NY Post’s Shamus Profile Reveals Much

Here.

1. On the positive end, you can read this profile as something in which Shamus either participated directly or likely approved of indirectly, and as such it may provide some insight as to his current state of mind and market positioning. I would say this all but confirms that Shamus' new business model is going to emphasize the conventions over the magazines. It's not like the fact that Wizard's site ignored recent earth-shattering publishing announcements in favor of announcements as to what musical acts have been hired to play the next Shamus convention wasn't a huge clue right there, but still.

2. The incessant branding within the article of Shamus' conventions in particular and of conventions in general as Comic-Cons seems to me a deliberate attempt to piggyback on publicity garnered by Comic-Con International and to a lesser but still significant extent by the Reed Exhibitions folk. But mostly CCI. No one I'm ever aware of has called comic conventions "Comic-Cons" with such certainty that an article like this can make that determination. I've been writing about comics for 15 years and I was still looking up proper spellings two years ago.

3. "You might have to look hard to even find a comic book." Ugh.

4. I could swear Wizard didn't buy the struggling Chicago Comicon until 1998. I'd bet money it wasn't 1994, and that it wasn't called Chicago Comic-Con.

5. It's really a strain to say that Shamus is part of a new generation of promoters that have transformed the comics convention; the hopeful description sounds like anyone but Shamus (movie previews?), the more realistic description (Adam West) sounds exactly like what Wizard tried with its broader-implication WizardWorld set-up. It's quite a dance to make this all sound new, but CCI has been so successful and there is enough of an appetite for pop-culture dealer and minor-celebrity driven shows I imagine there are going to be a ton of people willing to write articles like this.

The funny thing is, I never had anything against the old WizardWorld shows except that they were not my cup of tea. A mainstream comics-focused show with a strong adult fan contingent and Golden Age dealer emphasis made a certain sense as a divergence from what San Diego has become. I was at the last few Chicago Comicons and the first couple of Wizard shows -- that show wouldn't have lasted much longer in its previous form. At some point, though, that model either showed its limitations or started to fail, and you had MMA on the premises and perhaps a certain kind of mainstream fan got too old to devote an entire weekend to drunken excess in a hotel bar and the shows weren't family-friendly enough to reboot... I honestly don't know. I just know it faded quickly. I think buying a bunch of smaller shows is also a great idea, but I'm just uncomfortable with the mirror-branding which could bring with it a lot of confusion in that marketplace that feels exploitative. I guess we'll wait and see.
 
posted 8:40 am PST | Permalink
 

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