This weekend, the Jacob Javits Center on the west side of Manhattan welcomed the inaugural Special Edition: NYC. The convention, set up as a bookend to New York Comic Con (held at the same site, with the same parent company, Reed Pop), was set up to be a more intimate, comics-based weekend. Their website has this to say about the convention: “Special Edition: NYC is a pure celebration of comic book culture created specifically for die-hard comic book fans, creators and publishers!”
This was, to many, a welcome proposition. NYCC is a beast of a weekend, with 100,000+ people crammed into the Javits Center, and creators struggling for attention alongside giant video game and toy displays, 25 foot t-shirt walls, giant robot cosplayers on stilts who step on you (this actually happened to Multiversity columnist and podcaster Mike Romeo), and the cars painted like comics characters in the lobby. To have a convention featuring just the comics aspect of NYCC seems like a no-brainer.
Three MC staffers attended the event on Saturday – myself, the aforementioned Mike Romeo, and staff writer James Johnston. James came later in the day, but Mike and I were there before doors opened, and spent much of the day walking the floor together, discussing the con, shopping, and talking to creators. I’ll be dropping in anecdotes from Mike and James throughout, as well as some off the record remarks creators and retailers made about their experience at the convention.
The first thing I noticed when walking into Javits was how unusual it felt to see only a few hundred people queued up to get into the con. The entire show floor for Special Edition was in the space reserved for Artist Alley at NYCC, and the lineup to get into the show was only 50 or so yards long. This was a pleasant development from a fan’s perspective, as the space was wide open, comfortable, and lacking that usual funk of body odor/Axe body spray/hot dogs that Javits usually stinks of during a con.
The show floor was a weird amalgam of Artist Alley and the normal show floor at NYCC. The first half of the room was made up of retailers and publishers – Valiant, Marvel and Archie being the three main displays – with the back half being, essentially, Artist Alley. The major publishers there didn’t really have too much going on – Marvel had some swag (including the ubiquitous on the show floor Original Sin bouncy eyeball), and Valiant had a stack of free comics, but other than that, not that much. As James said, “The minor presence from major publishers made it seem like they didn’t care about being there. I mean, DC literally just sent some cardboard cutouts of Batman and a DJ. That’s not what you get for a convention, that’s what you get for the raddest Bar Mitzvah ever.”
He’s not kidding – the DC portion of the day was six or eight Batman cartboard cutouts, highlighting his various costumes throughout the years, and a DJ spinning hot jams like the theme to Star Wars. The publishers, more or less, were there with a minor presence, and never seemed overly swamped (outside of signing times, which were still pretty tame).
The retailers present were, almost exclusively, comic shops and folks selling original art. Mike and I made one of our first stops at an art booth, and spotted a beautiful “Love and Rockets” back cover by Jaime Hernandez selling for the low, low price of $10,000.
The front half of the con reminded me of the cons I went to as a kid in hotel ballrooms and VFW halls – lots of longboxes, some big ticket books, and a culture of folks hunched over, looking through longboxes for books to complete their collections. This part of the con seemed well trafficked, and a retailer I spoke to said that Saturday was a very good day for them. I didn’t see many retailer booths empty and saw some great prices (an “X-Statix” omnibus for $45 that almost came home with me, for instance). Overall, the retail portion of the con was refreshing – it was great to see books being sold to fans without a lot of the ephemera that sometimes gets sold at these cons. This part of the convention lived up to its edict to focus on the comics, not the culture.
Continued belowThe Artist Alley portion was, again, what you’d expect: a mix of established talent and new faces, with various levels of interest/excitement. There were consistent lines for Mike Allred and Gail Simone the whole day, but most other creators seemed to have a steady stream of lookers, flipping through art books or pausing to see what their books were all about, but not as many active buyers as you’d find at other shows.
One creator, about halfway through Saturday, had already declared it a “low-money” show, saying that no one was buying anything. This creator is not a newcomer nor a household name, but a really solid talent with respect and name recognition in the industry. Their original art is large in its size but affordable in cost, and was shocking to see so much of it sitting there, not purchased.
Part of this is, no doubt, due to competition. Just within a 90 minute drive from NYC, there were two other shows this weekend: one in Long Island (Eternal Con), and one in White Plains. The White Plains show, NY Comics Fest, had a lot of big draw creators: Scott Snyder, Jim Steranko, Mark Waid, Bill Sienkiewicz, Fred Van Lente, Ann Nocenti, and Paul Levitz, to name just a few. Couple that with Denver Comic Con, a growing con that grew 60,000 attendees in just one year, and you have a talent crunch to consider, as well. Special Edition was a bit of a late addition to the con slate for 2014, and being the same weekend as those shows didn’t help its draw.
Neither did the fact that this two-day show wrapped upon Father’s Day. One retailer estimated only 100-200 people all day showed up on Sunday. I am honestly not sure how many tickets Reed Pop was selling for the show, but this has to be a huge disappointment. I know not everyone lives close to their parents, nor does everyone have living fathers, or any desire to spend the day with their dads, but this is a huge blow to the potential audience for the con. One creator expressed real regret giving up his own Father’s Day with his kids to attend a show that was, more or less, empty.
A few creators I spoke with said that, monetarily, the show was a huge bust. Flying in and out of New York is not cheap, nor are hotel rooms, and the con just didn’t bring in enough people to justify the cost to many creators. One creator, in particular, said that they only made as much over 2 days than they usually make each day of a (not super busy) three day con. And this creator’s table had steady foot traffic every time I swung past it.
One thing that I would not have been aware of at the show if I didn’t get press materials ahead of time was that there were a number of panels taking place at the show as well. The panel rooms were on the opposite side of Javits, and aside from a few signs pointing that way, they were not heavily emphasized. I know that this is somewhat the case at every convention, but it felt especially odd, as the convention was so heavily focused on giving fans access to creators, you would think a panel, especially at such a limited event, would be a great place to ask some questions.
On a purely personal level, I really enjoyed my Saturday. I got to spend time with creators I enjoy, I picked up some great old comics from my youth in dollar bins, I got to talk comics for a few hours with friends, and I walked away with a sweet Ryan Browne sketch. The con felt shockingly small to me – part of this was that, unlike most conventions I attend, I had no interviews/panels/meetings scheduled. I was walking around, taking it all in, and had taken it all in within 40 minutes of arriving. I had done a complete lap, with stopping to talk to a few folks, in under an hour. Because of the relatively small nature of the con, I was able to do a lot more. I had longer conversations, I dug deeper in the bins, I took some time to really appreciate some art on display – I wasn’t being pushed all over by the flotsam and jetsam of a crowd.
Continued belowAhead of time, I felt the convention price was fair, too – $30 seemed to me a decent price for a one-day pass ($35 on site), but once I was inside, the price seemed a bit high. Heroescon, a much, much larger show that happens in North Carolina next weekend, costs $20 per day. NY Comics fest was also $20. Kids under 5 get in free at Special Edition, but both Heroes and NY Comics are free for kids under 12. James agreed that the price was too high, especially without the diverse experiences offered by a bigger con.
Speaking of kids, I didn’t see too many at the show. I mean kids both in the under 18 sense, as well as the “get off my lawn” definition of people in their early 20s. The show looked a lot older than your usual big con, and so was devoid of a lot of the usual con culture stuff. There were very few cosplayers present – I was surprised that any showed up for the con that was labeled as more of a “for comics” event, and Mike was surprised that there weren’t more (except for this adorable Captain America dog who, I’m pretty sure, was also at NYCC last year), and the overall feel of the event was a little more, and I hate this term, “grown up.” It felt like a place I could bring my 2-year old daughter without fear of her being trampled or scared, but one she’d also be supremely bored at.
James had this to say about the overall experience: “For next year, I would just try and get a bigger presence from the publishers and creatives. Maybe some more panels, events, etc. I think Special Edition was great at focusing just on comics – as I overheard some mournful Homestuck cosplayers note – but there didn’t seem to be a lot to do for the amount of time there. Buying back issues can only take so much time and as awesome as Artist’s Alley is not everyone wants to spend hella money for commissions or autographs (though I did get to tell Andy Diggle how much I loved “The Losers” which was neat).
“Essentially, and I hate to feel like the traitor here, but I feel like there didn’t really need to be a NYCC that focused primarily on comics. Compared to San Diego, NYCC always did a pretty good job of balancing comics culture and other “geek” media. For every booth focusing on South Park there’s four others for comics. And even though I love comics to death, I’d much rather go back and forth between looking for discount trades and playing the new Smash Bros. demo.”
I’m a bit more positive on the experience than James is, and overall, I think it was a nice try on the part of Reed Pop to bring a different sort of convention feel to NYC, even if the execution was flawed. One creator told me that Reed ran it smoothly and efficiently, but that the attendance is really what killed it. That seems to be the overall feeling from the weekend, and one that might be able to be remedied. On the other hand, with the recently announced expansion of NYCC into “New York Super Week,” I could see Reed Pop cutting its losses and focusing more on that con.
What Special Edition did do was bring a small-town show feel to the biggest city on the planet, which was charming and nice, if only for a few hours. To make it last into the future, however, they’ll need to turn it up a bit next year.
