Wizard World St. Louis -- April 7-9, 2017

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Seven months away.

Three months away.

That one will be a big NO, unless there is a major overhaul of the dealer's room to bring in some quality back issue comics.

Last time, it might as well have been a Funko Pop convention only.

Michael C. Hall appears to have cancelled.

I will be going.

Looks like I might be the only one going.

I'm sure I'll be there.  

I will be there for at least one of the days, but this is looking worse than last year.  I just don't see how anyone setting up is going to make their money back let alone eek out a profit.

Any reports?

There certainly was a lot of space to stretch your legs and plenty of empty tables and chairs if you needed to find a place to sit.  This was going to be a subpar show but I didn't expect to be able to walk the floor in 10min, though I was surprised by the number of comic selling vendors!  Harley is always a standout with a nice range of golden age books but a vendor named Kristina's Comics (not sure about name) had a nice mix of silver and slabs for this area and were priced below market (they always had alot of traffic and sales).  I ended up spending a large portion of time bothering shooting the breeze at Stuart Saygers booth as it is rare to find another Millie/Decarlo/Goldberg fan so I make it a point to stop by any convention he is at.

This is the first Wizard convention I've been to since they really fell on hard times the end of last year but the Celebrity area was in the middle of the convention floor and from a design perspective gave the impression they were spreading it out to take up space rather than showcasing talent.  There was probably about 25% of the floor space sitting empty with an additional 10% of empty booths (I was only there saturday).

With all of the above stated, the general crowd atmosphere seemed pretty good though, I would be very interested to hear the vendor and artist reaction.  I believe most of the vendors will do ok (not loose money) any artist in attendance had to be worried in my opinion.

The only money I ended up spending was at the above Kristina's Comics:

• X-Men V2 9.8 #205 (for the registry)
• X-men V2 9.8 #4 (newsstand)
• Flash #113 in Fine

All for very good and very sub market/GPA prices!

This was such a horrible show.  It will not last much longer IMO.  I like a little more comics at my comic convention.  Very few dealers, in fact there were more dealers at the last local flea market I went to in the are than there was here.  There were some vendors with interesting stuff.  My son bought a art print thingy and had his caricature done for $10 and he enjoyed that.  i never have been into autographs really but that area was confusing.  Oh and Gene simmons was signing things for $120 which is hilarious to me. Or you could get a selfie with him for $120.  Boggles my mind.

As was stated earlier you could walk it in very little time and since there were few comic dealers I ended up mostly watching my son get pics with some of the cosplay people which did a pretty good job.  In all I was there for about 2.5 hours.

Last WW show I will go to.  Going to C2E2 this year instead so hopefully that's better. WW ruined the Chicago con, I wish they had not sold it to them.  Waiting for Comic Show Armageddon when WW goes bankrupt.  Then those left might actually be good.

2 hours ago, WoWitHurts said:

This was such a horrible show.  It will not last much longer IMO.  I like a little more comics at my comic convention.  Very few dealers, in fact there were more dealers at the last local flea market I went to in the are than there was here.  There were some vendors with interesting stuff.  My son bought a art print thingy and had his caricature done for $10 and he enjoyed that.  i never have been into autographs really but that area was confusing.  Oh and Gene simmons was signing things for $120 which is hilarious to me. Or you could get a selfie with him for $120.  Boggles my mind.

As was stated earlier you could walk it in very little time and since there were few comic dealers I ended up mostly watching my son get pics with some of the cosplay people which did a pretty good job.  In all I was there for about 2.5 hours.

Last WW show I will go to.  Going to C2E2 this year instead so hopefully that's better. WW ruined the Chicago con, I wish they had not sold it to them.  Waiting for Comic Show Armageddon when WW goes bankrupt.  Then those left might actually be good.

With at least two other large players (Reed and FanExpo) you'll just see fighting over Wizard's corpse to pick up the profitable shows. With Chicago, for example, Reed already has C2E2 so another Chicago show later in the calendar makes little sense. I see either Fan Expo moving in, or another moderately sized independent promoter picking up the late summer Chicago show. Most of the Wizard shows will go away completely, with better attended shows like New Orleans being possible exceptions.

I'd like to think a well run winter show will survive in Cleveland but I think Cleveland has way to many small one day shows already to justify a big one once a year.  Cleveland just isn't a town that want to or can spend $150 getting a celeb signature so these mega entertainment cons may not be back once Wizard goes the way of the dodo.

On 3/19/2017 at 1:02 PM, Transplant said:

I'm sure I'll be there.  

Turns out I was not.  I looked at the list of comic vendors and made the choice to not even try to get a dealer pass or some other free entry into a show, 10 minutes from my house.  Instead, I made bank at the poker tables Friday night; spent Saturday doing family stuff and Sunday was supporting the GO! STL Marathon.  Didn't feel like I missed a thing.