Comic Con

This past Friday my talented wife and I spent the day on the placid isle of Manhattan, at the New York Comic Con. 

I've gone to a lot of science fiction and game conventions in my time. I've manned a booth at Gen-Con during the peak of the card game boom. I've been to World Science Fiction conventions in Baltimore, Glasgow, Philadelphia, Montreal, Boston, Yokohama, Chicago, and San Antonio. I went to the old Atlanta Fantasy Fest a couple of times.

But nothing prepared me for the scale of Comic Con. The enormous Javits Center was packed like Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras -- and that was on Friday, the "slow day" of the convention. According to local media about 125,000 people attended this year's Comic Con. By contrast, this year's World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio boasted between 4,000 and 6,000 people, depending on how one counts. In short, Comic Con in New York managed to pull about 20 times more people than what is supposed to be SF's "flagship event."

Now, admittedly, New York is a bigger city than San Antonio -- 8 million to 1.4 million -- and it's in the more densely-populated northeast. There are something like 50 million people within a couple of hours' drive or train ride of New York, so the Comic Con membership represents only a quarter of a percent of that population. On the other hand, there's 26 million people in Texas alone, so a comparable attendance rate would have given this summer's Worldcon a very respectable 65,000 members!

So why weren't they there? We have panels and discussions at Worldcon on the "graying" of SF, and every panel room has to have parking space for mobility scooters -- but the crowd at Comic Con was young. Not a gray head in sight. Why aren't we attracting these bright-eyed, energetic fans who represent the next generation of SF readers?

There is a difference in cost: membership in Comic Con was $85 for a four-day pass, while LoneStarCon cost $240 for a full membership. Presumably some of that cost difference would be offset by the cheaper food and hotels in San Antonio, but people don't always think of that. A kid might be able to pay for a bus ticket and Comic Con membership who couldn't necessarily afford a plane ticket and Worldcon. But surely that can't account for a tenfold difference in attendance. (And a ten-times-bigger convention can surely cut costs through economies of scale.)

My question is simple: why is Worldcon so small? Why is it dwarfed, not only by the New York Comic Con, but also by Dragon Con in Atlanta and the mighty San Diego Comic Con? Somehow regional comics conventions can pull in an order of magnitude more people than our "World" SF convention. 

I'm not privy to the deliberations of the Secret Masters of Fandom. I don't know if Worldcon's modest size is a conscious decision by organizers or not. But I do know what Worldcon could be -- I've seen it in New York this past weekend.

Comments

[leslie cambias]

Texas is, after all a southern city. The South does not generally like fantasy - the regional writers like Williams, Faulkner, etc., etc. have their own fantasy genre. They exaggerate the behavior of the locals to that level. It is rooted in a corner of Earth, with little interest in the Cosmos. The folks in our little corner are interesting enough.