Bigger, Stronger, Faster: Boston Comic Con, Day One

Jesus Christ, I wasn’t expecting that.

In the times that I have attended Boston Comic Con in the past, it has been a nice little regional convention. Sure, in the past few years, it has attracted some A-List talent like Tim Sale and Geof Darrow, but generally, those guys have stayed at their tables on the floor, and while some of them might have attracted a decent individual line or two, it didn’t affect the little regional convention as a whole. Which meant that you could walk in off the street, wander up and buy a ticket at the door within thirty seconds on a whim, comfortably wander the floor at your leisure to see everything you want, spend a bunch of quality time with every creator you could make eye contact with, and leave within a couple or three hours, comfortable you’ve seen everything there is to see.

And frankly, that was what I was expecting this morning, when we got to this year’s delayed opening of the Boston Comic Con. Sure, the convention had picked up one or two more high-toned guests like DC Comics’ Publisher Dan DiDio and Batman writer Scott Snyder, but thanks to the delay created by the Marathon Bomber, the convention was being held at the Seaport World Trade Center – a much bigger venue than the originally-booked Hynes Convention Center – so there should have been plenty of room to handle the expected demand for a little regional convention, right?

Yeah, right… except it seems that 2013 was the year that Boston decided that it no longer wanted a little regional convention. By noon today, the main floor of the convention, even at this bigger venue, was like walking the floor at San Diego Comic-Con on any given Saturday, and every volunteer on the floor – who thought they were signing on to wrangle a nice little regional convention – looked like they had suddenly realized that they had signed on to be the local intern guide for Galactus.

At least for today, Boston Comic Con was not a nice little regional convention. It was a major convention with world-class talent and a comparably excited and enthusiastic crowd that could hold its head up with any convention short of San Diego and New York…

Even if the people running the convention weren’t completely prepared for it.

Falling For Another Con: Boston Comic Con Coverage Starts Today

We are posting this as we are preparing to leave to attend the first day of Boston Comic Con 2013 – a smaller convention than San Diego Comic-Con to be sure, but I’ve seen a couple of estimates on Twitter that 15,000 people are expected to attend, which means it has grown hell and gone from four years ago, when it was still being held in the function room of a local hotel. But there’s a lot to be said for attending a smaller convention, particularly when it it being attended by A-List talent like Scott Snyder, Joe Hill, Gabriel Rodriguez, Colleen Doran, Dan DiDio, David Mack, and a pile of other exciting creators… and when attendance requires only a subway ride as opposed to a cross-country flight. Besides, after a week of leaving a convention and then begging and scraping for the odd spare Internets, it will be nice to have a pre-paid multi-megabit pipe to post pictures of people in Wolverine outfits.

We will be attending and covering both days of the convention (but if you’re local to southern New England, you don’t need us; tickets will be available at the door at the Seaport World Trade Center at 200 Seaport Boulevard in Boston, or you can preorder them through Eventbrite), including as many panels as we can get into (including a Batman panel featuring Snyder that has just been announced), but please be sure to follow us on Twitter, as we will be live-Tweeting panels and photos right from the scene. In addition, we will be uploading videos from the convention to our YouTube channel both tonight and tomorrow evening (and honestly, probably on into next week).

But if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to make our way to the convention. Being a trip via the subway system, I will just as forbidden to smoke as I was on our flight to San Diego… but the good news is that, being the Boston subway system, I will be allowed to urinate.