2008 Paradise Toronto Comicon
Report By Jamie Coville
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Date: July 13-14th Location: Holiday Inn, 370 King St. West Time: 10am - 7pm Attendance: 4514 I should probably start off by mentioning that this convention used to be a 3 day con in a big convention centre had for this year shrunk down to 2 days in a hotel. It was the first Paradise convention without Kevin Boyd coordinating it. By all appearances Doug Simpson seems to have done a fine job filling in that role. There didn't appear to be any major organizational issues within the convention. My press badge was filled out a head of time and getting in was quick and easy. Almost everybody seemed to be up and running by the time the convention started and the show did start fairly close to it's stated time. When I arrived around 9:45 there was already a bit of a line up for the convention to open. Paradise has had small 1 day conventions at this hotel before but this was a much larger event and it was interesting to see how it got laid out. The con floor was bone / dumbbell shaped with two big rooms with a mix of dealers, pro's and organizations spread around and in between the two rooms was a hallway where Artists Alley was. As a result Artists alley got a lot of foot traffic walking by. Panels were held in conference rooms on other floors. Early going there seemed to be a lot of activity at the con with people looking and buying books. There was plenty of diversity in terms of back issues. You didn't have to look hard to find dealers with non-Marvel and DC comics like ACG, Dell, Gold Key, etc. Lots of people selling magazines, treasury sized comics and some selling old digest sized books too. But modern art/lit comics and manga was almost non-existent with even the Beguiling focusing on back issues and current trades. Hairy Tarantula brought Boys manga and regular superhero/genre trades too. There were plenty of women at the convention, some by themselves, some with friends, some with boyfriends. Nerd Girl Pin Up and Suicide Girls were there. Nerd Girl Pinups had a picture of my friend Nancy (as Wonder Woman) on their table, which was talked about as Nancy has a lot of friends in Toronto. As in previous years the show had a kids table where kids could come and draw (and did). Chip Zdarsky came to the show and spent most of his time there drawing with the kids. I caught the tail end of the How to Break into the Business panel hosted by Glass House Graphics. The room was full and the presenter was giving speech about "fast" vs. "slow" artists that was pretty much identical to a Mark Evanier column. In a nutshell, the "fast" artist doesn't take any breaks while the slow artists does, which results in the "fast" artist getting more work done despite both artists drawing at the same speed. Only in this guys speech the fast artist was doing 3 pages a day and the slow one was only getting 1 page done a day. The next panel was Web Comics, The Future of the Medium? in which 10 different creators showed up. They actually brought in a couch from the hallway to fit them all on. The creators were Scott Hepburn, Andy Belanger, Karl Kersch, Cameron Stewart, Dan "Jamie" Simon, Jeff Moss, Brian McLaughlin, Tyrone McCarthy, Ramon Perez and Danielle Corsetto. The panel talked about a wide range of general webcomics issues, not really about the panel topic. Most of it was Q&A among fans and talk amongst the creators. A lot of it was pretty funny. One of the more interesting points brought out was the total lack of crossover between traditional print comic and webcomic readers. Cameron Stewart talked about how he thought some of his print readers would check out his webcomic and discovered by and large they didn't. There was lots of talk about Paypal donations and the variety of success going from 0 donations to people quitting their day jobs and living off them. I recorded the panel and you can hear it by downloading it here. (62.8mb, 68:37) After that there was a panel of sorts at the local Hotel Bar. It was the Women in Comics panel hosted by Liana K. This wasn't your traditional panel with a stage, microphone and questions. Liana made a 15 minute presentation about the people there that were either women or males that were very supportive of women in the comics industry. Then it turned into a social gathering where those who signed up in advanced got 2 tickets for drinks and there was food available as well. I came back up to the con floor at 4pm-ish. The con attendance had noticeably tailed off. Guest of Honour Herb Trimpe hadn't yet showed up (there was a sign saying he'd be there at 2pm). Around 4:45-ish I saw him come in. He told me he drove from NY State to Toronto and there were a couple of backlogs of traffic, particularly at the border. Fans began taking numbers to keep their place in line for when Herb came. When Herb did show up at his table there was a round of applause with some cheering. Among the other creators there with long lineups were Greg Land (who sketched at the HERO Initiative booth for a while), Stuart Sayger, Dale Keown and Yanick Paquette. Plenty of others had traffic coming and going like Cary Nord, Mark Sparacio, Pat Oliffe and Brian Pulido. The pro's were mainly spread out all over the con, typically along the outer edges of the rooms. Pictures from the convention can be found here. I left to grab dinner around 5pm. I came back around 6 and managed to ask a small handful of retailers how the show was going so far. Responses ranged from "Surprisingly good" to "Slow" with most in-between. I was not there Sunday so I can't conclusively say how the show did over all. A few friends who were there both days told me attendance was down on Sunday which was of no surprise. One particular friend of mine did go to the show on Sunday and spent a large amount of money on low grade 40s and 50s books so certain dealers did do very well at the show. I personally had a good time and picked up a lot of books I did not expect to see there. I wish I could have been there Sunday to cover the panels. More and more Paradise conventions are turning into a back issue bin diving show. People pay to get in, they find a variety of books priced at lower than Overstreet Guide and/or cheaper than typical going Ebay prices. There is nothing wrong with this, but it does narrow themselves to a niche within the comic market place. So much so, that I'm not sure if it warrants a 2 day convention. It really only takes part of 1 day to go through all the dealers bins of stuff you're interested in, leaving little reason for people to come back on day 2. I think Paradise needs to come up with some specific, targeted Sunday "event" that doesn't just appeal to the typical back issue collectors. Either that or they have to expand the space and amount of dealers to such an amount that back issue searching would take 2 days to do and hope the collectors are rich and fanatic to do it for 2 days straight. I hope next year they won't have the convention so close to San Diego and not on the same weekend of the Polaris22 Sci-Fi Convention, as I'm sure it hurt their attendance. I did not see any street advertising around the hotel for the show. Outside of Internet and perhaps the various retailers telling their customers about the show I'm not sure if there was any other promotion for it. I think the show really needs to invest in marketing to draw more people in if they want to grow or at least remain stable. This is especially true if they want to become a 3 day convention again. It will be interesting to see where things go from 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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