Conventions

Last fall, we here at The Beat teamed up with the awesome folks at The Devastator to put together a survey for convention exhibitors. With all the controversy over who is spending and what cons are con games, it seemed like time to seriously upgrade this survey. And you responded, with more than 100 people taking the survey, giving results on the top cons and CAFs that revealed average sales and average amount of satisfaction with each show. In case you've never heard of them, The Devastator is a humor/comic magazine based in LA that features sharp satire and art by founders Geoffrey Golden and Amanda Meadows as well as people from The Onion, the Daily Show, Adult Swim, Marvel and more. The result, as crunched by the Devastator's staff, has some eye-opening statistics. You can read the entire report right here, and see some of the Devastator team's own comments below, but here are a few of my own eye-openers:

Brought to you by Publishers Weekly, it's More To Come, the weekly podcast of comics news, interviews and discussion with Calvin Reid, Kate Fitzsimons...

By Bruce Lidl Lost somewhat in the initial burst of news from last week’s ImageExpo was the announcement of a new Image Humble Bundle offering,...

In an announcement on the Emerald City Comicon site, it's been announced that the show is joining the ReedPOP family of conventions. As announced, this is not s straight out acquisition, as the ECCC team will continue running the Seattle-based show, and also work on existing Reed shows, presumably including C2E2, New York Comic-Con, PAX and so on.

Back during Labor Day weekend, the Library of Congress hosted the 14th annual National Book Festival at the Washington Convention Center.  We posted the notice...

By Bruce Lidl As has become a tradition at Image Comic’s semi-annual event, the announcements of upcoming titles came fast and furious today at ImageExpo....

Before You Buy The Book See The Movie By David Nieves Tons of exciting announcements came out of the Image Expo keynote today. It's become the...

What goes up, must deal with thinner oxygen at higher atmospheres. The last two years have seen unprecedented growth in comic cons/ media events around the world, with many showing spectacular growth. But as we keep pointing out in our "When a con is crap" recurring feature, this also means a lot of fly by nighters and unprepared rookies are jumping in and not achieving the results they might have hoped for. And along the way, unsuspecting vendors, guests and attendees are getting caught holding the empty oxygen tank.

New year, new looks for some familiar websites, and some observations about Comic Con that I never revealed until now!

It's a time of consolidation and retrenching, and some don't make the journey to the next phase. One such entity is the Detroit Fanfare convention, as announced on this Facebook post. A planned February is being cancelled, a Kickstarter cancelled (and pledges not charged) and the event is not going to be held again.

By David Nieves The holiday isn't quite over yet but Dark Horse Comics is already getting set to take our Christmas money. Today the publisher...

Long Beach Comic Con 2014: Did Cosplay drive up Attendance and Sales? by Pamela Auditore Ticket sales for the Long Beach Comic Con held the weekend...