Conventions

This morning's San Diego Comic-Con hotel registration process was, as opposed to past days, a quick 3 minute exercise during which I did not hit refresh even once. As you may recall, in the olden days, servers were usually swamped, resulting in endless refreshing, endless waiting, endless website crashes, endless agony. The upside was that you knew within an hour if you had your hotel.

This weekend's Emerald City Comicon seems to have been a raging success, if only from the amount of "highly refreshed" tweets we saw all weekend. The Seattle Times has a preview which notes that some 25,000 people were expected. Based on the number of pictures like this one from @alisonst showing packed crowds, it would seem that the first year going from a two- to a three-day show was a raging success.

The excitement has already begun at the Emerald City Comicon, but in case you need more info, here you go.

This is the first time the show has run three days, but it has definitely joined HeroesCon, Baltimore Comics Con, WonderCon, and a few others as one of the premier "regional" shows of the year. If things were different we'd be there slurping oysters right this minute, but hopefully next year.

Here's an interview with showrunner Jim Demonakos, and a guide to the show with ALL the info you need.

The Emerald City Comic-Con kicks off today and it sounds like a rockin' good time! We're GREEN with envy over everyone who gets to go. Lots of outside events too!

Nothing too notable...people went, wore costumes, made out with Elmo ,and got autographs.

The Wizard World Miami show kicks off this weekend at the Miami Airport Convention Center -- it's the first Wizard show in this venue so we'll see how it goes. Renee Witterstaetter announced some exclusives from the Eva Ink Artist Group:

If you were thinking of getting into the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con via volunteering, that window too passed a few weeks ago:

In the aftermath of Saturday's Comic-Con sellout, folks were kicking their server tires, expressing apologies, and planning to put the comics back in Comic-Con.

While lost in the SDCC ticket sellout hoopla, it's a curious fact that tickets for New York Comic Con in October went on sale Monday at noon, and here again there was a lot of demand, although nowhere near San Diego levels. As one potential attendee named @mightysquid tweeted:

It didn't take that long for tickets to this year's San Diego Comic-Con to sell out after they went on sale yesterday -- but it did seem like an eternity for those who spent four+ hours hitting the F5 key in hopes of getting through. The ticket site -- run by indie ticketseller TicketLeap -- went live at 9 am PST and immediately slowed to an excruciating halt -- it never technically crashed. Those who persevered through fail screens eventually got tickets -- by about 6 pm EST, 3 pm PST, all tickets were gone. We've already reported some of the bitter reports on twitter, but this really does seem to have been a year of massive frustration. The TicketLeap site took more than 35,000,000 hits during the ticket buying process...allowing for 100,000 tickets sold (let's say), that's 350 refreshes per person, but who knows how many actually TRIED to get on. No wonder that Isotope responded with the "FailFrog:"

UPDATE: Four day passes sold out about 4 pm e.s.t. Single day tickets are still available. For now.

To the surprise of no one, when passes for this year's CCI:SD went on sale this morning at 9 am P.S.T., even the industrial-grade servers at TicketLeap were immediately hobbled. Sales have been going on all afternoon, with this the most seen screen:

As you may recall, this Saturday is the FOURTH attempt at Pass-oween for the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con, with tickets going on sale with a new, multi-phase system which is being handled by TicketLeap, which explains in a press release: