Category: Conventions

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Wizard World Los Angeles 2008Wizard World Los Angeles turned out to be a surprisingly good con. Originally I was planning to go on my own, but when they announced the addition of Milo Ventimiglia (Peter Petrelli) to the Heroes panel, Katie decided to go as well. So we drove into LA Saturday morning, and arrived at the con around 11:00 AM. I was expecting a much sparser crowd based on my experience last year, but that had been a Sunday. This Saturday was a full-fledged con.

Update: The photo gallery is up!

The Floor

I put on my robe and wizard hat.I spent most of the time on the main floor, hunting down back-issues, bargains and autographs. A lot of dealers had brought their bargain bins (some of them, thankfully, alphabetized!), and a lot of them had trades and hardcovers for half-off or close to it. There were also the booths selling high-grade Silver-Age and Golden-Age books, toys and collectibles, and at least two booths selling swords. Yes, swords.

At one point, I overheard two comic-book dealers discussing whether the show was worth it. One of them said that people here tended to be looking for bargains, so it was hard to sell anything else. They agreed San Diego was a better bet.

Marvel Cars: Iron Man and Punisher SUVsI’ve been joking that the logo design for this year’s con (see above) was inspired by the gigantic auto show that shared the convention center witl last year’s con. So I was surprised to find a mini-auto show here: Marvel-themed cars, including Iron Man and Punisher SUVs.

There was a stage set up for Guitar Hero. At one point, I noticed the music was Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” It seemed appropriate.

Costuming

Darth Vader and his entourage march though the food court.There weren’t quite as many people in costume as I saw at WonderCon last month (also a Saturday). But there was a large contingent of people in Jedi costumes, some of whom seemed to be sparring with lightsabers every time I walked down the right edge of the dealers’ room. And there were Imperial Stormtroopers directing traffic, making sure people could find the one large panel room that was half-way to the other end of the convention center.

Continue reading →

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I’ve been trying to decide whether to go to Wizard World Los Angeles this year. On one hand, it’s close. On the other hand, I just went to WonderCon last month. The astonishing thing is that a one-day ticket for WWLA costs almost as much as a 3-day membership to WonderCon. This got me thinking about comparing convention prices.

So I looked up the comic conventions in the area, plus the other two Wizard World cons that have prices up.

Convention Thu Fri Sat Sun Full
LA Comic/SciFi (a.k.a. The Shrine) $8 N/A
WonderCon (advance) $12 $12 $10 $30 = $10/day
WonderCon (onsite) $15 $15 $10 $40 ≈ $13/day
Wizard World LA, Philadelphia $25 $25 $25 $45 = $15/day
Wizard World Chicago $25 $25 $25 $50 ≈ $17/day
Comic-Con Intl. (way ahead)* $60 = $15/day
Comic-Con Intl. (advance) $25 $30 $35 $20 $75 ≈ $19/day
Comic-Con Intl. (onsite) none

And to compare to some non-comic-focused conventions, some nearby, some just big:

Convention Thu Fri Sat Sun Full
ConDor (advance) $25 ≈  $8/day
ConDor (onsite) $20 $25 $15 $50 ≈ $17/day
Loscon (advance) $35 ≈ $12/day
Westercon 61 (advance) $60 = $15/day
Gen Con Indy (advance) $35 $35 $35 $35 $60 = $15/day
Gen Con Indy (onsite) $45 $45 $45 $45 $75 ≈ $19/day
Dragon*Con (advance) $65 ≈ $16/day
Dragon*Con (onsite) $90 ≈ $22/day
Worldcon/Denvention 3 (advance) $200 = $40/day

It’s interesting to note that WonderCon (San Francisco) and ConDor (San Diego) are extremely cheap if you sign up far enough in advance. Also, when you expand to more general cons, San Diego Comic-Con is right in the middle of the range, with several conventions being more expensive. I’d guess that the more volunteer-based cons like Westercon and Worldcon probably don’t bring in as much money from exhibitors, so they’d be more dependent on memberships to keep afloat.

In compiling this, I discovered that this year, Comic-Con International isn’t going to be selling any memberships on-site. It’s going to be pre-registration only.

I guess they’re expecting it to sell out again like last year, and don’t want people to count on something they won’t be able to deliver. Plus I’m sure it’ll simplify matters for the con, since they won’t need to deal with taking money for registration.

Update: Added Loscon for nostalgia’s sake. Also fixed some links; GenCon rearranged their website sometime in the last 4 days, and I somehow typed in the wrong domain name for ConDor.

Note: These are the 2008 prices, except for the ConDor advance price, which is for 2009. All prices were obtained from the events’ websites except for the way-advance price for San Diego Comic-Con, which is simply the price I paid last summer for this year’s con. For shows with multiple membership packages, such as Wizard World, I selected the most basic package that lets you walk in the door.

*CCI always has a booth selling pre-registration for the following year’s convention at an even lower price.

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A press release from The Hero Initiative arrived today, describing their plans for MegaCon. The dateline said Los Angeles, which I found funny, because I knew MegaCon was somewhere on the east coast, but I couldn’t remember exactly where (and the press release didn’t say).

So I looked up the convention website. The first location I saw was Orange County, which was a bit confusing because I live in Orange County, California, which is right next to LA. Then I remembered there was an Orange County in Florida as well. Scrolling further down the page I confirmed that the con was in Orlando.

The cognitive dissonance lasted all of a second or two, but it makes me want to go back and look at anything I’ve posted about WonderCon in the past week and make sure I mentioned it was in San Francisco.

(The post title is not to be *ahem* confused with ConFusion, a convention in Michigan for which I’ve occasionally seen flyers.)

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WonderCon 2008We spent Saturday at WonderCon in San Francisco, the first time either of us had attended the convention. It’s run by the same people as Comic-Con International, but it’s more comics-focused and considerably smaller. Which is not to say that it’s tiny, and the floor did get crowded in the middle of the day, but it was a much less stressful convention than San Diego tends to be.

Update: Photos are up!

Getting There

The trip to San Francisco was spread over several days during which we stopped at various tourist traps and visited friends. We got into town late Friday afternoon and spent the evening visiting family.

Line in front of Moscone CenterSaturday morning, shortly before 11:00, we arrived at Moscone Center. We could tell we were at the right end of the convention center by the Stormtrooper waving people along. 😀 The pre-reg line ran to the end of the block, but at least it didn’t wrap us around the corner. And when it started drizzling, they opened up a ballroom as a holding area and moved everyone inside. Clearly, they decided to get people in as quickly as possible instead of worrying about ticket fraud (probably more of an issue with CCI anyway). Instead of scanning the tickets’ barcodes, printing labels, etc., they had two people standing at the front of the line: one with a cardboard box, the other with a bunch of blank badges. As we walked past, one collected printouts and tickets, checked whether it was a one-day or 3-day pass, and put it in the box. The other handed out blank badges of the appropriate type. We were in the convention proper within 15 minutes.

The Exhibit Hall

The main floor reminded me a lot more of SDCC than Wizard World Los Angeles, though everything was smaller. Continue reading →

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I’ve driven 500 miles in the last 2 days. We’re heading up to San Francisco for WonderCon this weekend, stopping along the way to visit friends in Silicon Valley and my brother and his fiancee in San Francisco. We ended up with an extra day at the beginning of the trip, which we used to visit Hearst Castle.

We left around mid-morning on Wednesday, driving through 2 hours of crappy Los Angeles traffic until things finally cleared up out toward Ventura. Along the way we saw something we’d never seen before: Our Prius runs in part on a battery, which is recharged by the gas engine, by coasting, and by braking. It has an 8-bar battery gage that mostly moves around in the 2–7–bar range. Heading down the pass into Camarillo, for the first time, I saw it fill all 8 bars.

We took the 101 most of the way, branching off at San Luis Obispo to take Pacific Coast Highway up to San Simeon. With all the rain we’ve had this winter, the countryside is amazingly green. The last few times I remember taking the 101 up the coast, it was summer, so the hills were all golden brown. We lucked out with the weather: instead of the constant rain I was expecting from the forecast, we only had scattered showers.

We spent Wednesday night in San Simeon. Dinner was at a restaurant called The Sow’s Ear in Cambria, which was very good.

Blurry Lunar Eclipse through cloudsWe actually managed to see the lunar eclipse. Sort of. The cloud cover was just light enough to see the bright sliver shortly before totality. It screened out the reddish light completely. I have a blurry picture of the just-as-blurry eclipse.

Neptune Pool at Hearst Castle.Thursday morning we went to Hearst Castle for the morning’s first tour. We didn’t get the one we wanted (Tour 2) because it didn’t start until 9:20, and we wanted to get to San Jose by 5:00. If I could make one change to their website, it would be to list actual tour times. We got rained on a bit, but it was a good overview of just how eclectic the house is. Basically, if William Randolph Hearst was traveling and saw a piece of a building that he liked, he’d buy it, ship it back to California, and have it built into his house.

After stopping briefly in Cambria, we took highway 46 across the hills to catch up with the 101 and head north to San Jose. Partly I wanted to avoid the long, twisty, cliffside stretches of PCH, and partly we wanted to avoid getting caught in the bike race. The route goes past cattle ranches, empty hills, and wineries. At one point there’s a fantastic view of Morro Bay off in the distance. (Update: We took the same drive a year later and caught the view in the sunlight)

View of Morro Bay and Morro Rock from Highway 46
We made it to San Jose around 4:30, and managed to get tickets for the last tour of the Winchester Mystery House. Yes, we toured two big, rambling mansions in one day. It was interesting to compare the way the tours treated the two places. With Hearst Castle, it was very much a museum tour. Everything was preserved as exactly as possible, including all the furniture and decorations, and they admonished you not to touch anything. And the docents were walking encyclopedias. With Winchester, it was much more casual. The speeches felt more canned, and the tour guide wasn’t concerned with anybody touching anything except for a few places where the floors or tiles were still original.

After the tour, we met up with our friends for dinner. I don’t remember the name of the place, but it was a tapas restaurant on Santana Row. Also quite good. Edit: Katie points out that it was called Consuelo.

Tomorrow: On to San Francisco. Not sure whether we’re going to WonderCon on Friday or not—it depends on what else is available (since they keep promising massive downpours of rain)—but we’ll definitely be going on Saturday. For one thing, I’m hoping to get to the premiere of Justice League: New Frontier. I really liked Darwyn Cooke’s original mini-series linking the dawn of the Silver Age and the dawn of the space age, and what I’ve seen of the animation style looks quite promising.

OK. It’s 11:30. Time to get some sleep.

Update: filling in a few pictures.

Continued in: Saturday/WonderCon and Friday–Sunday