Shocked reactions to the dismissal of Gabe Fieramosco and Stewart Morales, both here and at Newsarama have been overflowing. In Fieramosco’s case, in particular, professional after professional from Peter David to Talant Caldwell to Skottie Young has mentioned how helpful and on the ball he was in getting exhibitors and artists what they needed, making his firing somewhat baffling.

Beat operatives drew our attention to a couple of other interesting links. This story at MMA WEEKLY talks about the IFL presence in Chicago, and throws around that 200,000 attendance figure that was making the rounds early on:

Wizard World is a comic and pop culture convention held by Wizard Entertainment, the company of IFL president and co-founder Garub Shamus. This year’s four-day event was the 10th edition of the convention and was attended by more than 200,000 fans.

Meanwhile, Todd Allen at Indignant Online runs down the problems at the show and mentions the most easily solved one:

Please get it through your collective head, Wizard World Chicago can not go head-to-head with the San Diego Comicon. Not going to happen. This business of scheduling Chicago 2 weeks after San Diego is asinine. Please adopt a realistic attitude towards this and quit hurting the show.

Spelling this out:

Its not even two weeks. Day of close in San Diego (a Sunday) to preview night in Chicago (a Thursday) is 10 days apart.

Does any publisher want to pack up the majority of the office and be gone for 2-3 business days on alternate weeks? Of course not, it will play hell with the schedules. Is it going to cause scheduling problems for creators? Probably. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons the guest list seemed a bit sparse this year.

Speaking of which, the Texas guest list is up.