It's the dead of summer peaking at 115 degree temps, but that didn't stop thousands of people from making their way to phoenix convention center for this year's Comic Con. From cosplayers to famous actors phoenix comicon was bigger and better than ever, and as always the Droids were there to tell you all about it.
Now the first thing wanna touch on was the dedication of the people attending. As i mentioned temps reached a scorching 115 degrees and the lines easily spanned across 2 city blocks, did i mention the lines were outside in the sun. People in full costume had to have been dying. We saw a lot of running sweaty makeup, feelt kinda bad for them. Convention Director Matt Solberg actually issued a formal apology in the news for making fans wait outside in the heat saying “there was no excuse and it should have been better planned” which i thought was a nice thing to do.
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The coordinators of the event booked all 3 floors of the convention center, closed 2 full city streets, and even the first floor of the Hyatt hotel. With all that space they still managed to pack more than you could imagine. The convention floor is loaded with collectables, comics and artists there to sell you anything from a casper comic book to a $15,000 replica sword autographed by the cast of game of thrones.
Needless to say one needs to be carefull, its way to easy to get carried away buying stuff and end up broke beyond belief. As I mentioned in my fan expo review i'm not much of a comic book guy but i have to mention that there were at least 20 booths selling a range of comics which one would expect from comic con.
There was also an overwhelming number of vendors selling collectable like pop characters, tv/movie memorabilia, weapons, and the ever famous mystery boxes. Needless to say there was more than enough to look at and keep everyone entertained.
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Cosplay is always another really big part of comic con and that was indeed the case. There was no shortage of great cosplay with the usual suspects showing up as well as a lot of new characters that i hadn't seen before. Now with the deadpool movie and star wars movies that came out and I expected to see a flood of Deadpool and Kylo Ren but that wasn't really the case, there were a good number of them but not in the masses i expected.
Some of the more popular ones that i saw that were kind of a surprise were the war boys from Mad Max, and amazingly a lot of Five Nights at Freddies (which i am a huge fan of i might add). There were of course no shortage of Harley Quinn's and X-men. All in all there were some really great outfits and some not so great outfits, even the not so great ones were good to see since it's more about the fun of it than making “the best costume”.
Second to the cosplay was the list of famous actors and artists offering pics and signatures. Over 35 of them to be a bit more specific. With names like Oded Fehr, Mark Pellegrino, Kane Hodder, Nolan North, Ralph Macchio, Sean Astin, Tony Todd, Troy Baker, William Zabka, just to name a few. Getting an autograph from one of these stars will range you from $20 all the way up to $80 i saw (for just a signature a pic with them was an additional 30).
I don't usually pay for autographs but being the huge horror fan that i am i couldn't pass a pic and autograph with the infamous Kane Hodder. Some had huge lines (i waited for 45 mins to meet Kane) and some had no lines whatsoever (almost felt kinda bad for them). With the massive number of people and how quickly everything moves and happens the chance of a random encounter with someone famous is pretty much non existent sadly.
I couldn't find any actual numbers for attendance but the closest i saw was over 75,000 over the 4 days. Considering the temps being as high as they were that's a huge turn out. Overall it was a lot of fun as always, more fun infact that you almost couldn't see or do everything in in just one day. One of the biggest things that i noticed in walking around is that there is a certain friendship that thousands of total strangers can get along and have fun just because we all obsess over the same stuff.
Watching the people in the long lines everyone would spark up conversations and act like they have been friends forever even though they just met, just because we are all into the same culture, it's very uplifting. We can't thank the people at Phoenix comicon enough for the opportunity to attend and report back the amazing times we had. Up next Fanfest, make sure to keep an eye out in december.
