Conventions

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While doing research on my German comics article, I discovered an interesting press release in the Erlangen Comics Salon website.  The news?  Five comics...

Jamie Coville has done his usually top notch job of recording some of the best panels from this tear's Emerald City con. Here's his...

Some people are very upset about how this year's San Diego Comic-Con hotel sale went. But should they be?

While the mainstream comics world was getting reaquainted and dusting off their drinking pants at Emerald City this weekend, the year in CAFS also kicked off in Providence, RI with RIPE, the Rhode Island Independent Publishing Expo. Now in it's second year, this is a show in a town with a solid comics history and within driving distance of lots of other scenes. Robyn Chapman, cartoonist, First Second editor, and Tiny Report mastermind, has a report on the show, and she had me w2ith the first photo above. Was this expo held in a Greek temple to the sun god Apollo??? No, just the Providence Public Library.

Yesterday The Mary Sue published an article suggesting that for-profit comic-cons could be violating federal labor law by not paying minimum wage to workers improperly classified as volunteers. However, a recent case involving Major League Baseball shows how ReedPop and other commercial comic-con ventures could beat the tag.

Marvel's Secret Wars ECCC panel teases and pleases.

DC Comics brings its upcoming  event to Emerald City with their DC Entertainment: All Access Weeklies and Convergence panel. Among the panelists for this fan...

A lot of Dark Horse Comics were announced yesterday with opening day at Emerald City Comic Con, but probably none more anticipated than the...

Seems like everyone had the same great idea at the same time: with comic-cons proliferating, and nerdlebrities making a circuit out of it, wouldn't this be fine fodder for a realityish TV show/webisode of some kind? And wouldn't actors who had starred in TV shows that had insanely fanatic fanbases but who didn't get much airtime outside of that be the perfect people to do it? It seems both Firefly's Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion and Supernatural's Rob Benedict and Richard Speight, Jr had the same idea. And both have turned to Indiegogo to bring these ideas to fruition.

Getting a hotel room for Comic-con is a physical and mental race against the clock. You need to have Nolan Ryan's fastball, Ronda Rousey's reflexes and Edward Snowden's keyboard skills. It's the ultimate test of nerves for nerds. But some may wonder, just how short IS the window to get a room downtown?

As I write this, the hotel situation for this year's San Diego Comic-Con remains in flux. Open hotel registration—which is in effect a lottery based on hand and browser speed—took place yesterday morning, and it was a tense, tense 10 minutes with confirmation emails yet to go out. Hours of training, both physical and mental, memorizing maps and testing internet speed were all for nought for a bunch of folks—the Beat included—because the website suffered some kind of hitch. Tony Kim has a sad account, backed up by many on Twitter. As the world collectively hit the refresh button at high noon EDT, 9 am PDT, the hotel selection form froze up and then sent you to the "Congrats, wait for your email" screen. That's what happened here. I got the first screen, clicked on some hotels hit return, got kicked out and then sat there in confusion and dread and then went back in. The second time it worked but by then four minutes had passed, four precious, precious minutes, and downtown hotels are usually gone long before that to people with better autofill speeds.