San Diego has become ridiculous. The buses that ferry folks between the hotels and the con are sometimes hours late in the morning from all the traffic and the hotels are outrageously overpriced… IF you can score one.
My friends and I had to pay for a cab ride every morning and the cabbie would have to drop us off several blocks from the con as not to get stuck in traffic and the weather when I was there was balmy and gross.

Vegas has a tram that goes OVER the street to the con center making it so renting a car for the weekend, parking it somewhere and taking the tram isn’t an impossibility.

The Convention center is HUGE, there are hotels everywhere and folks from California drive there ALL THE TIME. Next time you are there count the California licence plates to the Vegas plates.

If the con does decide to move Vegas is the only rational place.

That would keep the place cleared out in the morning so that dealers could actually sell stuff to the “hardcore” fans that see Comic-Con as a purchasing trip (On Tuesday, I watched my friend UPS home 112 pounds of comics and paperbacks) and still provide plenty of opportunities for the casual fan to sweep up the swag and make the random purchase.

Oh yes, and if you’re one of the few that stopped in at the film festival, I salute you.

It would augment the amount of convention space and hotel rooms.

It would augment the amount of convention space and hotel rooms.

Keep it in San Diego, but get rid of some of the things that have nothing to do with comics, like soft core porn (again, I like some porn, but there are separate shows for that). The focus needs to return to comics.

For one thing — OF ABOUT THREE MILLION — the favorite activity of most con-goers is standing around and talking, and the entire city is designed to thwart this. I don’t believe too many people dislike the con-goers as much as some believe, but in Vegas they’d openly hate the con-goers.

Although I have to admit it would be funny to have a convention in Las Vegas where they ran the figures and found out only $342.76 was spent on gambling by all 175,000 attendees combined.

Plus I would totally kill if I could bet on the Eisners.

Maybe Comic-Con could become a bit more segmented like SXSW did for a bit with music, movies, technology (it’s been awhile since I’ve had the need to attend that so I’m not sure what it’s like these days) with a couple of key days for movie panels (like SIGGRAPH’s Exhibition 3-days) at the beginning or end of the Con, and 3-4 days of comics writing/art/production focused panels. Comic-Con could be spread over 6 days then instead of 4…

Yeah, let’s have the damn convention in Las Vegas!

Show up with your damn surfboard and see what happens.

~

Coat

Tired. Very tired.

Of course, the numbers Torsten quoted make a very compelling case for the “nonprofit educational organization dedicated to creating awareness of, and appreciation for, comics and related popular art forms” moving to Las Vegas. If you like walking from the show to your hotel, however, I’d stay in SD. And, the ocean views are better in SD too…

A concept that would certainly make Comicon a much more interesting show, albeit one that Convention organizers would likely nix because they are Californians and enjoy the local monopoly of hosting the fanboy version of the Super Bowl in their back yard EVERY YEAR:

Have Comicon become a traveling show that cities in the U.S. of A. can bid to host, as the CES has done in the past. Who thinks world class cities like Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles WOULDN’T and COULDN’T host Comic-Con? Rotate the Fanboy “Super Bowl” by having San Diego host it in even years, and try other locations in odd years.

Professional organizations, big and small, that host national meetings almost ALWAYS rotate locations to get the best deal possible for their organization and the people who pay for the privilege to attend them. In fact, why should SD city fathers negotiate a better deal or work with convention organizers AT ALL if the latter does nothing but stay put?

Wonder how the SD Chamber of Commerce would explain losing Comic-Con, one of the biggest consumer shows in the U.S, to Vegas or Chicago. I’d love to see the Comicon folks handle THAT PROBLEM!

What do y’all think?

Wayne

We talked about skywalks over the trains, too! But really, what train took more than a few minutes to go through? Our city has a number of skywalks. With four real seasons, we need ‘em!

Thanks for the figures to Thorsten! Do the Anaheim figures count the ice rink place where I saw the circus once? I’d like to use that, too, if I could. I think Disney, etc, could do the crowd thing, or at least could say what they think?

All LA area people will commute, they like that sort of thing acc. to Randy Newman. And LA, WestHo, etc. rooms all count.

Bringing the SD crowd to Vegas is immoral along the lines of the Children’s Crusade.

And we need to start thinking about remote viewing of panels. Why crowd in one room if you’re watching a screen anyway? It could be like the space academy in R is for Rocket. Or a well run sports book.

Probably like ten years ago, I was stuck on the non-convention center side with, if I remember right, among others, Mark Evanier, Stan Sakai and Jeff Smith. There had been some small press kinda thing at one of the hotels and we were all making our way back to the convention center when the train came by.

New York, Philadelphia, Chicago … all have had comic cons that failed. So why are comic cons still being held in those cities?

Viva Las Vegas … if someone can do a better job or organizing and promoting, they can have a show in Vegas.

Moving the show to Vegas won’t be good. They had a comics convention just a few years ago, and it failed miserably.

San Diego is the best place to hold a summer convention because the weather isn’t too harsh.

I, myself, even though I had a good time, am thinking about skipping next year and making the San Francisco Wonder Con my main convention as it’s the size that the San Diego convention was from 1999 until about 2002 or 2003 before it exploded. I just get overwhelmed easily and get sad when I can’t do everything.

PS - Yeah, no pedestrian bridge over the train track is pretty dumb. But then, the whole layout of that area is kind of wonky, especially for traffic in front of the Con Center.

They’ll do one for the balpark, with it’s tiny crowds, but not for the biggest money maker San Diego city actually has.

Poo to them I say! Poo!

Speaking of the Gaslamp district, you’re not going to find that concentration of good restaurants near the LA convention center. And in Vegas, everything’s so big that you practically have to walk half a mile to get from one end of a casino to the other.

The hardest thing to fix is hotel rooms. Parking is nasty, but mainly because it’s spread out across the downtown area. I heard they opened the lots at Petco Park this year since there weren’t any games this weekend, but I just left my car in the hotel lot the whole time.

If they expanded programming into neighboring hotel meeting rooms, it could ease some of the congestion. And I’m not sure they even use some of the upstairs rooms on the harbor side of Ballroom 20.

And a pedestrian bridge or two over the railroad tracks, somewhere in the middle. The bottleneck points at either end of the convention center, with a street and railroad blocking both, are really bad for trying to get in and out of the convention center.

San Diego: Halls A-H: 525,701 72 meeting rooms: 204,114 (Ballroom 6: 40,955 sq. ft.) plus pavillion space

Los Angeles: 720,000 sq ft exhibition; 147,000 sq ft meeting.

Las Vegas: (136,000 guest rooms, 9.7 MILLION sq. ft. total in the city)
Sixteen exhibit halls (1,940,631 sq.ft.) 144 meeting rooms (241,000) many rooms can be configured into larger (20K+ sq.ft.) rooms. (There are also the Mandalay Bay and Sands convention centers.)

Anaheim sounds nice, except for one BIG elephant in the room: Disneyland. What is the hotel occupancy during a typical summer weekend? Subtract that from hotel rooms, now add 50,000 guests.

Spin the media off into a new con, earlier in the season, probably in Anaheim. San Diego is still the big Con-glomerate (sorry, couldn’t resist), but some of the press-ure (heh) can be reduced if Hollywood is not tossing everything against the wall to see what sticks.