"Back" as in back to our home, as SCCC was held in the same city as us. I'm doing this today, two days after the convention, because while I'm still wiped out from this weekend's event, tomorrow I have to get back to work making plush for Comicpalooza in two weeks.
There's been a lot of controversy and talk about Space City Comic Con. Earlier this year, it was the Houston Convention Bureau's suit against the convention organizer, George Comits, for infringing on the HCB's trademark of "Space City" for trade shows and conventions. This past weekend, it was rumoured that several of the headlining guests from the FX show "Sons of Anarchy" had their appearance fee checks bounce. Since I don't have any firsthand knowledge of either of these two events, I'm not really going to talk about them. All I know is that I had a pretty miserable experience at this show and that TIM+BEN Dolls won't be showing up to it again, as vendors or attendees, next year (although it already looks as if there won't be a next year).
The weeks leading up to the event, Space City Comic Con released an app to help guide attendees. Filled with icons that promised to give you info on what panels were going on, what celebrities would be signing and when, and what vendors would be where, you could tap on any to reveal ... nothing. My biggest concern for the app was the fact that they did not update the vendors past the letter 'A'. Pre-con advertising is pretty important to build hype and excitement for fans of artists attending the con. I'd think that my booth fee kind of entitled me to being at least on a list on a website/app, but it turns out that the money I'd spent would be worth much less than that.
The day of, we arrived to set up. We don't often have the luxury of setting up the day before the convention, as Aaron works during the week and I am still faithfully holding out for the self-driving car, so that our future car-robot overlords will take my loyalty into account when they start treating humans as crash test dummies for androids. I was worried, most of the other convention's we've been to required us to bring proof of purchase for our booth to receive our passes, but I hadn't gotten any info on such a requirement for SCCC. It turns out you could pretty much just walk onto the loading dock and say you were with TIM+BEN's table and have passes handed to you. Well, if you were willing to wait 45 minutes on the noisy, hot, outdoor loading dock. Oh, and they might have run out of actual vendors' passes when you get to the one man checking vendors in, so you'll get handed a pair of weird silver 3 Day Passes instead. Mine was actually broken, so I had Aaron go exchange it. He came back with a Convention Guest's pass, which afforded me many opportunities to sneak into places I wasn't supposed to be.
We walked over to the booth to find that it was a) nothing like the vendor packet said it would be; no dividers, table length was incorrect, trash can not included, colors were incorrect and b) right next to another stuffed toy vendor. I think that handmade stuffed toys are an uncommon enough commodity to space them out, but since I sell basically only original designs and most other plushie artists sell primarily fan art, there's little overlap in our customer base. Unprofessional details overlooked by the con, but not something I can't deal with.
Con was slow on Friday, lots of rain and people still being at work contributed to that. Our friend, author Ian Everett came to hang out with us at our booth! He's in the middle of writing his new novel, so we greatly appreciated him taking the time to hang out with us for the day. We did very well on Saturday; I was jazzed because this is our first booth where we brought only dolls and it's made me confident about the new doll designs I had available. Our friend Jude Vivona of the Caalo Xan audio drama stopped by to say hello, his booth was only a few aisles over. A man with an Ogler from the Caalo Xan booth stopped by for some repairs to his plush. If you're not aware, last year I made a series of large Ogler dolls for them. Sunday was slow-ish. A lot of children and families came for this last day. Not so many sales and we left an hour early because I started feeling ill. My cousin stopped by to see me -I haven't seen her in about 10 years, but she's been a big supporter of TIM+BEN since I started around 6 years ago and I was very pleased to see her and meet her new family. We got recognized from several people who have bought from us before! Fans! What a world.
The con was ok on a vendor's level. Not well-run, but sales were pretty good. I was so annoyed with so many aspects that we won't be coming back. I really like clear communication and feeling like the event I'm vending at actually knows how to run itself, so Space City Comic Con isn't for me.
On a personal note, Aaron got our home an autograph from Doug Jones, a very talented actor and professional sweetheart that we both admire. So, at least one good thing came out of Space City Comic Con for us.
Stay Fanatic,
Megh
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