The Tip Sheet is spinning off. Introducing Space Invaders, a newsletter about movies and pop culture that invades this space on Saturday. Arrives irregularly during this pilot phase.
I’m not sure when the mood and feel of going to a comic con began to change, but I know when it started to change for me.
It was one Saturday morning at a Toronto Comicon event, and things were buzzing on the vendors’ floor and artist alley. I noticed a group of – for a lack of a better term – bros, and while they were wearing the colours, t-shirts with some kind of superhero emblem on them, they were, most definitely, not there for the appreciation of all things comic book, manga, sci-fi and gaming. They were looky-loos, and Comicon offered the best people watching in town!
At some point in the early 2010s, comicons, sci-fi conventions and other similar events went from uniquely niche experiences to something more mainstream. This was about the point that Marvel Studios reached its zenith with The Avengers, and when franchises like Twilight and The Hunger Games turned traditionally nerdy genres into something youthful, romantic and exciting and sold them to an entirely new fan base. Young people bring money, and money makes people want to chase that money to the point of making it the exclusive consideration.
It was around this point that cons stopped being fun and fan-focused. It was around this point I started feeling that going to these cons was more trouble than they were worth.
Now this could be an “Old Man Donaldson” moment, and I admit that being a very late-stage Gen Xer I’m probably not built for wandering around a convention centre all day for three days in a row, but I’m not so sure. To wit, I caught this post on notorious content mill BlogTO at the start of the week, noting how a number of people who attended Toronto Comicon last weekend experienced pickpocketing and theft and they didn’t experience a lot of sympathy or reaction from event staff.
"Thank you for the horrible experience of overcrowding and theft and harassment. Thank you for treating people with disabilities horribly! Thank you for doing nothing to help the hundreds of people that had their phones and more stolen!" read one social media post quoted by BlogTO.
Any big event is organized chaos, and marshalling thousands of people going every direction at multiple levels while also managing line-ups on a regimented hourly schedule for dozens of little events is as complicated to execute is it is to describe in a sentence. The weird part here is that the chaos at this event seemed to surpass the expectation of chaos, and the rude event staff, who are almost always universally rude, were ruder than usual.
The blame here, if many of the posts are to be believed, is overcapacity, although Informa, the company that runs Comicon and its summer cousin Fan Expo, claims that the amount of people inside the Metro Toronto Convention Centre did not break occupancy limits.
Perhaps they didn’t, but I’ve been to events in the past that walked right up to the line. I remember one Fan Expo where I had a thought to hit a food truck on Front Street as opposed to the highly inflated (and similar offerings) inside the building, but staff were counting people leaving and entering the event, which meant they were near or at occupancy.
At a certain point going to Fan Expo – or, more likely covering it during my Nerd Bastard days – I learned to find a perch and stay there, at least on Saturday and Sunday. You pick one side of the building, north or south, you pick a level, and you craft your schedule accordingly going from one room to the other, or, better still, staying in the same room. As a reporter, you could pick off most of the big guests and panels that way, but it also meant you couldn’t meander through the rest of the con, check out the vendors, or enjoying the hard work of cosplayers.
And if I may have another “Old Man Donaldson” moment I’m disappointed by just how big the event has gotten.
I remember being able to walk right up to some of the celebrities to say ‘Hi’. I’ve never been much of an autograph seeker, but I shook Doug Bradley’s hand because Pinhead has haunted by nightmares since the first time I saw Hellraiser at 13. I interviewed The Hills Have Eyes star Michael Berryman, talking about his love of cooking, as he sat at his table and kept signing autographs. I was able to grab Hellboy creator Mike Mignola for a quick chat as he left a panel, and then he introduced me to the director of the Hellboy animated movies. And Mile Morales creator Brian Michael Bendis let me do an in-depth interview with him, literally on stage, after a long day of signing autographs.
And those are the celebrities. It used to be easy to take time, meet new people, and have conversations where you were able to hear each other talk. You could get to know a vendor, or a struggling artist in Artist Alley, without feeling like your caught in the current of thousands of people moving up and down the aisles. You didn’t feel like you were being squeezed for every dollar, you could walk into a panel halfway through, and even with the big stars it didn’t feel like there was a distance between them and the fans.
That’s assuming that they want to close that distance. An article in The Hollywood Reporter in 2016 frankly, and quite brutally, laid out how conventions are a cash cow for not just the people organizing them, but for the celebrities participating.
“If somebody wanted to do a convention every weekend, they could make more on the convention circuit than their episodic fee,” said Stephen Amell. He was starring in the superhero series Arrow at the time and was turning the horror/sci-fi/superhero celebrity appearance at cons into a kind of niche management industry meant to maximize money making for all convention appearances, from the members of the TV Justice League to the survivors of The Walking Dead.
Now it was always the case that when a genre actor couldn’t escape the rabbit hole of type casting anymore that they had a future appearing at cons, but that was a way to get by, not a way to make a profit. Now, one doesn’t want to crack the chestnut about money being the root of all evil, but when making money’s all you can see, it’s easy to miss the little things like the fan experience. Or making sure fans with accessibility needs can get around the con floor. Or making sure that they can find their wallet where they left it when they see that coveted collectable.
That’s unlikely to change so long as Informa keeps packing them in at the Convention Centre, so while it may mean that you’ll miss your favourite celebrities, the smart move is to stick to the smaller cons for a while if you want to at least have a good time with good people while having some room to breathe. Like dozens of people last weekend at Comicon, the organizers will only learn when *they* start losing money.
Fan Expo Canada takes place on the last weekend of August in Toronto.
The Bookshelf:
500 Days in the Wild (Sat-Sun)
One Life
Perfect Days (Sun, Wed-Thurs)
Galaxy Cinemas – Woodlawn:
The American Society of Magical Negros (till Wed)
Borromini and Bernini: The Challenge for Perfection (Sun-Mon)
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (Sat)
Dune Part Two
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Hate to Love: Nickelback (Wed)
Jatt Nuu Chudail Takri
Kung Fu Panda 4
Late Night with the Devil
Love Lies Bleeding
Luca (Sat-Sun, Tues, Thurs)
Madgaon Express
Migration (Sat-Sun, Tues)
William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill (Sat-Mon, Thurs)
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 (starts Tues)
YOLO
Starting Thursday: Godzilla x Kong: New Empire
Galaxy Cinemas – Clair:
Bob Marley: One Love
Cabrini (Sat-Sun)
Dune Part Two
French Girl
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Immaculate
Imaginary
Kung Fu Panda 4
Wonka (Sat-Sun)
Starting Thursday: Godzilla x Kong: New Empire
Mustang Drive-In:
Opening March 29 with Godzilla x Kong: New Empire and Dune Part Two
Princess Cinemas – Twin:
Hey, Viktor!
Late Night with the Devil (Sat, Tues-Wed)
Love Lies Bleeding (Sat-Sun, Tues-Wed)
One Life (thru Wed)
The Queen of My Dreams
Princess Cinemas – Original:
How to Have Sex (Sun, Tues-Wed)
Magnolia (Sat, Mon)
Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (Mon)
Ru (Sat-Sun, Wed)
Stalker (Sun)
Apollo Cinema:
Anchakkallakokkan (Sun, Wed)
Argylle (Sat, Tues)
Drive-Away Dolls (Sat-Sun)
Om Bheem Bush (Tues)
The Peanut Butter Solution (Sun)
Predator (Sat)
Starting Friday: Exhuma.
This week on End Credits, Candice Lepage co-hosts as we’re forced again to ask the question: “Who you gonna call?” This next episode we’re going to call Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, and then we’re going to flashback to a certain June weekend in 1984 when both the original Ghostbusters and Gremlins opened at the same time. Which one of these supernatural comedy classics has the edge in a head-to-head match 40 years later?
And finally, feel free to reach out to me by email at adamadonaldson [at] gmail [dot] com, or find me on Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, GuelphPolitico.ca!