It’s two days until the launch of Denver Comic Con, and the event’s fearless leaders look frazzled.
Sitting in their office a few blocks from the Colorado Convention Center, which will host the 500,000-square-foot event from Friday through Sunday, convention director Christina Angel and programming director Bruce MacIntosh repeatedly check for pressing e-mails on their laptops, which are emblazoned with Iron Man and Pokémon decals. In a conference room nearby, organizers are scrutinizing a blow-up of the convention center floor like a battle map, coordinating the 75,000 fans and 860 volunteers expected to attend.
“We wanted to create the convention that we always wanted to go to,” says MacIntosh. “The great irony is that we did, and now we’re too busy to experience hardly any of it.”
By any measure the non-profit Denver Comic Con has been a success. Since its launch in 2012, Denver Comic Con has ballooned into Denver’s biggest consumer convention and one of the largest pop-culture conventions in the country. At the same time, the event’s organizers are learning that with great power comes great responsibility.
Like other local comic cons across the country, Denver’s started thanks to the work of a lot of dedicated comics fans. But also like other cons, Denver’s has dealt with its fair share of internal shake-ups and pressures from outside forces—like larger national convention outfits coming into town. And now Denver Comic Con finds itself at a crossroads: Will they be able to keep their loyal attendees and continue to grow or will outside interlopers pull them away one by one?
Last year, Charlie La Greca, one of the convention’s founders, was ousted from the organization and responded on a website called Save Denver Comic Con, where he voiced concerns over what he considered to be mismanagement on the part of his former colleagues. La Greca and Comic Con’s management recently concluded legal mediation and while the results of that mediation weren’t made public the resolution appears somewhat tenuous. La Greca seems mostly pleased with the outcome, but he is also behind two Rock Comic Con concerts on Friday and Saturday night, where bands like Daenerys and the Targaryens will be in direct competition with “The Nerd Rock Experience” and other official after-hours Comic Con events.
“After a year of intense life changes, I’m getting back in the Quinjet and strapping in for blastoff,” La Greca says when asked about the ordeal. “My mind is constantly bustling with ideas and I’m ready and prepped to take that next step. We’ve been developing Rock Comic Con since 2010 and I’ll be expanding that concept and its market reach in 2015.”
There may also be a new foe on the horizon. Denver Comic Con organizers say they’ve heard that Wizard World, a major pop-culture convention chain that doubled its offerings to 16 cons this year, is aiming to hit Denver in 2015. Wizard World CEO John Macaluso will neither confirm nor deny the rumor, noting only “we have a more expanded calendar for next year, and there is probably not a city in the country we are not looking at.” Wizard World might not be the only operation eying Denver; convention companies like ReedPop and Informa are also expanding their comic-themed lineup and could try to get in on the geeky action.
Just as superheroes and sci-fi have come to dominate Hollywood and the videogame industry, comic book events have morphed from niche festivals to behemoth pop culture celebrations.
Just as superheroes and sci-fi have come to dominate Hollywood and the videogame industry, comic book events have morphed from niche festivals to behemoth pop culture celebrations. The leading U.S. convention, Comic-Con International in San Diego, is projected to generate nearly half a billion dollars in economic impact between 2013 and 2015. “San Diego Comic-Con has become one of the world’s biggest media events,” says Heidi MacDonald, editor of the comics news site The Beat. “Who wouldn’t want to be part of that? A lot of local shows are trading on that reputation.” These days, MacDonald estimates there’s between 600 and 700 pop-culture conventions doing so around the world each year.
And where there’s that sort of money and attention involved, there’s conflict. Hence, the so-called “con wars” have erupted over control of various convention markets: One-time event co-organizers in Cincinnati that now go head-to-head with competing events. A lawsuit over who gets to use the term “comic con” in Toronto. And Wizard World’s tendency to enter a new city by scheduling their event right before a preexisting con. “They have a predatory model,” says Steve Menzie, general manager of Fan Expo Canada in Toronto. “They find somewhere that has good show in a strong market and try to take it over.”
Wizard World’s Macaluso, however, denies that’s the case. “It has never been my strategy,” he says. “We try to put a show in city that does not conflict with other events. We are simply at the mercy of the schedules of the event centers.” But in practice, such conflicts have repeatedly arisen. Last year, for example, Wizard World Portland debuted just a month before the longtime Emerald City Comicon in nearby Seattle. And last month, Wizard World held its first convention in Minneapolis two weeks before SpringCon, which has been held in the city for 26 years.
“San Diego Comic-Con has become one of the world’s biggest media events. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that? A lot of local shows are trading on that reputation.”— Heidi MacDonald, editor of The Beat
“They’re branching out like the Borg,” says Joe Parrington, Emerald City’s former PR director. Since Wizard World set up shop in Portland, Parrington says for the first time, several celebrities booked at Emerald City haven’t made enough selling autographs to meet their event guarantees, meaning the convention has had to pay them the difference.
So what’s the best way for independent conventions like Denver Comic Con to stay afloat in the increasingly cutthroat industry? One option is to turn professional. “A lot of these conventions have fanboys and girls running their shows,” says Parrington. “They are not business people. And so when Wizard comes to your town, they may not kill your show, but they will make your show work around them.”
Attendees Chris Holm, Chris Walenter, and Kelsey Kraft take a break during the Denver Comic Con in 2013. Photo: Seth McConnell/The Denver Post via Getty
But some longtime convention organizers say there’s another option: Get back to basics. According to lead organizer Nick Postiglione, attendance at this year’s SpringCon in Minneapolis was up 25 percent despite Wizard World Minneapolis occurring two weeks earlier, plus SpringCon didn’t have trouble meeting celebrity autograph guarantees—since it doesn’t book celebrities. “We are a comic con. We don’t do media guests,” he explains. “We are kind of purebred in that way. We are here to provide the comics industry opportunities to interface with the public. There is kind of a fight going on for the heart and soul of the whole thing. A lot of conventions have forgotten the girl who brought them to the dance, so to speak, which is the comic geek.”
Denver Comic Con, for its part, is taking a middle-of-the-road approach: “We aim to do a lot of everything,” says MacIntosh. Yes, Denver Comic Con attendees this year can spend $150 for the best seats at a partial cast reunion of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but they can also visit with the 300-plus comic artists who will be in attendance, 80 percent of which are based locally. Yes, attendees can shell out $50 for a photo op with Chandler Riggs, the kid who plays Carl Grimes on The Walking Dead, but they can also attend workshops with titles like “The Margins of the Panel: Marginalized Identities in Comics.” Or attendees can try out new shoot-em-ups in the convention’s “Hall of Games,” but the revenues from their convention ticket purchase will be go to support Comic Book Classroom, a local comic literacy organization for underserved students.
“We want to appeal to new people and get them in the door, so then they can figure out what we already know,” says Angel. “We can get a whole bunch of new people on the bandwagon for comic books.”
