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.

Long Con To Short Con: Boston Comic Con Releases Panel Schedule

The Boston Comic Con was originally scheduled to take place in late April, but had to be postponed for the most mundane of reasons: a mad bomber who had blown up a part of the street where the convention was scheduled to be held was on the loose, leading to a five-city cop lockdown and to most of the population of Eastern Massachusetts to scream at their televisions, “Just turn the dogs loose on the prick so I can get to the fucking bar!” You know, everyday irritations.

Well, the convention was very quickly rescheduled for August 3rd and 4th. Which was great, and we couldn’t wait to throw our support behind it… until we realized that that weekend was less than two weeks after the San Diego Comic-Con, which is an experience that normally takes us an entire week from which to recover from the fatigue hysteria.

Oh, make no mistake: we’re still going. It might mean that by mid-August we are so ravaged that we are unable to write anything more complicated than, “Comics are neat,” but we are going.

Because not only has the guest list ballooned since the reschedule, including Dan DiDio, Scott Snyder, James O’Barr, Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez to name a few, but the convention has just published their panel schedule for the event. Now, make no mistake: Boston Comic Con is still a small convention as these things go – San Diego’s panel schedule fills a magazine-sized book every year, while Boston’s fits comfortably on a single Web page – but still, you need to remember that as recently as 2009, Boston Comic Con wasn’t big enough to host any panels. So following that growth path, maybe in a few years I’ll be able to attend a massive comic convention without having to spend five and a half hours on a smoke-free airplane.

So yeah, there are only a few panels over the two-day event… but there’s one or two that you won’t be able to see anywhere else. You can get the whole schedule here, but as we did with the San Diego Comic-Con event schedule, I’m gonna call out a few that look particularly interesting to us.

Healing Factor: Boston Comic Con Rescheduled For August 3 and 4

The Boston Comic Con was originally scheduled to take place last weekend at the Hynes Convention Center on Boyston Street in Boston. Unfortunately, the event was abruptly postponed last Friday, due to the usual mundane and obvious reasons a convention gets put off: some douchenozzle blew up the street upon which the venue was scheduled, and then spent Friday, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert, trying to make a dazzling escape from law enforcement on a landlocked boat.

It might sound like a small thing to reschedule a relatively small city comic convention – Boston’s a big town, and the Boston Comic Con has become quite a little convention, but it’s still only about four years along from being an old school, buy-your-back-issues-and-get-out convention as advertised on late night UHF channels) – but you’d be surprised. In talking with the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop referring to myself as “The Comic Con,” I was told that the biggest problem with rescheduling was finding a venue. Apparently the Hynes Center is fully booked pretty much a year ahead of time, and there simply aren’t all that many venues in town of the right size to book a thing like this. In a lot of ways, you either have a hotel’s function room (which holds about 90 people), the TD Banknorth Garden (which holds about 15,000 people), or you just wait for the Hynes to have an open spot on the calendar.

So while I held onto my advance tickets (which the convention assured us would be accepted for any alternate dates) to show the people so desperately trying to give this town a decent convention that some of us were pulling for them, I was fully expecting to eventually hear that the convention was being cancelled until next April.

Yeah, I was wrong.

NEW DATE: August 3-4! NEW VENUE: Seaport World Trade Ctr! Details on the website! Tell your friends! bostoncomiccon.com #comicmarket

— Boston Comic Con (@BostonComicCon) April 27, 2013

Okay, so they’re having a convention. But that doesn’t mean that any of the originally-scheduled special guests or artists are gonna show up, right?

Oh, you’d be surprised.

Return of The Dzhokhar

Update, 4:10 p.m.: Boston Comic Con just announced that this weekend’s convention has been cancelled:

ATTENTION: Boston Comic Con has been cancelled. We will try to reschedule for a later date. Thank you for your support & understanding.

— Boston Comic Con (@BostonComicCon) April 19, 2013

The full message from Boston Comic Con, including details on rescheduling and refunds:

Due to the unfortunate events that have transpired here in Boston, a city wide lock down has been put into effect until further notice causing The Hynes Convention Center to suspend all events until further notice. As such, The Boston Comic Con has been posponed [sic] and will be rescheduled to a date sometime in 2013.

All people who purchased advanced tickets on line will have their tickets honored at the rescheduled show. We will notify you of that date. If for some reason, you can not come to the show on that date, we will refund your ticket.

Please, we ask for your patience, understanding, and cooperation.

We appreciate your loyalty, and continued support for The Boston Comic Con. Unfortunately, this situation is beyond our control.

We stand with all Bostonians and hope that current events are resolved quickly and a degree of normalcy can be returned to our city.

Thanks a lot, you cowardly, mad-bombing, cop-killing douchecanoe.

————-

Yes, the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office is in the lockdown area because of the manhunt for the missing Boston Marathon bomber, roughly walking distance from where last night’s shootout with the prick occurred. As such, we are a bit distracted from normal comics news today (but not so distracted that we didn’t notice that “Dzhokhar” is uncomfortably close to being pronounced, “Joker”).

However, we are still anticipating that a single 19-year-old untrained dipshit will either be found dead or rounded up by the cops in time to allow tomorrow’s Boston Comic Con to proceed as scheduled – and as of this writing, it is still scheduled.

We are still continuing with this weekend’s convention under the assumption today’s situation is temporary. Apologies for any inconvenience.

— Boston Comic Con (@BostonComicCon) April 19, 2013

We are still preparing to attend and cover both days of the convention, so watch this space for that coverage… or for news of whether the status of the convention changes. 

Remain Calm And Carry Comics: Boston Comic Con Taking Place As Scheduled

After the wretched and depressing events at yesterday’s Boston Marathon in Boston’s Copley Square, there was some speculation about whether or not this weekend’s scheduled Boston Comic Con would still be held, what with the fact that it is being held at the Hynes Convention Center – roughly three blocks from the, as of this writing, still-active crime scene.

The question was up in the air until a few hours ago, when the convention emailed attendees with advance passes to tell us that not only is the convention still on, but that all scheduled guests are apparently confirmed to still be there.

You can check out the full release from Boston Comic Con, including the names of all the confirmed guests, after the jump.

We Will Soon Return To Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

If ever Boston needed a Batman, it was today.

— The Batman (@TheBatman) April 15, 2013

The Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office is based in Boston – miles away from the site of yesterday’s Boston Marathon bombings, but still, we’re here – so suffice it to say that we have been a little distracted for the past eighteen hours or so.

We, and everyone we know, including all our contributors, are all fine, although a bit shaken up as we had idly kicked around the idea of venturing downtown yesterday to try to score Red Sox tickets for the morning game, and the idea of getting hammered at the Cask And Flagon bar on Lansdowne Street and wandering toward Copley to drunkenly heckle the workaday, “This is my first marathon!” runners had been floated. Marking April 15th, 2013 as the first day we have ever been grateful for having made the decision to not day drink… although after the news started to come out, you can be damn sure that we made the decision to night drink in fairly short order.

So please bear with us as we shake this off and soon return to our regularly-scheduled comic book programming, probably later today… with that programming to include coverage from the Boston Comic Con, currently scheduled to take place this coming Saturday and Sunday.

Currently we expect #BostonCon to continue as planned. We will have more information in the days ahead. Thank you for your patience.

— Boston Comic Con (@BostonComicCon) April 15, 2013

Shane! Come Back! – Jon Bernthal Cancels Boston Comic Con Appearance

Say, were you excited about meeting Maggie and Shane from AMC’s The Walking Dead next weekend at the Boston Comic Con? Yeah? Well, temper your enthusiasm a bit. Lauren Cohen will still make an appearance, but Jon Bernthal will not. According to an email sent by the convention to ticket holders last Friday:

A Message from the Host:

Unfortunately, Jon Bernthal (Shane Walsh) of The Walking Dead must CANCEL his appearance at The Boston Comic Con due to a sudden change in his filiming schedule.

All attendees who purchased a VIP Photo Op ticket will be refunded in full.

Any other person who wishes a refund of their admission ticket to the Boston Comic Con due to Jon Bernthal’s cancellation must submit a refund request by no later than Friday April 19th. Once the show has started no refunds will be issued whatsoever.

We apologize for this unfortunate inconvenience which is out of our control.

The Boston Comic Con

Beyond their control, perhaps, but certainly a possibility that they were aware of. A source connected to the group that produced the 2013 commercial for Boston Comic Con tells me that they were told to downplay Bernthal’s appearance at the con because of the likelihood that he might pull out. You can check out their commercial after the jump.