Just announced at the New York Times, ReedPop is expanding the reach of its flagship event, New York Comic Con. Not content with the Con taking place twice in one year, the October event is now expanding out of the confines of the Javits Center to become “New York Super Week“, a citywide festival from October 9th to the 12th designed to hit on all things fandom sort of like Austin’s South by Southwest Festival – but, you know, for nerds (well, a different type of nerds).
ReedPop will be partnering with Clear Channel on the extravaganza, which will feature comedy shows, lectures, concerts and much more while taking over venues like Barcade and the Hammerstein Ballroom. This is arguably the next logical step for the comic convention game, although it’s hard to imagine this really being an entire comic book-centric event. Impossible to, really, which sort of makes this upcoming weekend’s NYCC: Special Edition feel like something used to make comic fans swallow something of a bitter pill easier.
Lance Fensterman, global senior VP of ReedPop had this to say in the press release about the event:
“New York Super Week will follow the spirit of popular events like South by Southwest, but introduce it with a distinct New York sensibility and flair that is fully rooted in the world of popular culture. With New York Comic Con becoming so popular amongst fans, media and sponsors, it was natural to broaden the scope of content and tear it out of the Javits Center and into the city at large, allowing new fans and more fans to experience a whole week of content leading into the show.”
It’s absolute madness if you ask me, and it makes me a little bit happier about my decision to skip the con this year. We’ll see what our faithful bunch of NYCC goers at Multiversity have to say about this as we get it but it should be a wild time, and hey! Neil deGrasse Tyson will be there! That’s neat, right?
More on this as we get it, and please stay tuned for some very fitting pieces about the evolution of comic conventions tomorrow on MC.
