Hobby Star Toronto Fan Expo 2009
Report By Jamie Coville
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Date: August 28th - 30th Place: Toronto Metro Convention Centre Attendance: 59,000, a 23% increase in attendance. The big buzz about this convention was that Marvel and DC officially had booths there for the first time. Overlooked in the Hoopla was that Boom! Studios was also there. Although I don't think many of their known creators were there, or if they were it was not well advertised. Mark Waid was not, if he was I'm sure there would have been more buzz about them being there. Just outside the main con doors was a touch screen set up where you did a survey and you could win a Playstation 3. That was busy for most of the weekend. Fan Expo was giving away cloth shopping style bags with their logo on it to those with a VIP pass. Other people could buy them for 3 dollars at their exclusives booth. The 501st Legion was there with a table as was Nerd Girl Pinups. DC's booth was tables with a ton of freebies on it. They were the After Watchmen 1st issues, FCBD books and promo posters/buttons, etc.. By Sunday they were all gone except for a small stack of CMX Manga previews. They were also giving out those flashing Green Lantern rings. It was manned by Fan Expo Staff/Volunteers. They also had an a guy dressed as Green Lantern you could take pictures with. Marvel's booth was a stripped down version of their San Diego booth. They had a table where at certain times a number of artists were doing signings. They also had fun pop/rock music playing on loud speakers. They had a few give aways but not much, most of it was posters. Toward the end of Sunday (after the Mondo Marvel panel where they mentioned new freebies would be available) they did put out free variant cover issue of an Avengers title. I did grab one but lost it somewhere and can't remember which issue it was. Between the two was a Warners Brothers booth where they were selling DVDs. They also had big screen TVs showing the various movies you could buy. Watchmen, Batman, 300, the DC Animated movies, DC cartoons, etc.. could all be bought there for standard retail prices. Zellers, a Canadian Wal-Mart type chain store had a corner to themselves and they were selling batteries, memory cards, bags and other convention related stuff. The video game section was fun with all the major game systems and a variety of consoles there to play/try a bunch of games. Interested in Street Fighter 4? UFC? the new Mike Tyson-less Punch out boxing game? Batman? They were all there and more. Depending on the game you could play against a pro (and get your ass kicked like I did with Street Fighter 4) or just play against the computer. They did have a stage where the good gamers were singled out, brought up on stage and an Asian woman wearing a bikini top and low cut jeans would come out from the back and do maxim-style poses for pictures with them. Unlike a couple of years ago there was no very loud speaker set up with Guitar Hero or anything else disrupting the rest of the con. In terms of comic dealers almost everybody that was selling TPB's was selling them at some discount. A number of them were selling for less than US cover price, the steepest was 50% off US cover price. There were plenty of back issue comics to be found from Golden Age to recent books with variant covers. I personally bought a whole bunch of books I had no intention of buying just because the prices were so good. Some creators were getting in the act with Jeff Lemire selling his Collected Essex County at $25 Canadian when the US price was $29.95. There were panels but much of the comic related panels were focused on DC/Marvel or artists doing sketch offs. I didn't cover the DC panels. At San Diego they recorded their own panels and put them online and I'm assuming they are going to do the same if there is anything major to announce. The one I did step into briefly had Dan Didio talking away with some people with him. I did attend a couple of Marvel panels. The first being a Cup of Joe where Joe Quesada, Arune Singh and CB Cebulski answered questions. Singh seemed to know a lot of the production answers on what was going on and when. His job is Manager of Sales Communications. A fan griped about Marvel characters in certain movies, specifically Deadpool. Quesada mentioned that ever since that movie, Deadpool's popularity has shot through the roof and everything Deadpool they have at Diamond is sold out right now. The 2nd being a Mondo Marvel panel which had much of the same people including Kathryn Immonen and Spider-Man assistant editor Tom Brennan. Kathryn was there to sell her new Pixie series and did her best to fit in with the tenor of the panel. At that panel fans were giving Joe grief about One More Day and the recent Marvel Diva's book. Joe defended One More Day in his usual way saying the marriage closed off stories they could tell (he gave the flirting Black Cat story as an example). His main defense of Diva's was "but did you read the book?" They announced officially that X-Factor #200 was coming out and it was being turned into a Private Investigators in the Marvel Universe type book. He also made reference to a 4 issue mini he really wanted to draw but eventually had to give it up, due to the workload. He said he's now head of creative for the Marvel Animation Department. Joe Quesada had to leave a bit early for some urgent business reason. I guess we know what that reason is now. In case you haven't heard yet, it was announced Disney bought Marvel the next morning. The only comic creator focused panels was with J. Michael Straczynski, Darwyn Cooke and a writing panel with Len Wein. JMS told a story about his early meeting with Rod Sterling and his later working on his stuff. He also told a hilarious story about how he faked his graduation for his parent's benefit so he could leave school and go to work as he didn't like the school. He did answer some nerd type questions about specific story elements from Babylon 5 and also spoke about briefly working with Clint Eastwood on Changeling and how that benefited him. Darwyn Cooke talked candidly about Parker: The Hunter and working at DC. He told behind the scenes stories about how a Spirit animated movie almost came to pass. They wanted him involved as he was doing the comic at the time and have it come out in conjunction with the Frank Miller movie. Darwyn backed off when he saw what was being done with the movie. There was also talk about DC's attitude towards female characters. Len Wein wasn't aware he was doing the panel until just prior to it. He gave a brief talk about writing and then took questions. Much of the audience was interested in becoming writers and had good questions to ask. He emphasized they should be writers per say and not just comic book writers. He also encouraged reading prose books and studying writing from all types of mediums. The big laugh of that panel was about the Watchmen video game. Somebody asked how he got that job and he said they came to him because he was the editor and there was no way Alan Moore was going to write it. Different from previous years is they cleared everybody out of the panels before starting the next one. No "camping" was allowed. This lead to number of panels starting about 8 minutes late. Or in JMS case, his 90 minute panel ending about 15 minutes early.
Audio from the panels is online here: As usual there was huge amount of people in costumes. Comparing from last month's San Diego to the Fan Expo I think Canadians by ratio love to cosplay more. I did attend the masquerade and took videos which will end up on YouTube soon enough. They gave the longtime host Gord Rose a surprise birthday present as they had a scantly clad cosplayer "pop" out of a cake for him. It was his 50th birthday and they used "contestant" #50 (titled Birthday Cake) for it. He felt really dumb for not seeing this coming. Some old friends showed up to greet him and the audience sang happy birthday to him. The two more interesting comic related costumes was the cast of Watchmen and X-men with Victorian era costumes.
I did take a bunch of pictures of pro's, misc stuff and people in
costumes. You can see them here: Some unusual stuff was people getting tattoos right there at the convention. There was very scantly clad male and female getting costumes carefully airbrushed/spayed on to them. The guy was turning into Ion from Green Lantern, the woman I didn't see what costume she was getting. A friend of mine was disappointed in how virtually all the artists were charging for sketches now, which is a change from a few years ago. He said ebay has ruined that aspect of the convention for him. He said prices were quite high for what he used to get for free, a full body sketch on a comic backboard. Artists are either doing head shots or full fledged commissions at commission prices and nothing in between. It's now generally assumed that people are charging for sketches and you are seeing people in artists alley advertising they'll do sketches for free. Air conditioning was a problem at first. It was hot Friday and early Saturday. Around 1:30pm Saturday you could feel the A/C working. On Friday and Saturday the fire marshal restricted access to the south building. The south side of the convention has 4 levels, street level and 3 levels below named 600, 700 and 800. Line up to get tickets was on the 600 level and that is where too many people were. Con security directed people who had already gotten their tickets to move down to the lower levels. Once people moved down off of level 600 the Fire Marshals were letting people in. The delay did cause some people to leave in frustration. I do know they sold double the amount of advanced tickets and sold out of the advance VIP premium tickets about a week before the show. Friends who bought those tickets went to the con at noon on Friday and only had short line to get their badges. Come closer to 2pm the lineups were huge. The long lines hour + long wait for people to get in was always an issue but with this many people they really need to figure out a way to get the registration process moving quicker. I talked to dealers both half way and at the end of the convention. Many said Friday and Saturday was really busy. Sunday was slower as normal, but slower than usual for some people. Regarding sales most of them said it was either much better or about the same as last year. Oddly, the tables closer to the video game section on the far left were the ones saying they had done much better and the more towards the middle of the floor dealers were saying it was about the same. Artists were a little less uniform but most of them said it was an up year. Tara Tallan who was unsure of how well her Galaxion would sell to what appears to be a more superhero oriented audience was surprised in how well she did, with only a small quantities of books left over at the end of the day. Lars De Sousa, artist of Least I Can Do said they had an up year. I can't help but notice both of these are done on the web and I can't help but speculate that helping as Fan Expo is drawing on more diverse crowd. Traditional comics is only a part of the convention now, with Video Games, Manga/Anime, Statue/Action figures, Sci-Fi, Card/RPG stuff and now non-geek culture related celebrities showing up. Perhaps their webcomics, which generally attract a more diverse audience is seeing a benefit from the diverse crowd? Much to my surprise I actually found more people doing self published comic books than usual in artists alley. It used to be you could count those doing comics on 1 hand, now it's getting to 2 hands. The press was treated much better this year as we were able to get our press pass at 2 when it started and get in right after. I pretty much stuck to the comic stuff and stayed away from the celebrities for the most part. When I was around there I was able to snap a picture or two. The security to try and prevent pictures being taken was not as tight in previous years. While apparently some celebs didn't want any fans taking pictures they quickly gave up on that as it's impossible to prevent in a wide open space. In all it appears that Marvel and DC officially having a booth/presence at the con did drive up attendance and sales for the comics section of the convention. I personally had a good time and will be likely going again next year. Speaking of which, the convention will be moving back to the North Side as HobbyStar was unable to get the same space on the south side of the building. Looking at the Metro Centre website it appears that there is 7000 sq foot less floor space for the main dealers room which isn't too hard to manage, but the extra stuff with panels and especially the masquerade will difficult to squeeze in to the much smaller rooms around that area. It will be interesting to see how they handle it.
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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