First, Tom Spurgeon discusses the ups and downs of this year’s con with Comic-Con Director of Marketing David Glanzer:
SPURGEON: Assuming you’re going to be working at near full capacity for the next few years, what can you now do to generally improve the experience knowing you’re going to be working a variation of the same crowds from here through 2012?
GLANZER: My personal hope is that we can entice some people to work with us to program some off-site events. I know there was an event on Friday evening at PetCo Park , which we had no involvement with, but an big event like that, during the day, might be a partial solution to the crowding situation at the center.
Granted, one event won’t alleviate the problem, but a number of events? It’s something worth exploring and that might allow us to re-examine the attendance caps we utilized this year.
Then Paul Karasik turns in what has to be the best con report of 2007:
How can I begin to give you a picture of the enormity of this event? Imagine the largest airport you can think of. Empty it (except for Security). Refill it with hundreds of tables piled with plastic things and lots of people touching them. At first, I was overwhelmed by table after table after table laden with action figures, DVDs, video games, and, what else? Let’s see…oh yeah, comics. This is a Comic-Con, right?
After a while, I became less traumatized by the shear volume of stuff being hawked. 99.9% of what I saw I was not interested in. To be more precise, 99.9% of the stuff I saw I simply could not understand since I lead a sheltered life in a thatch hut in the woods. Electricity? What’s that? Once I began to treat all of this merchandise as an endless continuous fogbank, I found that I could begin to find my way to the places I really needed to go: the Starbucks kiosk and the bathroom.
August 27th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
Wow!
I’d like to read the WORST con report.
Still, thanks for the kind words.
I am curious. I have heard a lot of bitching and moaning about San Diego (and have contributed to a certain amount of both), but what do people LIKE about the San Diego Comic Con and/or the city of San Diego in general?
BTW: For those patient folks waiting for their Fletcher Hanks book (”I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets”) from Amazon (or your local comics shop): the 2nd edition should be in the warehouse soon.
In the meantime, check slide over to the Hanks website and check out the Fantomah story that does NOT appear in the book:
http://www.fletcherhanks.com