Convention questions
I have a question that I feel that people here can answer.
Wife and I were on JCCC3 and are excitedly booked for JCCC4. It's an unusual event for us though - neither of us have been to any kind of non-professional convention before. There's an Austin ComicCon-thing next week, and I genuinely can't figure out why I would pay money for it.
The highlights from the website (http://www.wizardworld.com/home-tx.html) basically describe 1) meeting famous people, and 2) a comic flea-market. I don't find either of those things to be that significant. (Okay, James Hong is awesome. But a 35-second meeting and a scribbled *something*... Meh)
I know there are convention people in the group - what am I missing? Is the website selling this thing poorly or am I genuinely missing something significant?
(I ask here because JCCC forms my frame of reference for the answer)
Thanks!
Comments
The "crowd control" tactics that these events use are also bothersome. Attendees are often treated like sheep whose time has no value. In fact, just getting a ticket for some of the biggest ones (e.g. San Diego Comic Con) requires stopping your workday at an arbitrary moment (perhaps when you're on a ladder, fixing a software bug, or seeing a patient) and dumbly, mechanically refreshing a Web page for half an hour before paying a king's ransom for a ticket. Again, it's a matter of respect. I don't feel that these businesses respect their customers.
For these reasons, I favor fan-run conventions and attend commercial events and "comic-cons" only occasionally. And when I do attend the latter, I do everything I can to avoid the overcommercialized and overhyped aspects of them.
All that being said, I don't know anything about the Austin show, and I'm not really into comics per se. But if it's not too far and not too expensive, I'd say give it a shot just to see what it's like.
I do understand the paying for autographs though, it's just a matter of economics. There are just way more people at a con that want to meet those people than they could possible manage to in one weekend so you have to charge just to whittle them down to those that think it's worth it. Just supply and demand. I have always thought there are plenty of just as interesting people who I don't have to pay 60 bucks to get time with so I'll go talk to them instead.