Starting a story with a quote from the late Yogi Berra sounds like a cheat, but the quote attributed to him about public places certainly applies to the New York Comic Con. “Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded.” Soon enough, that might be how people see the annual event.
I covered the convention’s first three days and it was my first time at a comic book convention in several years. I actually attended the very first NYCC back in 2005, when it was a much different event. Back then, they didn’t even have the entire Javits Center. Today, with the comic book world gone mainstream, the event is desperately hoping to be as big as the San Diego Comic Con.
Conventions often whittle down to standing in line for a good chunk of your day. You stand in a line to get in, then stand in the “queue hall” to get a wristband for a main stage event and then you stand in a line for panels. You stand in line for autographs and you stand in line for drawings in Artists’ Alley. That is life at NYCC and it usually works.
There was one huge mistake made on Saturday, when a major chunk of the crowd that turned up for wristbands for the Netflix/Marvel panel on Jessica Jones and Daredevil weren't able to get one. For some inexplicable reason, someone must have forgotten how to count and there were more people than wristbands in the line. It was a disaster for so many and also revealed one bizarre thing missing from NYCC: satellite rooms showing live feeds of the main stage panels. When I was at Star Wars Celebration V in Orlando in 2010, there were rooms set up to watch George Lucas’ conversation with Jon Stewart. Even at SXSW in March, there were rooms showing the keynote speakers’ addresses if you didn’t get in. Are there not enough rooms at the Javits Center to allow for this?
There are other signs that this might be getting too big for the Javits Center. Even though every day sold out, there were much more people squeezed in on Saturday. You were practically pushed into a line just to leave the main showroom floor where dealers competed with publishers and studios for your attention.
All that said, there is still some fun to be had. Costume players - I mean cosplayers - are all over the place and most are willing to take photos. They are incredibly creative. One guy made a full Doctor Octopus apparatus, with arms made out of foam.
Some of the smaller panels I attended were actually more fun than the bigger ones. Lucasfilm and Disney made sure Star Wars was well-represented and those panels were all informative and even featured some announcements. On the other side of the spectrum was the previously mentioned Jessica Jones/Daredevil panel. While it was cool to see the first episode of Jessica Jones early, there was no major news revealed because that’s how Marvel works. We get it actors, you’ll get in trouble if you spoil things.
The next NYCC is scheduled for Oct. 6-9. You can check out my convention coverage below.
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Marvel finds another unique hero for Krysten Ritter’s ‘Jessica Jones’ on Netflix
Marvel promises another dark, daring season of Netflix’s ‘Daredevil’
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A more in-depth look at ‘Star Wars: Rebels’