The Never-Ending, Four-Color Festival: Cons, Shows, Events

By Tom Spurgeon

* the buzz from last week's Wizard show in Chicago, still the company's flagship convention, was extremely strong from a kind of grass roots comics standpoint. In a nutshell: no official presence from the biggest comics publishers and a reduced presence by most retailers meant that emphasis was split between the celebrity-type stuff Wizard's been doing lately and a large Artist's Alley set-up. I hope mini-comics legend John Porcellino won't mind if I say that he stayed the whole day, sales were good and he met several fans of his work while at the show.

* speaking of Chicago, organizers of something called the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, or CAKE, have announced a show for June 16-17 2012 at Columbia College. I'm not certain there's anything else that weekend or not; Heroes Con in Charlotte is I think a week afterwards.

* this week it's Baltimore Comic-Con, a show of the major regional/smaller national variety highly regarded by attending professionals for its mostly laid-back atmosphere and resolute focus on comics over other media. Baltimore is a fun city to visit, too, which always helps. That is a fine guest list.

* everything else about Wizard's convention business seems to be sort of a mess this week, as they've pruned some of their ambitious slate of local and regional shows to something more manageable. Heidi MacDonald has a nice list of the changes up here. A few things are worth noting there. The first is that some of these conventions were purchases/partnerships with already existing show. Just because Wizard is divesting from them doesn't necessarily mean the show will fail to go on in some semblance of its pre-Wizard form, so if you're a potential attendee keep an eye out. The second is that this all reflects on Wizard's plan to string together a constant stream of such shows, and indicates that such shows may not be as automatically profitable as some folks belief. The third is that Wizard has as part of these moves put an imminent (September 24-25) Los Angeles-based comics show into a state of limbo. This in itself has three notable aspects: that they're potentially going to screw creators and exhibitors that have made non-changeable plans; that to cancel something this close to the event indicates some very bad things about the company's convention business generally; that Los Angeles continues to vex convention organizers, Wizard in particular.

* 2012 exhibitor registration has opened for the Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland, Oregon. SPX has posted their list of official show debuts.

* finally, Kevin Czap reviews the Philly Alternative Comics Convention, a young show that has drawn interest from area cartoonists and a few alt-comics publishers. Willceau Illo has another report up here.
 
posted 4:45 am PST | Permalink
 

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