I had the chance to go back to Comic Con International in San Diego, CA after a nearly seven year absence from attending. Don’t ask me why I haven’t been back there in all that time. There really is no good answer as to why. But considering there was a period where I attended Comic Con six years straight and have been there a total of eight times before this year, to have gone so long without returning to Comic Con was definitely a treat I aimed to take full advantage of.

Then I started to talk to people I know who have been to Comic Con during the years I have been absent, and from they had told me, it was beginning to seem the Comic Con that I knew had evolved into a whole new monster. Not that I was totally oblivious to it; I mean, I do keep up with the news and stories that have come out of Comic Con over the years. I have seen the mainstream media takeover of the event happening year after year. The thing is, until you see it all for yourself you can never fully grasp just how different the experience will be. 

So as I prepared my stuff for this year’s Comic Con, I had this inkling in the back of my mind that I may very well be overwhelmed by the whole experience given how rapidly it had grown in the time that I had not attended. I mean, the last time I went to Comic Con, the main focus of it still relied heavily on just comic books and science fiction fans. Video game companies, anime distributors, and movie and television studios were just starting to make a mark there, but nothing that would lead one to believe that it would one day be the main focus of the con. 

My first experience that the whole event had changed was actually during the booking of a hotel room months before the event. The last time I went to Comic Con, it was hard to get a room near the Convention Center but not nearly as impossible as it was this year. Then again, the last time I attended the event attendance had just broken the 70 thousand marker; last year’s Comic Con had a confirmed attendance of 126 thousand - an 80% increase since my last time there. For the first time ever I would be attending Comic Con and not be staying in or near Downtown San Diego. 

By the time I actually arrived at Comic Con with Shadow and Nightminx, I could see for myself that damn near everything had changed. I had never seen the San Diego skyline adorned with so many huge banners promoting certain events, movies, and companies that were there. Getting closer to the con, the next giveaway that things would certainly not be the same was the massive crowd walking towards and around the convention center. I have been in and around large crowds before but never did I expect that I would see a crowd like that at Comic Con. The number of people, and the traffic flow congestion they created was unlike anything I had even seen in San Diego. 

Of course with large crowds there also comes certain complications, and my group and I experienced our first major complication back at the hotel which never received our booking info from hotels.com. That was taken care of within an hour, and thankfully to our benefit as we were moved to a higher end hotel at no additional cost. But we also ran into complications when attempting to retrieve our four-day press passes. Somehow, our passes were lost in the system and it took nearly two hours of talking to I don’t know how many people and one hell of an argument for them to finally find our names and give us our passes. Those are issues that I had never experienced before while attending Comic Con.

Another new thing for me at this year’s Comic Con was the fact that now the event had totally encompassed the San Diego Convention Center. In previous years, the con had taken up much of the convention centers floor and meeting room space, but it had never been into Hall H of the center before. Now it was, and some of the bigger and extravagant panels would be taking place there. Of course by now you all have heard of the stabbing that occurred there over seating, so I won’t get into that, but that did take place in Hall H.

Walking around the show floor was something else entirely. There was barely any room to move freely amongst everyone there. And heaven forbid that some booth was trying to make an announcement and draw in a crowd around them because that would just cause a stoppage of movement that would clog up an entire aisle on the show floor until the crowds dispersed from that booth. Even worse still was trying to take a picture of a certain cosplayer in the middle of the crowd. As soon as the cosplayer would stop, a crowd of people with cameras would swarm in and create an even bigger congested mess.

And while I started to touch on the subject of cosplaying, let me expand a bit on that. Before, if a person would attend Comic Con in costume, you could most certainly tell that they were true fans of either the character or cosplaying. Now, it seems that the con was filled with cosplayers who were there for no more reason than the sake of being the center of attention. This problem isn’t unique to just Comic Con, but it was definitely more apparent that it was at other events I have been to this year. I don’t know; there was just something about the cosplayers there this year that just didn’t seem kosher.

You could tell that some cosplayers there put no real effort into the costumes they were wearing. No attention to detail, no checking to see if the color scheme of the outfit or the makeup they would wear was on properly… in fact, most cosplayers I saw there just seemed so out of place that a fan such as myself began to wonder if some people are just so ego centric and narcissistic that they would pay that much to attend Comic Con simply to be seen in costume and have their pictures taken. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of good and excellent cosplayers in attendance as well. Some of which I know had gone through great lengths to get their costumes and concepts right to properly honor what they are fans of. But they were almost completely overshadowed by the bad and poorly thought out ones.

I know it seems that I have nothing but negative things to say about my experience at Comic Con this year, but that is far from the truth. The truth is, I had a real fun time there and I actually see a lot of these changes as being in the best interest in comics. As a fan, anything that brings exposure to the medium of comic books, especially when on a scale as grand as Comic Con is, can only be a good thing for the industry. It is then up to the industry and the fans to weed out what needs to be there and what is to be thrown out after each new Comic Con. Yes, there are plenty of things at Comic Con that don’t belong there. But that is when it becomes the responsibility of the true comic, anime, and science fiction fans to step up and say what we do and do not like about the direction that the con is going in.

Personally, I had a better time than I thought that I would given all the warnings people were giving me. At the end of the day, I ended up liking how things have changed at Comic Con. Yes, there were a few hiccups here and there, but overall my experience at Comic Con was a very positive one. If it were up to me, there are definitely things that I would change to bring back the major focus of the con back to comics. But in the overall scheme of things, and from a business stand point of the industry, I can see why the changes and focus have evolved into what it is today. I guess really, if there was one thing that I would change, and I mean one thing that really needs to change about Comic Con, is the fact that the con needs more space than the San Diego Convention Center is capable of handling - but that is a discussion for another time.