Too big for its own good

Another year, another Comic-Con.
The world’s largest pop culture event continues to get bigger and bigger. Everybody wants to go, which is starting to become a real problem for the people that manage it.
I had a great time, of course. I hung out with the developers of “Sonic Mania” at a VIP party, interviewed the cast of “Gotham,” and even nearly brushed shoulders with Stan Lee himself on the convention center floor.
But I was able to do these things thanks to my access as a member of the press, the support of my group of friends, and an intimate knowledge of how the convention works.
If a lone person decided to visit Comic-Con, their experience would doubtlessly be very different. So much so that I wonder if I would enjoy the convention at all if this year was my first time going. I fear that newcomers lucky enough to get in will be soured by broken expectations.
In some crowds I am still a relative newcomer, but after fourteen years even I can lament about how things were in the good old days. Since my first convention, Comic-Con has more than doubled in size. I remember celebrating the first time attendees filled the convention center to capacity in 2006, proud of how much it had grown.
Nowadays filling the San Diego Convention Center to capacity is a given. Comic-Con has long since outgrown the building, spilling out into neighboring hotels and venues. From nearby marina to the sports stadium across the street, the convention has all but literally burst out of the convention center and spelled into a huge area of downtown San Diego. You can literally take a trolley from the convention center to the next stop down the line and still not leave the area of the convention.
Amazingly, these expansions haven’t put a dent in the demand for tickets. Even as it grows faster than the city of San Diego can keep up with, tickets to the convention are harder and harder to get. Tickets sold online are gone within seconds, often crashing the vending service in the process. Buying a 4-day pass is essentially like playing the lotto, hoping that you can get your credit card through the internet before the website crashes from the onslaught of thousands of people trying the same thing.
This ludicrous amount of demand is becoming unmanageable, for both attendees and Comic-Con staff, who are challenged with the impossible task of controlling the population of Cedar Rapids within a few blocks of downtown San Diego.
Ironically, it seems that Comic-Con’s biggest feature may be responsible for many of its issues. The illustrious Hall H, a 6,000 seat room where Hollywood’s biggest stars come to show off their upcoming features or tease new products.
Once upon a time you could arrive at the convention center at the crack of dawn and secure a front row seat for Hall H’s events.
Today it’s all but impossible to even get inside unless you’re willing to camp out overnight. Every year my group gets in line earlier than the year before and every year we end up even further back. These days you’re not likely to get into Hall H unless you have a network of friends to take shifts waiting in line for at least a day.
Demand for entry into Hall H has even attracted a criminal element. This year Comic-Con had to crack down on people buying and selling fake wristbands to gain access to the hall.
Ten years ago such a thing never would have happened, but the culture of Comic-Con has subtly changed as its population ballooned. Demand for entry into Hall H has overridden the sense of community that once brought all of us geeks together.
Which is not to say that the convention culture has completely fallen into disarray. Several San Diego police officers have told me that Comic-Con is an easy week for them. One would think that putting 100,000 strangers in downtown San Diego would be a recipe for disaster, but apparently we’re still a mostly good bunch.
Still, it’s hard to deny that Comic-Con is not what it used to be. It’s still my favorite week of the year, but that’s more to do with spending time with my friends and having realistic expectations about what is or isn’t possible to do than anything else.
This is normally the part of the column where the writer would weigh in and offer an idea of what should be done, but the truth is that Comic-Con is stuck in an impossible situation. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Even if the perpetually stalled expansion to the convention center happens, it won’t fix the underlying issue. The extra space may allow for more people to attend but the demand will always exceed the supply. So long as that’s the case, it’s going to continue to be too difficult for people to really experience what the convention has to offer.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and remembers the good old days.