By Saturday, The Admiral Theater (a local strip club) had not shown up and a comic dealer was occupying their booth.  Let’s count this as Wizard getting a clue that having strippers at a booth is just asking for Fox News and company to start running “exposes”/witchhunts on the comics community.  Especially when you’ve got an officially designated Kid’s Day.  I know some of you guys want to see your strippers for free, but this just isn’t the right place (although this year saw the return of “glamour models” to the autograph area).

Overall Assessment

Wizard surprised me.  The crowd on Saturday and the slightly elevated levels on Sunday make me think this is still a viable show and this won’t have been the last year.  On the other hand, this is not a comics show, per se.  An awful lot of the Saturday traffic, which was what saved the show, seemed to be autograph/media-related.  Yes, that includes Twilight.  These people aren’t going to be spending as much (if any) in the dealer area and artist alley.

The Friday ghost town indicates to me that few people were taking a day off work and/or flying in for Friday, relative to years past.  To me, this is the core comics audience and it has eroded since the 2000-2003 period when the Rosemont convention center was almost bursting at the seams, especially on Saturday.

Talking with some artists in artist alley (not named Frank Cho, who always had a line), the reaction was that they got about what they expected.  “Average.”  “Mediocre.”  They don’t get a lot of enthusiasm up for Wizard World.

The dealers was a mixed bag.  It seemed like if you were participating in the heavy discounting, you were getting a decent amount of business.  It seemed like it was also “average”/meeting expectations, but that not everybody was planning on coming back.  There also seemed to be some logistical complaints about set up, who had what booth and so forth.  (Of course listing the $40 admission ticket for the John Ostrander auctions as “FREE” in the convention program is high on the gaffe list.)  I’ve talked before about the nature of dealers at conventions changing, but I never really thought I’d be seeing multiple examples of $3 graphic novel fire sales.

I also wonder where all these deep discount Marvel tpbs are coming from?  I’m going to go out on a limb and say at least 80% of the $5 graphic novels were Marvel from the last 3-4 years.  Which is to say you were just getting into comics and happened to be at Rosemont, you could get a pretty decent percentage of Marvel’s creative production in the last few years for $5 a pop.

I had dinner with a couple of out-of-town fans Sunday night.  They weren’t planning on coming to another Wizard show in Chicago.  It boiled down to, they just didn’t have much to do at the show.  The programming and lack of publisher booths had them contemplating going downtown Saturday instead of going to the show.  In other words, they were bored.

And that’s really what this boiled down to: lack of excitement.  Fans, dealers, creators… nobody (Twilight fans excepted, and it isn’t like they had real Twilight stars at the show) seems to be that excited about Wizard.  It seems to be more of a one-day show than three days and a preview night.  Chicago is a celebrity-starved city and an autograph show could have legs, but it’s quite likely to see more attrition on the dealer and artist alley side unless Wizard can pull some more publishers back in.  I suppose where I’m sitting, the identity of the so-called Chicago Comic-Con is in flux.  The comics part floated the show (kind of ) Friday and probably Sunday.  It would seem to make fiscal sense to swing more towards media next year and try to stretch out those Saturday visitors (getting higher profile celebrities would be a good start).

I really thought this year would be Wizard’s swan song in Chicago.  They proved me wrong, I just don’t remotely know what it is they’re going to be.

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