When Emerald City Comicon announced that it was merging with ReedPop, everyone who knows and loves the Seattle-based convention had the same question:
“Will ReedPop change Emerald City Comicon?”
I mean, after all, exhibitors and attendees alike have loved this show — run by Jim Demonakos and an amazing staff of dedicated comics-lovers — for years.
Ask anyone who has ever exhibited there. and they’ll tell you that they’ve never been treated better. Ask the attendees. They’ll tell you the show is a highlight in their year. This show was special. And there’s more than a few people who felt a little worried that this Good Thing had come to an end earlier this year when the merger was announced.
Scott, Cory and I wondered it on a recent episode of Surviving Creativity. We got both Jim and ReedPop VP Lance Festerman on the line to assuage our fears.
They told us that Emerald City was going to continue unchanged.
We crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.
So imagine my surprise — my downright elation — when I walked into the ReedPop-run Special Edition; NYC convention this weekend. This was the first Reed show since incorporating the Emerald City staff, and it was — for all intents and purposes — Emerald City East.
Better! It was like one of the old Emerald City shows. Remember being in the bottom of Mariner’s stadium? Remember those old comics-centric Seattle shows — those shows where the hardcore love of comics was as palpable as the smell of Silver Age quarter bins?
That’s what happened at Pier 94 in Manhattan last weekend.
Exhibitors got all the one-on-one attention, the shuttles to and from the show, the care, and the respect that they thought only happened once-a-year in Seattle.
ReedPop may not change Emerald City, but from what I saw this weekend, Emerald City is changing ReedPop.
And that’s good news for people like me who love those old-school comic-book comic conventions.
I asked the former-ECCC staffers who stopped by my booth in their new roles with ReedPop the same question: “With this show proving such a success, what are the chances for Special Edition: Chicago… Special Edition: Oakland… Special Edition: Boston… and so on?”
All I got were smiles.
Wide smiles.
There was a lot of that going around last weekend. Build-a-Baddie Returns (And It’s Bigger, Badder, and More Chaotic)
The last Build-a-Baddie Poll was such a hit, it spun off not one but two projects — a microfic and a 1,500-word short story!
So naturally… we’re doing it again.
Welcome back to Build-a-Baddie — the crowd-sourced character experiment where you decide:
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The creature
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The personality
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The situation they’re caught in
I take your winning combo and turn it into a brand-new illustration.
There’s also a Wildcard section if you want to whisper your weirdest ideas into the void. No promises… but I will read them.
Voting opens this week on Patreon. Bring your best (and worst) ideas.
Transcript — Evolution Success Stories
A single-panel cartoon shows two bug-like creatures standing on a forest floor surrounded by large green leaves. Both have tall, thin, purple bodies with spindly limbs and antennae. The bug on the right has colorful, symmetrical butterfly wings with orange, black, and white patterns and looks relatively normal — an evolution success story The bug on the left has a strange, mismatched set of wings that resemble bold, graphic signage instead of natural wings. The wings are black with bright orange arrows and large words pointing in different directions, including “TASTY,” “HERE,” and “YUM!” with arrows directing attention toward the bug’s own body. The malformed-wing bug looks uneasy, while the butterfly-wing bug looks on. Beneath the comic, a caption reads: “All I’m saying is… it’s easy to be a fan of evolution if all you hear about are the success stories…”
To the right of the panel is a blue box that reads: “Intermission — The Evil Inc storyline will continue next week.”
