The Only Question About CCC Is If There Was Enough Energy There To Generate Some PR Spin



The Great Lowered Expectations Con, aka Chicago Comic-Con, the show previously known as Wizardworld Chicago, took place over the weekend. (You may have seen reports and photos at places other than Wizard's own site.) Other than the overwhelming positive that is money raised for John Ostrander and his struggle to avoid blindness, the shape of the rest of the news will likely form over the next few days. This is one of those shows where the show itself and its relative level success is the news over anything that might have been reported at the show.

The stakes are reasonably high: a struggling Wizard brand is trying to find its way in the post easy-display-advertising-sales and print-publication-sales-out-the-wazoo era. Part of that reboot seems like it will involve conventions not bearing the Wizard name. Of the Wizard branded conventions that could make the transition the one that seems most salvageable and transferable is the Chicago show, traditionally and even recently North America's #2 comic book show. Thus the name change. Wizard must continue to run a successful Chicago with increasingly limited resources and now under pressure of some level of assault from convention giant Reed, whose Chicago show launches next April.

I strongly suspect without looking at anything other than the headlines at CBR to find an Ostrander article that we'll hear about surprisingly good and perhaps even enthusiastic crowds -- Chicago-area mainstream comics fans are awesome to behold -- and fun had by people looking for the general joys of convention-going: various celebrities ranging from D-list to A-minus signing autographs, top-of-the-line mainstream comics pros doing the same and selling art, shaking the hand of the man that once drew the Taskmaster or whatever, laidback panels, dressing up in costume. Still, no one on earth will really believe a 75,000 attendance figure if one surfaces. As for the future, who can say? The seams will have shown enough for enough people to question the continued viability of the show, but expectations will also have been low enough that it seems more likely than it did a month ago that the show will remain a factor on the convention calendar. It seems to me from an initial impression that Wizard's performance was equivalent to Tom Cruise's box office referendum via Valkyrie: it was good enough boosters could argue it as a non-failure. Since that's more than some predicted, there's a chance there for them to keep going with some version of the show if they can take care of very real business trauma elsewhere in their empire. Admittedly, there's a huge difference between putting on one lowered-expectations show and making a run out of them, but things look better for Wizard than they before the show. I wouldn't be surprised by any outcome.

So now a region of comics fans adjusts their big shoulder and casts their eyes on C2E2. Reed has the advantage of a much better relationship with big-time comics companies and a much greater holding bag of professional resources. But it should be noted that Wizard has a few advantages over the Reed show that may yet come to bear: those lowered expectations against the much, much higher standards that will exist for the Reed show's debut; the out-of-city location for Wizard which is convenient for not only suburbanites who sometimes grumble about coming into Chicago proper but also allows easy access for fans of the region; a name that seems to me easier to sell locally; and a calendar date that may make it easier for out-of-towners to schedule a trip and builds on habits from previous years. It should be fun to watch what happens.
 
posted 7:55 am PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives