C2E2 Launches First Show Today

C2E2, the debut show that sounds like a sequel, gets underway today in space at Chicago McCormick Place today. There are multiple business stories.

Local media has spotlighted one of them: the story of Reed's new show in competition with the traditional summer Chicago show, currently run by Wizard Entertainment. Wizard saved that show from oblivion in the late 1990s, and it became cornerstone of a still-developing convention strategy. At one time not too long ago, Wizard's Chicago show was a clear #2 event in North America and was even talked about seriously as a potential challenger to San Diego's Comic-Con International, mostly based on its capture of a very specific mainstream comics zeitgeist. The show has tumbled since then, both in perception and in the kind of realistic appraisals that count on on-floor observations and outside-in reporting as opposed to increasingly dubious reported attendance figures. I'd say that story is a little overrated right now. There's little reason to think that C2E2's big-tent, yearly high-point approach and Wizard's one stoop of many by a traveling band of nerd gypsies approach clash. Seeing it as a tussle favors Wizard, too, a show that looks like the little guy but really has any number of historical resources to its benefit, and a convention that has to meet a ridiculously low standard for its organizers to start trading high-fives.

Another story is Reed vs. Comic-Con International, and whether or not Reed's C2E2 and NYCC should be seen as two of three crown jewels in the convention business, particularly in that CCI operates a national show in WonderCon that has a more significant pedigree and probably sees itself as the one of those jewels. Yet another story is C2E2 as a measure of how appealing the broad designation of "comic con" has become, how big an appetite there is for this kind of activity in the Midwest. You can even see C2E2 as a story in isolation: how will it work, what will attendance, how much on board are the major publishers in terms of providing publishing announcements that drive a lot of news coverage of such shows and are also a signifier of how seriously such shows are considered, will there be a place for indy/alt comics and how much, ditto manga, ditto on-line comics, and so on. It should be a fun weekend for that reason alone, and I'm jealous of the reporters on site.

I also hope that everyone in town to visit enjoys Chicago. Chicago has several very good comics stores and a pair of great ones owned by Eric Kirsammer: Chicago Comics and Quimby's, small but powerful shops with deep local ties and a variety of unique shopping opportunities. Chicago is the best food town in America. It not only competes in the realm of culinary frou-frou, the City Of Big Shoulders offers a rambling landscape of cheap food options to shame any three other cities, from Salvadoran hole-in-wall neighborhood joints to a thriving Mexican-American small restaurant scene (the original burritos as big as your forearm) to the city's outright fealty to twin prime junk foods hot dogs and pizza. With its tolerable hipster ratio, Chicago offers an array of plebeian joys like honest-to-goodness thrift store shopping, big breakfasts, off-track betting, league softball taken seriously, staring at A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte or the same museum's multiple Homer Winslows, tromping around the Lincoln Park Zoo slightly buzzed, corner bars that open at 9 AM owned by guys named Charlie, and still-surviving stand-alone specialty retail like the Jazz Record Mart. It is America's best theater city from garage to million-dollar playhouse, it is the home of the most enjoyable painter who sometimes accidentally does comics without realizing it, and you can actually go to blues bars there and not be bored out of your skull. It is the city of Nelson Algren, David Mamet, Del Close, Studs Terkel, Rebecca Gilman, Bill Mauldin, Ernie Banks and Bronko Nagurski. It even offers one of the great sports experiences via a day game at Wrigley. What's not to like? What's not to root for?
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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