Missed It: WonderCon 2013 Back To Anaheim… For Now

Heidi MacDonald had a piece up last week over at PW detailing a decision by the Comic-Con folks to schedule the 2013 edition of their WonderCon for Anaheim -- Easter weekend, as a matter of fact. The show was held there this last year.

Let me try to type this out and see if I'm understanding it. What happened was that the Moscone Center in San Francisco was being worked on in 2011 and into 2012, which meant that WonderCon couldn't get dates for this year and had to move the whole magilla down to Anaheim. They did this rather than place it into a smaller facility in order to keep their general goals of a certain kind of show at a certain size at a general time of year. They wouldn't say so out loud, but I imagine this was also useful for Comic-Con in that this gave them something to give Anaheim, a runner-up in the sweepstakes to host the big Comic-Con International show, and allowed them to explore having a show in the greater Los Angeles area. If nothing else, Comic-Con putting a show into that general part of the country might help keep someone else from having a show in the greater Los Angles area of a size and with an imprimatur to compete directly with CCI.

Because WonderCon isn't a big enough show to leave a significant economic footprint on downtown San Francisco hotels and related businesses, Moscone wasn't able to give WonderCon dates more than six months ahead for the 2013 show. When Comic-Con finally crossed the six-month window upon which the Moscone people insisted, the facility didn't have suitable dates left. I know without looking that someone out there has written an article on alternative venues for WonderCon, but my impression is that there's nothing that comes close to Moscone in terms of space and central location. So Comic-Con announces WonderCon for Anaheim again, and if they can miraculously score some sort of workable dates with Moscone they'll shift it back and make Anaheim its own show.

I think that's basically it. Someone please tell me if I'm super-wrong with anything I didn't at least qualify.

I'm of two minds. On the one hand, San Francisco is a better place to attend a con by a factor of about 11,900. That's a great city to visit, there's a healthy comics culture, and there are comics institutions on hand for evening activities and/or to visit in days on either side of the con. On the other hand, once you get into facility issues, you're talking pretty fundamental issues of being able to have a show. Anaheim also has a few advantages. For one, it's arguably easier to get there if you're coming from a neutral location. Downtown San Francisco is easier to reach from other parts of the Bay Area, but I always have a bit of difficulty getting there. Having a Spring convention in Anaheim gives Comic-Con a chance to push a natural Hollywood angle -- a spring show, down the road from LA, well-timed to throw the spotlight on summer movie releases -- that never quite took in San Francisco. I imagine con officials might deny this is a priority and also might deny that this was not exactly working in San Francisco, but I think it is and it wasn't. I don't even begrudge them wanting to do a show with the movie stuff; they've earned that interest and focus by pursuing it for decades.

I feel bad for fans in the Bay Area that have had a show they like move, if only temporarily. That has to suck. I feel bad for local publishers, institutions and cartoonists along those same lines, although they would still have APE under any scenario moving forward and if you're going to argue "deserve" I don't know how San Francisco deserves two established shows. It might also be fun to see what developed in the vacuum, like the Image show from last year.

I would hope that the dialogue doesn't settle into the typical "greedy" patterns, but I imagine it will, along with the usual shrieked alternative plans that make no sense.

I found WonderCon pretty confusing the one year I went, even though I enjoyed myself. It didn't seem like an entrenched show the same way other shows like HeroesCon feel to me when I'm there. I also felt pretty alone in my sojourns away from the hotel bar and convention center and out into the wider community, but maybe when I wasn't looking a ton of people were enjoying different parts of San Francisco not the pair of comics shops that had parties.
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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