I’m at the Springfield Expo Center for Missouri Comic Con. More specifically I’m in this sort of side room off the main convention floor. It is fairly nondescript and echo-y, in part because it’s extremely crowded. This is where all of the “A-List” celebrities have their tables set up to meet fans all day. The line to see Sean Astin, who was Samwise in The Lord of the Rings, is especially long. His autograph is $80. It’s sort of like an airport – they’re zig-zagging the lines, and some of these people are so popular, they’re calling groups of attendees up over the intercom like boarding groups for a plane.
Despite being a relatively small part of the event, this room is the one thing at Missouri Comic Con that you’re most likely to know about — the posters for the event are dominated by portraits of Steve from Blues Clues, Gates McFadden from Star Trek TNG and all the other big-name guests. To learn more about how booking guests for an event like this works, I spoke with Joey Mills, who emceed the convention and also works with media.
As he explained, "typically what happens is the owner works with a group of agents or a group of companies – there are companies that just represent celebrities at conventions… So, it’s like, yeah, this is the amount of money I’ve got, I’m going to bring in two or three A-level guests, if possible, I’m going to bring in a bunch of that kind of like, B-level, and then I’ll fill up with whatever amount of money is in my budget with as many C-levels as I can."
Missouri Comic Con is run by a Mississippi-based company called VXV Events, founded by current CEO Jay Branch. They operate 11 other conventions throughout the south and upper Midwest. That scale is how they’re able to bring such recognizable guests, especially when compared to, say, Visioncon, Springfield’s long-running local convention.
"Yeah, so, Visioncon in particular: we can talk about them because they’re kind of the established brand that people know in this area. Visioncon is a non-profit that is ran and organized strictly by volunteers, and the money they make goes to a local charity every year, and they swap out which one it is based on what’s going on every year… And that’s perfect. I mean, there’s room for everything," said Mills. "But for us it’s a company. It’s an LLC, it’s for-profit… So, because this company is continuing to kind of build that war chest we can afford, over time, to start bringing out bigger guests."
But like I mentioned: the guests are the hook, not the whole convention. Across the street at the University Plaza Hotel there was a large area for registration and three panel rooms. Two of them were mostly celebrity Q&As, but there was another filled by things like "Anime Appreciation Hour" and "The Cosplay Dating Game." Upstairs at the Expo Center, there was a small arcade, a bunch of elaborate Lego displays and some booths for organizations like the Missouri Ghostbusters, who do not bust ghosts but do possess multiple working Ghostbusters cars.
By far the biggest area of the convention was the vendor floor, where booths sold everything from t-shirts to art prints to accurate recreations of film and video game props. I spoke to one such seller, E. Ville Labs, which recreates weapons from the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
"We’ll take the 3-D pieces and attach them to the product. A lot of times we have to re-tool them to fit again," the seller explained. "Once that is done, we’ll go back, and I hand paint each piece. I paint with a toothbrush and stencil brush, they’re not airbrushed at all. We’ll go back and finish that, and then it has sealer on it – that’ll create a finished product."
All of this is cool. But after spending some time at the event, it’s easy for one to start questioning what the point of all this is, really. When I asked Mills, his answer basically boiled down to connection.
As he put it, "I will see people in costumes that they’re not going to wear to work, they’re not going to wear to school, they’re not going to wear to the grocery store... and you’ll see -- you’ll hear it first, somebody squealing. And you’ll look, and there’ll be — see these people that like, come running over to that person like ‘oh my- I didn’t know anybody else liked this either, I love this character, can we get pictures with you?' You’ll see that happening one year, and then you come back the next year, and that group’s coming together."
Pretty reliably at any convention, the final event on Saturday (the busiest day) is going to be the cosplay contest. People get up in front of a crowd and show off their often handmade and extremely detailed recreations of characters to a fairly packed main hall. At Missouri Comic Con, it was so loud that I could barely get audio that wasn’t extremely distorted.
"Next up, gang, his methods might be suspect, but you can’t argue: he gets results. Ladies and gentlemen, give it for Red Hood from DC Comics!"