There's a fairly substantive little interview with Reed Pop's Lance Fensterman currently up at the hobby business news and analysis site ICv2.com. It's mostly post-their recent Chicago show. Fensterman reports their 2013 attendance on C2E2 at 53,000, up from 40,000 last year, with the number of exhibitors up as well. In a way that confers some additional authority to the positive figures, Fensterman also reports a mixed bag of sales from a targeted group of non-comics related vendors sporting an urban moniker and that New York is already out of four-day passes with staggered sales to come. A mini-section on security matters might interest a few of you as well.
Chicago is a great comics town, and like Seattle it's a great mainstream comics city while also having an alt/arts community of significance. So it should be no surprise that an audience might eventually begin to build for a Reed show there despite some of the infrastructure/culture impediments I think a show at McCormick Place initially presented (it's a bigger psychological chore to go to a show all the way near downtown than I suspect show organizers realized). DC Comics seems to have invested in establishing a presence there in a way that's begun to pay off for them. The next few years should be very interesting in terms of the Spring mainstream comics show season, particularly if Comic-Con settles into Anaheim.
Chicago is a great comics town, and like Seattle it's a great mainstream comics city while also having an alt/arts community of significance. So it should be no surprise that an audience might eventually begin to build for a Reed show there despite some of the infrastructure/culture impediments I think a show at McCormick Place initially presented (it's a bigger psychological chore to go to a show all the way near downtown than I suspect show organizers realized). DC Comics seems to have invested in establishing a presence there in a way that's begun to pay off for them. The next few years should be very interesting in terms of the Spring mainstream comics show season, particularly if Comic-Con settles into Anaheim.