NYCC: Around the Floor Wrap-up
I would have liked to get to this sooner, but real world work interrupted.
It’s probably easiest to just say that I had a blast at the 2013 New York Comic Con. While this year’s show broke attendance records and put it on par with San Diego, the show actually felt less crowded at times and that may be due to the fact that the main show floor was not under construction. The areas around the panel rooms still had decent crowds but the main convention floor was relatively easy to navigate and you could stop and shop at the booths. Good job all around to the crew that laid this year’s show out.
Quite often I’ll forgo panels at these larger shows but this year I attended three, the Archer Q&A, Star Wars Rebels and Diamond Select Minimates, which were all fun and informative. It seems that the growth of NYCC has helped it attract some bigger names in guests and I was very happy to see two Star Wars panels on the docket. As we move closer to the release of new Star Wars movies in 2015, I’m hoping for even more content in the years to come.
If you saw our coverage from the week following the show you caught most of the Star Wars coverage. We did photograph some of the publisher’s booths, like DK and Dark Horse (they’re in the gallery with this article), but somehow skipped Random House. There were quite a few booths with Star Wars merchandise, mostly modern, but a few vintage gems could be found if you started to dig. I don’t have any photos and I don’t recall seeing much in the way of Sideshow offerings but did see a few Gentle Giant releases scattered around. Of course, being a “comic con,” much of the merchandise featured heavily in the superhero categories with plenty of video game and robot action spread around. The Block has been an interesting stop the last two years but with the exception of Onell Design, and a few choice offerings from Suckadelic’s GalacticJerkbags.com, not much caught my eye this year.
Two things that I did not spend time on this year were comics and art. With the panels cutting into my time on the floor, I didn’t rifle through any long boxes or check out the 50% off trades and I completely skipped Artist Alley. While I do feel guilty about skipping Artist Alley, I saw enough awesome art at the Baltimore show to tide me over. However, the list of talent at the show this year was impressive and I hope that people took the time to see the work, or have a sketch done.
Cosplay is huge and this year’s costumes ran the gamut from superheroes to zombies. Batman and his rogues gallery were very popular as were other DC staples such as Superman and Wonder Woman, Harley Quinn and the Green Arrow. But Marvel wasn’t left out with some excellent mutants, Wolverine and the ever-present Deadpools. Stormtroopers and Jedi were around the floor but were outnumbered by Anime costumes, video game characters, including a healthy dose of Lara Croft, and plenty of extras from “The Walking Dead.”
It’s become a tradition to get together for dinner on Saturday night and this year we invaded Beer Authority on 42nd and 8th Avenue. There were close to 20 people out for dinner and drinks and the conversation ranged from the cool finds at NYCC to vintage Star Wars collecting to how cute our waitress was. Boys will be boys.
This year we added A.J. to the team and she did an excellent job with her interview of Dave Gilbert of WadjetEye Games. Big thanks also to Zach Oat, of Diamond Select, for our tour of their booth and for an excellent Minimates presentation on Sunday. We’re looking forward to providing more of this type of coverage at future events.
My weekend ended on Sunday afternoon at about 3:00 when I headed to the shuttles for the trip up to Grand Central. I managed to pack a lot into my time at the show and I think it was because, as I mentioned above, it was easier to navigate the convention center this year. The press room upstairs was a nice addition and the ability to get off the floor to sit down, out of the crowds, was invaluable. The charging stations for phones and cameras was also an excellent bonus.
The biggest issue, and really the only issue, was the lack of of a reliable cell connection on the convention floor. I completely lost connection to Twitter, website data was intermittent and texting came and went in various parts of the Javits Center. Calls seemed to work but tracking a 3 person team through the show to make sure everyone made their appointments and panels was difficult without the data connections.
There seems to be room to grow New York Comic Con in the future and I can’t wait to see how they top this year’s show. For its size, NYCC is still an accessible show to attend. The panels, comic and entertainment talent is diverse and interesting and the large industry booths on the floor showed off a lot of upcoming products to get fans of all genres excited. As much as I fell in love with the Baltimore Comic Con and their focus on comics and artists, NYCC is the premier event on the East Coast. I’d advise everyone that enjoys attending conventions to put this on their short list. I can’t wait to see what 2014 brings.
