Keystone Comic Con 2018 Review

The happiest vendor I spoke to this weekend was celebrating the fact that they had broken even. They covered their travel expenses and the price of their table.

That fact alone makes it difficult to begin a criticism of this event on a positive note.

The past three days, September 14-16 was reedPOP’s inaugural Keystone Comic Con at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Center City Philadelphia. When they gave me a free badge to attend, I said “What the hell, why not?”

I should’ve gone to SPX.

There are so many things fundamentally broken about the way this show was hosted that it’s difficult for me to state succinctly. Many of my complaints stem from reedPOP itself and they way they operate. They focus on celebrity appearances- like how Frank Miller and Catherine Tate were there for signings- and put almost no effort into creating actual content for the show. The panel schedule was barely present, and the way it was presented in the guide was almost illegible. As a result, I only attended one panel all weekend. To the credit of the team behind “Bringing Fantasy Worlds To Life”, they had some solid writing advice.

This was SO HARD TO READ. Why is it organized with the dates and times so small on the side? WHO DESIGNED THIS

Of course, I can’t talk about Keystone Comic Con without highlighting its most egregious offense: Scheduling a big budget show on the same weekend as Small Press Expo. Through some of my comics and graphic designer friends I heard that reedPOP said something to the affect of “The venue only had this weekend in September available”, but I’m not buying it. Pick a different weekend. SPX had announced their show dates long before KCC had announced theirs, and there was plenty of time for KCC to schedule around it. reedPOP failed to do basic market research.

The vendors were pretty great. I had a wonderful time talking with lots of creators over the course of the weekend- time afforded to me by the fact that the exhibit hall was sparsely populated. reedPOP sold the vendors a big show and set the table prices as if the show was expecting tens of thousands of attendees.

It’s not really a party if nobody shows up.

I heard attendees and staff repeating “Well, for a first year show…” followed by some apology for the numerous flaws in the event, and they would have been valid if reedPOP (Reed Exhibitions) hadn’t been hosting events since 1966. After 12 years of hosting New York Comic Con (the second largest event of its kind in the world), there is no excuse for this display of incompetence.

In sum, Keystone Comic Con cost a lot of people a lot of money that would have been better spent elsewhere. To all who didn’t make it, I envy you.

Below, I’ll go into deeper detail about the specifics of what Keystone Comic Con did poorly and how it could be improved.

LET’S DIVE IN

MUSIC

 

It seems to be a curse that each Comic Con will do this at least once: Music in the exhibit hall*. Keystone Comic Con had something called the “Main Stage” on the far-right hand side of the show floor*. For the duration of the show it was blaring loud music immediately next to many of the dealers. The intent was for there to be performances and an audience to see them, but there were never more than a handful of people there at its highest-trafficked moments.

I’d like to spell this out clearly for any convention hosts reading: It is never appropriate to play music on the show floor. The show floor is a place for transactions. This only works if people can hear each other. Hard working artists lost money because the loud noises in the echoing room drove people away and made conversation impossible.

Also, there were vendors behind the stage. You know who goes backstage? People who are invited. Not your average attendee. Anyone back there saw almost no traffic.

Jilly was with me for most of the show, and she was able to provide some perspective on the music that I lacked. At first glance, she enjoyed it a lot. After some time, she changed her tune dramatically. She works in the field of autism support, and noticed several attendees on the spectrum being agitated by the overstimulating environment. An exhibit hall is by design an intensely stimulating environment, and it’s actively harmful to participants to add loud music to that sensory overload.

A smaller, but similarly disruptive issue was a DJ operating in one of the vendor booth spaces- the surrounding booths were all empty because of him.

 

*Show floor, exhibit hall, dealer’s room, and probably a few other terms all refer to the large space at a comics convention where vendors sell their wares to attendees. I use them all interchangeably, but the official name for the one at Keystone Comic Con is “show floor”

 

DEAD SPACE

 

At some point in the planning process, someone on the Keystone Comic Con staff had to had a vague idea of what attendance would be. If they didn’t, KCC hired the wrong staff. To that end, how in the world is it a good idea to have such massive aisles?

I’m not even ashamed of the fact that I’m using the same image a second time.

 

There’s nothing wrong with small cons. The Free Library runs a small con that attracts about 3-500 people annually. There is something wrong with selling your vendors a large con and failing to deliver. Tables cost in excess of a thousand dollars ($1200 and sometimes more for corner tables, I’m told*) for a con whose hosts refused to give me any numbers on ticket sales. More on that later.

The thing to do in this situation is to shrink the show floor. The Pennsylvania Convention Center is designed to be sectioned off to host multiple, smaller events simultaneously. Keystone was not obligated to use the full space- if they had taken off a third of the space and used the rest for the show floor, vendors could have actually seen some foot traffic. As it stands, the few attendees that were there could hypothetically wander through the entire event without speaking to a single vendor or artist. That should not be possible.

Every single vendor deserves most if not all of their money back. It is the job of the convention host to ensure that their vendors are properly taken care of, and to give them a fair chance at making money. Between the blaring music and empty show floor, most people did not (and the ones I spoke to made no attempt to hide that fact).

*I do not have hard data on this, only numbers I was told from exhibitors. If you do, please email me (matt@mattstalltales.com) and I’ll correct/refine this information!

 

ATTENDANCE

 

Is it the con’s fault when nobody shows up? The market for conventions is so hot right now, I can’t help but think “yes”. Outside of the show, I spoke to almost nobody who had heard of Keystone Comic Con. My Lyft drivers, my friends, people outside the convention center- it seemed nobody knew what, where, or when it was, and all of them were disappointed that it was too late for them to go. The marketing outside of some Facebook ads was almost nonexistent.

Everyone knows San Diego. Everyone knows New York. San Diego ran for nearly 40 years before it was consistently selling out the San Diego Convention Center. New York’s been running for 12 and it’s taken most of that time to rival San Diego’s attendance. How in the world did reedPOP convince themselves their inaugural Philadelphia show would occupy a convention center that has a million square feet? I already mentioned the dead space in the previous section, so even though I really want to rant about that some more, I will move on.

Conventions are measured not by their celebrity signings/appearances or vendors or even panel content. Conventions are measured by their attendees. Without people visiting the show, nothing else matters.

The worst part about all this was the Keystone Comic Con staffers. Three separate vendors told me that after Friday was a total bust, representatives from the company were floating around the show floor telling everyone that they had sold 60,000 tickets and that Saturday was going to be a surefire success. Reader, I was at the show from Friday to Sunday. There weren’t 10,000 people there. 60,000 was a complete and utter fabrication. The show lied to keep their vendors from packing up shop and going home.

Again, I’m not here to discredit smaller conventions. I am proud to say I’ve worked on and for several shows that have had only a few hundred attendees. My favorite show (San Diego excluded) yields a few thousand people each year- Camden Comic Con, right across the river and hosted by Rutgers University. The issue is that Keystone behaved as though it was a well-established show. The table and ticket costs were prohibitively expensive ($75 for a 3-day pass would have been fine at a larger event), and that gave the illusion that Keystone was a major show. It was not. An event like this needs to be built up slowly, which actually leads me to my next point…

PHILADELPHIA REPRESENTATION

 

Where the hell were all the Philly artists? I met about three. There were vendors from all over the place- Arizona, Seattle, New York- but Keystone is supposed to be Philadelphia’s time to shine. I could list twenty amazing Philadelphia artists right off the top of my head, and that doesn’t even begin to provide a glimpse of the incomparable talent this city has to offer.

I’ll tell you where they were: Bethesda, Maryland at Small Press Expo with the rest of the heart and soul of the international comics community. Through poor outreach, bad scheduling, and wanton disregard for their target audience, Keystone Comic Con destroyed not only a business opportunity for themselves, but a chance for Philadelphia-centric folks to connect with each other.

PANEL CONTENT

 

The panels offered at KCC were nothing to write home about. Hell, their most noteworthy feature is their absence. The panels I walked by had almost no audience, and the panel I actually attended had maybe 15 people. There were only four panel rooms, so it’s not like there was heavy competition among the content.

I really hate to say this, because some close friends of mine were involved in these panels, but why did Keystone Comic Con need to have over an hour of panel discussion for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) every day of the show? How dry was their content schedule before the local NaNoWriMo volunteers filled up 4 hours of space? I love NaNoWriMo, and the local organizers are people I love dearly, and I’m glad they seized an opportunity to promote their volunteer and professional work, but it is the responsibility of the event host to put together a strong and varied content schedule.

SUPER VIP

 

I was planning to skip Keystone Comic Con altogether. Maybe I would have gone to SPX, maybe I would have stayed home in my underwear. But when they mailed me a print of young Luke Skywalker signed by Mark Hamill and a pair of SUPER VIP tickets for free, I said “fuck it, I’ll go”. Along with some neat swag and a mediocre event poster, the SUPER VIP tickets entitled me to exclusive access to the SUPER VIP lounge*. That last part sounded pretty sweet to me- here’s how they described it in the official writing:

Bullshit.

The “lounge” was a conference room that could and should have been dedicated to panel space. The “and more” from the previous paragraph was a big silver platter of nothing. I went in, got my exclusive lanyard (which was admittedly better than the standard lanyard), a poster, and a “thanks for coming” from a staff member who was bored silly. I feel really bad for them. There was one other person at the VIP lounge when I went- a meek fellow who was celebrating that he had just finished downloading Fallout 4 on his laptop using the convention center WiFi.

How fun.

*I also want to point out that having VIP tickets is a needless and excessive class barrier. Pop culture is for everybody!

BROKEN APP & EVENT GUIDE

 

The app for the Keystone Comic Con was barely functional. It was nigh impossible to read the schedule, was consistently having technical issues, and after 30 seconds wrangling with it I deleted it from my phone and just used the barely-better printed event guide. In the end, I wound up wandering aimlessly and asking people “What’s good” because anything else was too much hassle. Compared to everything else I have to say, this seems like less of a major failure, but if the attendees can’t find the content they want, creators get brushed under the rug and attendees vanish from the show altogether. Rather than inundate you with descriptions of why the event guide was a failure, here’s their excuse for a map of the convention center. Have fun deciphering it.

The Pennsylvania Convention Center is the biggest venue in the state of Pennsylvania, but that doesn’t make it the best. The building itself is pretty confusing in its layout, but that does not excuse this illegible and inaccurate map. For example, the GAMING ZONE advertised in the right-hand image was on the first floor and should have been on a different page.

THE Q&A

 

At the very end of the show on Sunday, Keystone had a feedback panel. Their stated goal was to take feedback to improve the show for next year. What the panel of four white men* actually did was sit there and make insincere apologies and excuses. I was personally insulted by their fake attempt at connecting with the community. Keystone, for the duration of the show, has proven exactly one thing: They don’t care about the pop culture community. They care about money.

*Yes, really. No women, no POC. Very Comicsgate-friendly.

FINAL THOUGHTS

 

There’s an old saying that every failure is an opportunity to learn. Or, something close to that anyway. I hope that Keystone Comic Con can learn from their catastrophic first show, but I’m not holding my breath. reedPOP clearly demonstrated that their primary goal is to cater to themselves, not their attendees and vendors, which is a real shame. Philadelphia has a whole host of tiny community conventions, and I welcome a larger industry show to my home. Just… not this one. As I said earlier, I was planning to skip this show, and I’m sorry to say that my instinct was correct. I will not be paying to attend Keystone Comic Con in the future. If reedPOP decides to send me free tickets again, I’ll give them a chance to prove they’re capable of change.

Until then, Keystone Comic Con can go fuck itself.

 

-Matt

UPDATE 09/19/2018, 1:00 PM EST

This review has been up for less than two days, and I’ve gotten a lot of feedback- mostly along the lines of “Hey, you missed a spot.” It actually gets worse!

Conventions have posted hours. This impacts everything about the con, obviously, but it is most noticeable on the show floor. Typical Con procedure is to announce closure beginning either 15 or 30 minutes before it’s actually closing time, depending on how they run things.

I did not personally witness this, but one vendor emailed me that Keystone Comic Con made no such closure announcement. Furthermore, rather than have staff walk around and secure the show floor post-closing, Keystone decided it would be appropriate to simply shut off the lights while people were still working and shopping.

I’ll be honest, when I read that I simply didn’t believe it. It wasn’t until I reached out and heard the exact same story from two other vendors and a fan attendee that I felt it was credible.

I do not have the words to describe how reprehensible this level of disregard for vendors and attendees is. Fortunately, someone else said it for me:

“Vendors sometimes are closing a sale at the last minute!   Nothing says, “Screw You” and “Thanks for nothing” like shutting the lights on your customers.”

Yikes.