The history of the Dallas convention scene is worthy of a book, or at the very least, a series of magazine style articles. Talk to any of the long time dealers about the now gone Dallas Fantasy Fair and you'll here plenty of crazy, but interesting stories. It's interesting to me how Texas managed to play a role in comic collecting history, including the Church collection.

As far as the convention center. I never would have thought that it would out grow it in just a years time. They didn't either. They are contracted for at least another year so we'll see what happens.

Your posts bring back a flood of memories of DFF, Dallas Collector's Expo and those early Ben Steven's toy shows.

Here's an old Ben Stevens flyer where he first switched from Toys to Celebrity stuff (and his table prices jumped accordingly).

You can read more about Dallas and Oklahoma Comics Fandom in this thread started awhile back in the GA Forum...

http://boards.collectors-society.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=4933194&fpart=1

There's a lot of interesting anecdotal craziness to weed through, but it's lots of fun. For instance, the DFF was known far and wide by regular attendees as LarryCons, but you'll have to read through the FANDOM thread to learn why.

Thanks for posting this. Here's the story of the fall of the Dallas Fantasty Fair as relayed to me from the inside by Mark Walters who was Larry's "right-hand" at the time with some of my own memory of the events added to hopefully round-out the story.

Larry was a hell of a promotor. No one disputes this Under his Bulldog Productions name he was quite successful with putting these shows together eventually building it to the 3rd largest in the country.

I seem recall that he was doing 4 mini-cons a year with the DFF being the premiere event. It's hard for people to fathom having so many mini-cons in one area but the key to remember is that this was before the Internet. The only way to find a lot of this stuff was at these types of cons or through mail-order.

What Walters told me was that when Larry moved from doing the cons in hotels he didn't consider at the time that the hotel was providing tables, chairs, table covers, etc and going to Dallas Market Hall (which is so big they hold car shows in it) that he would now have to pay a catering company to supply all of the things that the hotel was previously providing as part of the contract fee.

This led to basically double the cost for using Market Hall because the catering bill was equal to the space fee. Approximately $30,000

$30,000 twenty years ago was a heck of a lot of money and when you've got a $60,000 bill staring at you in the face Larry chose to pay the facility and "float" the caterer along for a year. He usually couldn't pay the caterer until having the next DFF!

Because of this he would end up using a different caterer because he still owed the first one and then would float the second one along until the next year.

By the time the third one happened the caterer was not pleased at all and had filed suit. The injunction against the DFF occurred on opening day and as you stated in the other thread the doors were padlocked by the police.

Now, here's the catch. Olivia De Berardinis' art rep (whose name slips my mind) gets ahold of Larry and says, "Hey, what's going on here?"
Larry and Walters explain to him that they owe the caterer $30,000. He offers this... He will pay the caterer's bill to get the show open but he wants to own the Dallas Fantasy Fair. He doesn't want to take controll of it, only to own it and wants Larry to stay on as a paid promotor because promoting is what he did best.

Larry's ego got the better of him and he said no, causing the DFF to fall apart and for several dealers (including Bedrock I believe) to try and pick up the pieces.

It was a huge blow to the Dallas convention scene. We went from having one of the premiere events in the country to having nothing but the small hotel ballroom cons. Most of those weren't even comic related but were toy related. This event also left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths that I think is finally starting to dissolve.

The DFF was the first convention to bring together all of the Image artists in one place. This doesn't sound like much now but back then they were the rock stars of the comic world. The Harvey Awards were held at the DFF also.

If anyone reading this has any more information that they would like to relay then please do. If you don't want to state anything publicly but privately, that would do also as I'm trying to compile some information that I may write up some articles on in the future.

I've considered contacting Larry because I'd love to get his take on the events, especially now 20 years later.