HobbyStar Toronto Comicon
Report By Jamie Coville
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HobbyStar Toronto Comicon Date: April 13-15 Location: South Building, Toronto Metro Convention Centre Attendance: 4500 Con Report by Jamie Coville This convention was unique for Hobbystar as they usually run a 1 day show in April, but this year it was expanded to a 3 day show. Fans can get in to these shows free if they spend $10 dollars at a participating comic shop. With this show, they allowed Friday to be the free day and there was an admission price for the other two days. I was a bit surprised about the lack of signs directing people from the main entrance to the south side of the convention centre. I had to ask somebody to be sure that's where the convention was being held. Inside the room there was plenty of space between tables, which is a welcome change from usual HobbyStar events. The show started pretty close to the advertised start time, which was also nice. There was a line up to get in and some pro's were not yet set up when the crowd came in. To nobody's surprise, Friday was a busy day with many people getting in for free. The stores and dealers had a wide variety of stuff to sell. There was a little bit of everything available, from regular superhero comics, golden age, silver, recent books, variant covers, manga, TPBs, art books, toys, statues, weaponry and other stuff. There was one free comic at the convention, a Spectacular Spider-Man #1 (2003) reprint with a new cover. It was done by Paul Jenkins and Humberto Ramos. Sadly some of the guests were not there. Among the missing were Keith Giffen, Alex Maleev, Mark Texeira, Ramon Perez, Andy Belanger, Kent Burles, among others. As a result there were a lot of empty tables in the artist alley area. Most of the better known pro's had long line ups for sketches and signings throughout the weekend. A female fan asked Dan Slott to draw She Hulk. Dan told her he was the writer and not the artist, but went ahead and did the drawing to the best of his ability. I got this on Youtube here.
Somewhat surprisingly, Saturday had less attendance than Friday. Early in the morning I heard one dealer clearly voice how unhappy he was about the lack of people. Again, plenty of creators were not set up as of 11am, despite the show starting at 10am.
I attended a couple of panels on Saturday, the first one was Dan
Slott's, who talked about both writing comics (specifically company
owned characters) and how to break into the industry. Slott kept the
crowd entertained with advice and funny stories and talked for almost 2
hours, even though another panel was to start after an hour, we lost
track of time and nobody bothered to interrupt. I made a recording of
the panel and you can hear it here. It was a very informal panel, with Slott choosing to sit on the stage itself and walk around on the floor a bit as he talked. At first 10 people was there, but more showed up later on. There were maybe 20 people towards the end, which was much better than some of the panels on Friday. Somebody mentioned the The Whilce Portacio panel had two people show up, one of them was Whilce. He didn't bother go through with the panel.
The next panel was the Carmine Infantino panel. With him was J. David
Spurlock, publisher of The Amazing World of Carmine Infantino. David has
a much better memory of the details of Carmine's career and was able to
answer questions that Carmine's memory was blanking on. Carmine opened
the floor to questions and they did a solid 45 minutes of answering
questions from the crowd. I recorded the panel and you can hear it by
clicking here. One woman reported a bracelet was stolen. It was a hand made, chain mail one, costing $15 dollars. She was pretty miffed over it and did report it to the HobbyStar staff, but because she didn't actually see a person taking it (she just had suspicions) they couldn't do much about it. Throughout the weekend a group of guys loudly re-enacted a scene from 300, which got everyones attention. Towards the end of Saturday Carmine was talking to a fan that wanted him to sign a book. Carmine spent a while having fun with him, telling him no he wouldn't sign it and he didn't want to see him again tomorrow. Carmine asked where the guy was parked, saying he wanted to slash his tires so he couldn't come back. When the fan revealed he took a train Carmine said "fine, I'll blow up the train, what do I care?" At the end Carmine did sign the book for him. On Sunday there was less people than Saturday, which I think everybody knew was going to happen. I met up with Nancy and we did an interview with Carmine which you can read here. We did a mix of comic shopping, chatting with staff and friends, getting sketches and so forth. I had to bite my tongue when somebody asked Nancy "How does a girl get into comics?" Nancy answered the question diplomatically. Some dealers began taking down wall comics and starting to pack up at 3:30pm, despite the show ending at 5. I went around and spoke to many of them to find out how the convention went overall. The results were quite mixed. One retailer I talked to was quite happy and did better than he expected. He said recent back issues were selling well for him. Most others called the show good or so/so. Everybody was happy about Friday, Saturday did well for some, most said Sunday was very slow. One retailer said they didn't make enough money to pay for their table. Different retailers had different things move better for them. Spider-Man comics were noted by two retailers as moving. A couple of them said Toys did well. Trades were said to be selling by a few of retailers, one specifically said what was popular at the store was also popular at the con. Other retailers found that dollar bin books and variant issues did well for them. The only people I saw wearing costumes were trying to sell something. In particular was the 28 Weeks Later folks promoting the upcoming movie, and some people from Artists Alley, particularly one woman who was selling the hand made chain mail. There was significant amount of kids and women there. I over heard two kids talking about Marvel's Secret Wars series. One saw the original on the wall and said "Look! Secret War!" and other kids said "Yeah I got it, if you want to read it I can loan it to you." The other kid said "No, this is the old one." The other kid replied "I got them both." I personally had a good time at the show, but I must say that the attendance numbers wasn't quite up to expectations. This helped fans that wanted sketches from the more popular artists, as with some expected line waiting they were able to get them. But everything else from Panels to Sales suffered. Pictures of the con can be found here.
Regards, http://www.TheGraphicNovels.com News and discussion on a free, Delphi like forum.
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E-mail: jcoville@kingston.net
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