
He swiftly graduated to more complicated costumes, scouring the Internet and social media for obscure characters. You’ll see plenty of Marvel, DC and “Star Wars” characters at any comic con — there is never a lack of Spider-Man, Harley Quinn or Boba Fett — but Harden seeks out characters nobody else has cosplayed. He did make a Voldemort costume for the last Harry Potter movie, but he also likes to make up his own characters.
His skills improved quickly. He’s been a dragon and an invented “Star Wars” lord. In 2022, he arrived at Florida Supercon as Dark Star Mordekaiser from the “League of Legends” video game, a costume so huge a friend had to help him in and out of it. He could only walk around the floor for 15 minutes at a time before he had to rest, despite the fans built into the costume.
His newest costume is Shao Kahn Bowser, a samurai version of the villain Bowser from Nintendo’s Mario franchise. He’s also building a separate Bowser costume he hopes to finish in October.
Harden’s sister Michaela Alphonse, who lives in North Miami, has watched her brother’s obsession grow over the years.
“As a kid, he would take these wrestling figures and transform them,” she says. “He was doing that in middle school. And I was shocked by all of this but at the same time it was like, ‘Well, this is the natural progression of things.’ I remember one costume he did, it was a character like a crow. The way he made that costume move, it really looked like a bird and how a bird would move. I was just amazed at the mechanics behind it.”
Harden, who also designs custom costumes for Carnival celebrations, says he has won prizes for best costume seven times over the years. He’s traveled to other conventions, too, in Orlando, Tampa and Atlanta. Competing at Florida Supercon was sidetracked in 2021, though, when he had a stroke brought on by a bulging disc in his back that caused an infection in his brain.
“I lost movement on my left side for a day, and then it came back,” he says. “But it was really weak, so I had to do rehab to get my strength back. That was a pretty scary time.”
Harden estimates a costume can cost anywhere from $200 to $800 to make; so far he’s only spent around $200 on Shao Kahn Bowser since he was able to recycle pieces from other costumes (Voldemort’s robe, for example, became a cape). He uses a lot of foam for the costumes because it’s light. Shao Kahn’s Thor-like hammer may look heavy, but it’s not.
Shockingly, he has made costumes over a weekend or a Thanksgiving break, but usually it takes a little longer. His teaching job, as you might imagine, leaves him exhausted.
Storage is an ever-present problem. Harden keeps a storage unit and tries to design costumes that can be taken apart so the separate pieces are easier to tuck away. He also made a throne for his Bowser costume but wisely decorated his classroom in a Mario theme and keeps the throne there as part of the decor.
“One side of my room is Princess Peach’s castle, kind of a Mushroom Kingdom theme, and the other side is the Bowser side, and that’s where my throne is,” he says. The students, he adds, love it.
Teaching, of course, is Harden’s true passion. As a musician who plays piano, organ, guitar, drums, bass and ukulele, he has found his groove as a music and tech teacher, instructing all grades in music and introducing middle schoolers to tech skills like building websites.
He wouldn’t mind teaching art to high school kids some day — “in high school, they’re more serious and willing to put forth the effort,” he says. But he still wants to incorporate his love of comic con culture into his day job, hoping to start a cosplay club and host a school comic con at some point.
“I love teaching,” he says. “You don’t always know when your students succeed in life, but when they do come and tell me what they’re doing, it’s really rewarding. One of my students just graduated from high school, and he’s going to Iowa for college. He struggled in middle school but got through it, and now he’s going to work in tech. So that’s pretty cool. . . . I wouldn’t give it up. It’s my life.”
Florida Supercon
Where: Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Dr., Miami Beach
When: July 12-14
Cost: $55-$65 for one-day ticket; $105 for three-day pass
Tickets: Floridasupercon.com
