Last weekend was one of the biggest nerd events that hits my neck of the woods every year: Fan Expo New Orleans. This is the single biggest media convention to come to southern Louisiana annually. I’ve gone almost every year, going back to its early days before Fan Expo took over, all the years it was Wizard World New Orleans, and even before that. I have attended with friends, with family, with my wife and son, and I’ve occasionally attended on my own. I’ve been there as a podcaster, I’ve been there as a panelist, and I’ve been there as just a fan. If I thought I could make back the booth fee by selling books, I would like to attend as a professional, but I don’t feel I’m quite there yet. And I fully intend to go to this show every time it comes to town for as long as the universe allows me to make it there.

But at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, it’s not really the same as it used to be.

I know, this is always the refrain of people as they get older. “It’s not as good as it was, the stuff they did when I was young was better, your music is too loud, what’s a SnapChat?” It’s very much a cliche. But just because something is a cliche doesn’t mean that there isn’t an element of truth to it. Before it was Fan Expo it was Wizard World, and before that it was a relatively small comic book convention started by a local comic shop owner that slowly built up over a few years. That was in my podcasting days and I attended every one. In the last one, I even got to host a few panels and do an interview with artist Francis Manapul, which was a lot of fun. Then, after this little show started rolling, Wizard snatched it up and made it part of its ever-growing assortment of conventions, like Thanos collecting Infinity Stones. So when I say “it used to be about the comics,” I can say that with authority. 

Over the years I’ve watched as the larger shows get more and more consumed by other media. It started with genre movies and television shows, which makes perfect sense. If you make a venn diagram of comic book readers and fans of things like Star Trek and Star Wars, it may not be a perfect overlap, but those circles will likely have very little hanging over the edges. As time went on, though, other things began to creep in. Dr. Who makes a lot of sense. And who doesn’t love things like Back to the Future? Game of Thrones started kind of niche, but it quickly went mainstream. Then you had things like Outlander, which is technically a fantasy show but traditionally serves a somewhat different demographic than most of the other fandoms that were being serviced. The same went for Twilight, but that never stopped actors from those films from appearing. And now, increasingly, we’re seeing the stars of video games like Five Nights at Freddy’s or the voice actors for popular anime when they’re translated into English. 

I need to be clear about this: I do not object to any of these things being added to things like Fan Expo. I’m no gatekeeper. I have always had the mindset of the more the merrier. My sister has attended before, but this year she brought her husband and two kids with her for the first time, and they had a blast. My niece, who’s a huge FNAF fan, made her own costume and got to meet some of her favorite voice actors. My brother-and-law and nephew got to dress up like Ghostbusters and get their pictures taken with movie-quality proton packs. I love that they had so much fun, because I want there to be something for everybody. The problem is that all of this stuff seems to be coming at the EXPENSE of the things that brought me to shows like this in the first place, rather than being there in ADDITION to them.

In the early days, the comic book vendors were a vast swath of the shopping section at this show, but this year I could count the number of booths selling actual comic books on one hand. There’s plenty of people selling toys, of course. Prints. Funko pops. Stickers of dubious legitimacy, from a copyright standpoint. Swords. 3-D printed tchotchkes. Candy. Candles. Soap. And one booth where you could pay $40 to hold a snake, cash only of course. But if you’re there to try to fill in those last three issues of Green Lantern you need to complete your run…well, places like this USED to be where you would want to go, but this year you were kind of out of luck.

Once there were publishers at these shows. Not often the big ones – Marvel and DC, I don’t think, ever had any official booth in New Orleans – but at least smaller publishers would make the journey. I don’t think I saw a single publisher booth this year. There were still a good number of creators in artist’s alley, but even there, I think the majority of them were local writers and artists, by which I mean friends of mine. I love seeing them, but I wish that there were other people too. 

I don’t want to give the impression that it was a total wasteland, mind you. The legendary Don Rosa was there, making his first appearance in New Orleans in several years, and it was fantastic to talk to him. And plenty of self-publishers were in attendance trying to draw eyes to their books and comics. But I know from experience how tough it can be to snare a potential reader’s eye wandering a convention floor, and for these kinds of comic creators it’s just going to get harder, because as there is less and less comic book content at these shows, there will be less and less reason for their potential audience to attend.

What, then, is the solution? Obviously the convention organizers are trying to draw in the guests that will get the most attendees, because that’s how they make their money. But I feel like more of an effort needs to be made to appeal to the comic vendors and creators that helped build these things in the first place. It’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy – they attract fewer comic vendors because fewer comic fans are attending because there are fewer vendors because there are fewer fans. Somebody’s gotta figure out a way to break that cycle.

Oddly enough, in recent years, I’ve found that the smaller the show, the better it is for people like me, people who are there for the comics. Last year, for instance, I went to one of the St. Tammany Collector’s Conventions that are held in Mandeville two or three times a year. They’ve been doing it for a few years now, but for one reason or another I hadn’t been able to attend until last spring, and I was amazed by how great a show it was. The venue was much smaller than Fan Expo, but it was packed to the edges with stuff. There were, of course, the vendors that sold toys and knick knacks, but there were comic books too – so many comic book vendors. I could have spent days digging through all the back issue bins there, and I walked away having spent more money and feeling more satisfied than I have in the last two or three Fan Expos. Not only that, but those local writers and artists, those friends of mine I saw last weekend at Fan Expo? Most of them were there too, along with some media guests, including folks like Five Nights at Freddy’s actors and others. They may not be as big as Fan Expo, of course – they’re never gonna get Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd – but they can get Sgt. Slaughter, and that ain’t nothin’. 

And that’s just at that one show. There are plenty of smaller shows across the state all year long. I don’t get to go to all of them, of course. My attendance depends on a lot of things, not the least of which is my wife’s work schedule (because Eddie is a little too wild to take him to something like this on my own), but I know that there are smaller shows coming up in Slidell, Gonzales, Morgan City, and plenty of other places within driving distance. They’re all on my radar, and they’re all going on my calendar. 

I know this might sound weird, especially if you remember the column I wrote last summer about how badly I want to attend San Diego Comic-Con some day, but these smaller shows are much more of a haven for people like me than the big shows are. That’s not to say I’m abandoning the big shows. I still like them. I still have fun. I love getting to see the costumes and talking on the panels and hanging out with some of the finest geeks that have ever graced Southern Louisiana. But the smaller shows are better at scratching the itch that drew me to conventions in the first place. I hope Fan Expo and any other convention organizers out there realize this. I hope they understand that bringing in new fans doesn’t have to mean excluding the old ones. And I hope they figure it out before there’s nothing left for the people who brought them to the dance to begin with.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He hopes to see you at one of those smaller shows before the year is out.