Conventions

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:

TCAF just got even more international with the announcement that renowned manga-ka Natsume Ono will be a guest. Ono, creator of not simple, House of Five Leaves, Gente, and Ristorante Paradiso, fits squarely in the "independent spirit" mold of most of the fest's guests and provides a reminder of the artistic diversity that manga offers. However she's also a very successful artist whose Ristorante Paradiso andHouse of Five Leaves have been adapted into anime, viewable in the US on Hulu.com, Funimation.com, and Crunchyroll.com, in North America.

The annual Angoulême comics festival is taking place over in France, and folks are blogging it like crazy. Tom Devlin and Peggy Burns from D&Q are having the best time ever obviously. And for those -- like The Beat -- who bitch and moan about having to stay at a hotel in San Diego more than 7 blocks from the convention center, the Burns-Devlin contingent is staying at a hotel 30 kilometres from city center. It helps when the hotel is a remodeled centuries old farmhouse and not a Days Inn, however -- no complaints at all.

After two melted servers and a stressful stress test that saw 1000 tickets sold in 60 seconds despite maddening lag times, Comic-Con International: San...