My Umpteenth Comic Con – A Boston Comic Con Report From A Jaded Convention Veteran

This was taken at 9:45am, when the line to get in was only curling around one side of the building.

Rob and I attended this year’s Boston Comic Con last weekend. We were pleased to have Pixiestyx and Trebuchet accompany us and not just because Trebuchet offered to drive on Saturday. It’s exciting to see a convention through the eyes of someone who hasn’t been to one before. And while we didn’t get to every creator or panel we had originally intended, a good time was generally had by all.

Rob and I have been attending San Diego Comic-Con for the past several years. It would be very easy to turn this post into a comparative study of Boston versus San Diego, but it wouldn’t be particularly fair. San Diego is the mega prom of all geekdom. Really, it is several conventions for fans of all stripes all crammed under one roof. You like movies? Go pack some Depends and hang out in Hall H. Like TV? Please direct yourself to Ballroom 20. Cosplay enthusiast? Action figure collector? Gamer? We’ve got panels for you, too. Oh, and there’s still programming for those who come because they love comic books. But, San Diego has taken on such a life of its own that it’s almost more like SXSW now. Alternative programming, such as Wootstock, Geek And Sundry, and Trickster, has spilled out into venues around Gaslamp and the surrounding neighborhoods. The number of options is mind boggling and, at times, overwhelming.

Boston Comic Con was a refreshing return to what a comics convention is supposed to be about: comics.

My First Comic Con: A Boston Comic Con Report From A Convention Virgin

For some time now Rob and Amanda have been trying to talk Trebuchet and me into attending San Diego Comic-Con with them, making their case with enticing details such as:

“You can’t really walk there. It’s more of a shuffle-step. Be prepared to throw an elbow.”
“The only place you might get trampled to death is the toy floor.”
and, most disturbing: “There’s no Dunkin Donuts.”

While we haven’t quite worked up the enthusiasm to fly cross-country and spend five days in the middle of a mob, we did think it was time to check out the much closer (though still two hours away) Boston Comic Con. If you have read Rob’s and Amanda’s recaps, this was not the tiny regional con we anticipated – but as it turned out, in spite of the growing pains, the unexpected crowd actually made the event more exciting.

Don’t Go Back To Nahant: Boston Comic Con 2013’s Locke & Key Panel Full Report

Editor’s Note: If this writeup of Sunday’s Locke & Key panel sounds fun, you can see a bunch of video from the panel, with a lot of additional information that didn’t make this report, right here.

If Boston Comic Con had a single event that no other convention, regardless of size or location, could reproduce in 2013, it was the Locke & Key panel, because it featured all the main players in the production of the book: writer Joe Hill, artist Gabriel Rodriguez, and IDW Editor-in-Chief Chris Ryall. And considering that the book is coming to a conclusion in just a few months, and therefore all of these guys will be moving on to other projects, if you ever wanted to see these three guys interact and talk about Locke & Key while it’s an ongoing concern, the only place to be was the Waterfront Room at the Seaport World Trade Center at 2 p.m. on Sunday.

The one thing that that panel didn’t have was a hell of a lot in the way of actual news, but who the hell expected that? We all know the comic is closing up shop (minus the odd rumored one-shot, which wasn’t something that was addressed at the panel), we all know that the Fox pilot for a TV series is two years dead, and the Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (of Star Trek reboot fame)-produced Locke & Key movie is only a month and a half into its existence, and there’s no way in hell that they would allow any hard information to be released in a function room full of people wearing t-shirts reading, “Yankees Suck!”

So these guys were not facing a crowd that was rabid for any new information (beyond maybe how, and who will make, Dodge eventually suck the pipe, but even that was a low-key questions; after all, the final issue is just about on its way), which meant that tensions were low for the panel, and it showed. The panel unofficially started with Hill looking at his phone at the stroke of 2 p.m., grabbing a microphone, and saying, “Guys, this just in: the BBC just announced that the next Doctor will be Jason Statham!”

And when the crowd groaned, Hill said, “It would be awesome, and you know it!”

Yeah, this panel looked to just be a good time. And it was.

Closing The Door: Video From Joe Hill’s and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key Panel At Boston Comic Con 2013

Boston Comic Con is now over, and it certainly has one thing over the San Diego Comic-Con: getting back to the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office from Boston Comic Con only took 20 minutes and cost $2.50 on the Massachusetts Turnpike.

Boston Comic Con might well have been a pleasant surprise and an exciting jump from a little regional convention to one that feels more and more like one of the bigger boys, but it certainly wasn’t perfect. In the coming day or two, either Amanda or I will be addressing the truly deficient methods this convention had for dealing with crowds both attempting to enter the convention and trying to attend the panels (for now, let’s leave it with the stark reality that, if someone tried to clear a convention room at SDCC in between panels, that effort would start with bemused laughter and end with a truly epic riot), but Boston provided some experiences that were indistinguishable from some of the biggest and best conventions in the world.

And one of those experiences is exhaustion. We are wiped out. And unlike when we attend San Diego, we don’t have a long flight and several vacation days with which we can recover; we’re right back to our daily lives tomorrow morning.

So while we will be publishing that general Boston Comic Con postmortem, as well as detailed coverage of Joe Hill’s, Gabriel Rodriguez’s, and IDW Editor-in-Chief Chris Ryall’s panel on Locke & Key (which, since Locke & Key is concluding, realistically marks the final time these creators will probably be in the same room at the same time), we didn’t want to leave you hanging while we weakly sip beer and appreciate our art purchases (Amanda picked up a J. O’Barr original sketch of Iggy Pop that is as awesome as it is an off-kilter work by the creator of The Crow) while yawning.

So in that spirit, here is a series of short videos we took of Hill and Rodriguez at the Locke & Key panel. And I gotta tell you: if you get a chance to see either of these guys at a convention panel, take it. Rodriguez is clearly enthusiastic about the work he does, and Hill is just plain old laugh-out-loud funny to see speak.

But don’t take my word for it; you can get a taste, straight from our YouTube Channel, right after the jump.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster: Boston Comic Con, Day One

Jesus Christ, I wasn’t expecting that.

In the times that I have attended Boston Comic Con in the past, it has been a nice little regional convention. Sure, in the past few years, it has attracted some A-List talent like Tim Sale and Geof Darrow, but generally, those guys have stayed at their tables on the floor, and while some of them might have attracted a decent individual line or two, it didn’t affect the little regional convention as a whole. Which meant that you could walk in off the street, wander up and buy a ticket at the door within thirty seconds on a whim, comfortably wander the floor at your leisure to see everything you want, spend a bunch of quality time with every creator you could make eye contact with, and leave within a couple or three hours, comfortable you’ve seen everything there is to see.

And frankly, that was what I was expecting this morning, when we got to this year’s delayed opening of the Boston Comic Con. Sure, the convention had picked up one or two more high-toned guests like DC Comics’ Publisher Dan DiDio and Batman writer Scott Snyder, but thanks to the delay created by the Marathon Bomber, the convention was being held at the Seaport World Trade Center – a much bigger venue than the originally-booked Hynes Convention Center – so there should have been plenty of room to handle the expected demand for a little regional convention, right?

Yeah, right… except it seems that 2013 was the year that Boston decided that it no longer wanted a little regional convention. By noon today, the main floor of the convention, even at this bigger venue, was like walking the floor at San Diego Comic-Con on any given Saturday, and every volunteer on the floor – who thought they were signing on to wrangle a nice little regional convention – looked like they had suddenly realized that they had signed on to be the local intern guide for Galactus.

At least for today, Boston Comic Con was not a nice little regional convention. It was a major convention with world-class talent and a comparably excited and enthusiastic crowd that could hold its head up with any convention short of San Diego and New York…

Even if the people running the convention weren’t completely prepared for it.

Falling For Another Con: Boston Comic Con Coverage Starts Today

We are posting this as we are preparing to leave to attend the first day of Boston Comic Con 2013 – a smaller convention than San Diego Comic-Con to be sure, but I’ve seen a couple of estimates on Twitter that 15,000 people are expected to attend, which means it has grown hell and gone from four years ago, when it was still being held in the function room of a local hotel. But there’s a lot to be said for attending a smaller convention, particularly when it it being attended by A-List talent like Scott Snyder, Joe Hill, Gabriel Rodriguez, Colleen Doran, Dan DiDio, David Mack, and a pile of other exciting creators… and when attendance requires only a subway ride as opposed to a cross-country flight. Besides, after a week of leaving a convention and then begging and scraping for the odd spare Internets, it will be nice to have a pre-paid multi-megabit pipe to post pictures of people in Wolverine outfits.

We will be attending and covering both days of the convention (but if you’re local to southern New England, you don’t need us; tickets will be available at the door at the Seaport World Trade Center at 200 Seaport Boulevard in Boston, or you can preorder them through Eventbrite), including as many panels as we can get into (including a Batman panel featuring Snyder that has just been announced), but please be sure to follow us on Twitter, as we will be live-Tweeting panels and photos right from the scene. In addition, we will be uploading videos from the convention to our YouTube channel both tonight and tomorrow evening (and honestly, probably on into next week).

But if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to make our way to the convention. Being a trip via the subway system, I will just as forbidden to smoke as I was on our flight to San Diego… but the good news is that, being the Boston subway system, I will be allowed to urinate.