Comic-Con 2020: A Guide
Comic cons are weird in 2020. Some have just vanished into the basement, some have rescheduled, then pushed the date, then ultimately cancelled and some have tried to go online with the experience with mixed results. Now the big daddy itself, COMIC-CON [AKA SDCC for us old guys] is making their attempt at lemonade from 2020’s lemons.
Obviously, this was always going to be a challenge - part of the allure of Comic Cons is the spectacle - the hustle and bustle of the crowds, the sights and sounds of booths and random celebs and cosplay and overpriced food. Anything online can only begin to scratch the surface of that singular nerd event that is the pop culture convention. As a creator that normally makes 90% of our income from cons, I’ve been watching this all with interest and so far, unfortunately, I’ve been generally disappointed - most offerings from other shows boil down to “Here’s some links to people, a couple of videos and a handful of tweets!” Or they go the other route, like Wizard World and double down on the celeb experience by doing events where you pay to watch a celeb in buffered “Live” chat sessions. Personally, I’ve found most of these to be high on the awkwardness and very low on every other aspect of a con.
I had higher hopes for Comic-Con. I’m not really sure why - It isn’t like their name lends itself to greater confidence in the digital promotion world, but they do have a lot more big money fingers in the pie, with celebs, games and studios having a vested interest in it being a resounding success. So far, it seems like what they’ve landed on is somewhere in between. Here’s a quick rundown of how you can attend Comic-Con 2020 @HOME:
PANELS:
First and foremost - The bulk of what’s on offer for Comic-Con overall are uploaded videos of panels. Most of them are pre-recorded.
The panels will be released according to Comic-Con’s schedule and most will appear on their Youtube page.
They also have a “Sched” site set up that lets you see the planned panels, when they will go live and details about each. This site is really well laid out and kind of fun to browse. They give you the options to watch the panels right there when they are live or go back to watch later. You can also add panels to your personal account if you set one up and that helps track things.
This is something I genuinely like. The idea of getting to see panels at my leisure is high on my positives for this - As an artist working a booth, I rarely get to see panels at shows and it’s one of the things I miss most about attending as a regular person. Also, I have no intention of ever doing SDCC so getting to see these panels in “real time” is cool. The Sched setup is really easy to use and browse.
There are some great panels on offer and their Youtube page will quickly become a valuable tool for creators and fans. I’d love it if they would consider releasing a lot of these as podcast episodes too.
The fact that most of these panels are pre-recorded is a plus for me - A lot of the shows have tried to do live streamed panels and it’s never efficient. They spend more time checking the feed than making content to watch and buffering, here in the internet wastes of Idaho is terrible.
SHOPPING:
The other major part of a con. Where my heart and bread and butter lie. This is where Comic-Con dropped the ball hard.
To “Visit” the show floor, the site takes you to an awkward virtual map with teensy tiny boxes all over with numbers and periodic logos. This map is pretty much the exact map we get as creators when we get our booth assignments. It’s always awful to navigate.
Once you find a booth - and they aren’t all populated, as vendors had to opt-in to this, you click on it and in a window to the side it shows you their booth name, or maybe an offer, or a bio, or a few tabs with all of it. Mostly plain text and a link or two. To actually visit the vendor, you have to follow a link to their page. Unless they uploaded products to Comic-Con’s shop option, in which case it takes you to a super basic product page that then links you to their shop page where you can buy things.
It’s all an absolute mess. Why they couldn’t set up a list of participating vendors that you could sort by subject or product type is utterly beyond me. This is like trying to shop from a catalog made of post-it notes that was uploaded to the internet in 2004.
Oh, and the site sends up a warning pop-up every time you go to the map. So to find a vendor and buy a product from the Comic-Con home page, you have to click on something 6-15 times just to get to the point you can click “Add to cart.” Ugh.
You can find a comprehensive and mostly efficient list to browse by digging into the listings far enough to find a product page, then clicking at the top. There you’ll find a text list of vendors with some minimal sorting options. This is the best way to use their site. And it still feels half-assed. Like they just ported over their usual vendor listings from the show and walked away. CLICK HERE for that style of shopping.
AMBIANCE
Comic-Con at least tried here. Probably harder than they did for artist alley and vendors. There is a link that takes you to printable badges so you can print out and attach a badge to your lanyard at home. They also have a “Do not disturb” sign for panels and even MP3’s of their overhead announcements. This is all super quirky and I appreciate it.
BEYOND THE CON
Like regular Comic-Con, there is also a plethora of other events planned by companies around the con. Toy releases, new trailer drops, big announcements and off-campus panels and videos. I’ll try and track those down too!
So we will see. I’ll be attending today and through the weekend, picking at panels that look fun and trying to talk to some of the vendors to see if they are seeing any success. I’m planning a daily rundown of news here, so stay tuned! Let me know what you’ve thought of con’s attempts to survive this - what could they do better?
Oh, and here is the schedule of panels I’m currently “attending” for the show. My plan is to track them with the Sched site, but not watch them from it - when they go live, I’ll add them to a playlist on my Youtube channel, then watch them from the Youtube app on my TV while I draw.
