NYCC 2009: Day 3, late
Yowza! Another con comes to a close, and a lot of hi’s from the usual gang of idiots, renewals of acquanitances (hi Cooch!), the continuted con conversations– you know, the ones which you pick up again as soon as you see the person you haven’t seen since the last convention, and so on.
We’ll have a lot of detailed reports from our Mix of folks soon, but here are my fast general impressions:
- Very successful, on a number of levels. The con has worked out all the problems related to size, and even though this is the biggest yet, they seem to have knocked out the bugs and ran very smoothly. There were no particular problems that aren’t encountered by any other con its size and location (the usual like convention center food, bad wi-fi, nothing within easy walking distance, etc.). Sellout crowds, very well attended panels, yet still movable for the most part.
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Most of the publishers and vendors I talked to were very happy with their traffic and sales. Scott Kurtz sold out of everything by the end of Saturday. Everything. One can only imaging what Sunday would have brought with a kid filled crowd.
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Lots of costumes, which is a sign of a certain level of growth and maturity for a con, if not necessarily for the con-goers. We’ll have photos up this week.
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Paper and digital continue to share their uneasy alliance. Most publishers realize they now can’t survive without both components, and are trying to figure out how to make that work.
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I expected the entire con to be nothing but Watchmen, and was happy to be proven wrong. On the other hand, the crowd for Dave Gibbons at Titan Books at the end of the con was nothing short of insane, as you can see from the picture above– the line was five deep, as you can see in the photo. There are a lot of people eager for this movie, and not from places you might expect.
Hopefully, over the next few days, I’ll be ahead of the curve enough to get some real analysis done. On the other hand, since I still haven’t gotten around to doing my 2009 preview… oh well. Hope springs eternal– which, come to think of it, seems to be the overall theme of the convention.
The Javits Convention Center has the worst wi-fi I have ever encountered. It’s gotten much much worse from last year, and I didn’t think that was possible. As a result, we’ve had no chance to blog from the floor or the panels. But rest assured, we’re collecting a lot of information, weird stories, and other fun things, and we’ll get them up as fast as we can.
Busy busy busy and expecting to be busier tomorrow today, but we had to get this piece of news up: G.I. Joe’s COBRA Commander has defected from Hasbro to Mattel! No word on what this does to the movie…
The Cubs win the World Series. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston get back together. 
Before you scream that Watchmen has been butchered to get it into theaters, do two things:
Living comics legend 
