Ottawa Comic Con
Report By Jamie Coville
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Date: May 12th - 13th, 2012 Location: CE Centre, 4899 Uplands Dr. Attendance: approx. 20,000 I got the last minute chance to attend the first Ottawa Comic Con for Saturday only. I did not go as press as I had some comic dealer friends who were able to get me a pass. When we showed up around 8:30-9am-ish there was already a long line up outside the convention circling around the building. We got in and some dealers were either just finishing setting up or were already done. I noticed people trickling in soon after and they were those with the VIP passes who got in an hour+ early. When the regular people came in you couldn't help but notice some got sunburn from waiting outside for a while. There were a variety of comic dealers there and they were the first 'section' the fans had to walk through. I didn't do an exact count but there appeared to be about a dozen comic dealers there. Some were local to Ottawa and I was familiar with them, others were traveling convention dealers like Harley Yee. The selection of bin comics primarily seemed to be bronze age to modern, except for what was on the display walls. Plenty of dealers had trades and I found some surprising variety within the selection. The aisles had lots of space which was nice. Mixed in and further down were dealers selling non-comic items like T-shirts, toys and anime DVDs. After that, then some artists on one side and celebrities on the other. They gave the celebrities lots of space for their line ups so it didn't interfere too much with the rest of the convention. There was also some gaming in the back corner, which was run by a local comic book store. There didn't appear to be too many people interested in gaming though. There was a food court section hidden away in the back corner that had some variety of food and a couple of convention food courts between the main floor and the hallway. These were pretty much always busy with long line ups. I had gone to 3 panels but only recorded one.
The first panel was Focus on Web Comics with Ryan Sohmer & Lar DeSouza. (49:20, 45.1mb) The 2nd panel was a Neal Adams panel. I arrived a bit late so I did not record it. Neal had answered questions from the floor and talked a bit about his love of new technology that can be used in comics. He said one of the reasons he came back to comics was because he wanted to introduce the new technology to comics. Specifically he brought up that he had his kids create the new Valiant poster where if you put your cell phone across the mouth area an animated mouth would appear on your phone and say something. Neal answered questions from the crowd, particularly talking about Green Lantern/Green Arrow run. When a guy in the audience started a question saying Neal was a nice guy, Neal immediately began talking at length about how he doesn't consider himself a nice guy and kept talking whenever the guy tried to ask his actual question. Eventually he gave up and other people were able to ask questions. Neal did have to watch his language as there were kids in the audience. He did mention he was doing something for Marvel but the details would be announced tomorrow (it was the New X-men related series). At one point a person wanted him to talk about his science theories and Neal knew nobody was interested in hearing that and advised the guy to come to his table and he can talk about it there. Neal did talk a bit about what he feels is unnecessary jargon in the various science fields and thinks there needs to be a new universal easy to understand language that allows the people from various disciplines to understand each other. The room which seats 300 was packed and and plenty stood along the back wall to watch. The last panel was supposed to be a Darick Robertson panel. There was a little over 50 people there. After about 15 minutes of waiting I had asked the volunteer what was going on and he said he didn't know and he asked the front desk about it. I gave up and left. I never saw him sitting at a table with the other artists but I am told he was there on both days. Artist advertised but I did not see was Herb Trimpe and Marco Rudy. I did get to see and talk to Ron Sutton and Janet Heatherington which was nice. I also talked to Dave Ross and Kelly Tindall for a bit too. I did talk to a bunch of the dealers around 5:30-6pm and the majority of them seemed to be happy with the show thus far. People were not buying big ticket items but most dealers were not selling very expensive books from the bins. Those that were selling expensive comics did not appear to be doing so well. Shelves that were full of trades were noticeably depleted of some of their stock too. The convention was interesting from a crowd reaction. A lot of folks looked to be completely new to comic conventions. Plenty dressed up in costumes. They came in, looked around at stuff, eventually decided to buy something with the limited amount of money they brought and then left. Later on in the afternoon the crowd thinned out considerably and the convention began selling more tickets as people began to leave. I was not there for Sunday but I've heard through 2nd hand sources it was pretty dead, which wasn't surprising seeing how people didn't stay the full day Saturday and Sunday was Mother's Day. I will likely go again next year but I'm not sure that I'll do both days unless there is some really good programming going on. 120 Pictures of the con are here
Regards, |
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E-mail: jcoville@kingston.net
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