Conventional Wisdom: Why haven’t you gone back to *INSTERT CON HERE*? (Patreon)

Every so often, somebody wonders why they haven’t seen any comics from their favorite con this year. Most of the time, it’s just a simple answer of “Oh, I don’t go to that con.” After all, despite all our strides at cloning and matter teleportation, no human being can attend EVERY con in the country. But while that’s an easy answer for a con across the country in a place I’ve never even been to, it’s a bit more awkward when the con is one I actually HAVE attended before. If you browse through the Conventional Wisdom archives, you’ll find several cons back in the day that I just don’t do anymore. What’s up with that?

Well, as I thought about the various answers, I realized the list of Cons I Don’t Do Anymore also doubles as a good list of Reasons Why I Don’t Do Certain Cons Period. At this point, just about every reason I don’t bother attending a certain convention has at least one real life example tied to it. I can kill two explanations with one stone!

Occasionally, the answer it really frickin’ obvious. Unless somebody invents a time machine that they’ll actually let me USE (you know who you are, thanks for nothing!) I can’t very well attend a convention that no longer happens. That’s the blindingly obvious answer to why there haven’t been any more Escapist Expo updates (also, a moment of silence for the slow agonizing death that befell tiltEXPO). Eventually, pretty much everything ends, and we have to go find new things to do with our weekends, simple as that.

But what about cons that are still going strong, but I haven’t been back to? Like, what about Anime Boston? I haven’t been back there since 2012, and I get at least one person asking me about it every year. Well, that one’s kind of twofold. The short term answer for why I wasn’t back in 2013 is a matter of timing. That year, AB was the same weekend as Animazement, and as I mentioned earlier, science hasn’t figured out how to put me in two places at once yet. This seems to happen at least once every year, there’ll be a con I want to make it too, but it’s either the same weekend as another, or it’s so close that it might as WELL be the same weekend. I’m trying to be better about leaving some breathing room between cons, so even if two aren’t the exact same weekend, I’ll still have to pass on one if I’ve already committed to another within two or three weeks. At the very LEAST, I don’t do two big cons in the same month if I can help it. A tiny, easy con a week or two BEFORE a big one? Okay, I might be done enough to do that, but I need my post-con recovery time. Even now, I was kind of hoping to head out to Cosplay America, on the grounds that it was one of the few conventions close enough for me to attend without springing for a hotel room. Buuuuut it’s the same weekend as Anime USA, and the larger con where I actually DO things takes obvious priority to the mild curiosity that just happens to be in driving distance.

But that only covers Anime Boston for one year. Why haven’t I been back since? Well, here’s the thing: Boston is a LONG way from me. The one time I managed to go, I was already up in Washington DC, and even from there, it was a LONG way. Add on the extra distance of traveling from North Carolina, and it’s just a BEAST of a journey. And I actually have made that trip before, from Durham all the way to Boston via bus. It SUUUCKED. But that’s something that has to be taken into account regarding cons, sometimes they’re just too far away. Maybe the trip would be too expensive, maybe I can’t find enough other people willing to go to split the travel/hotel room costs, maybe I just plain don’t want to go that far, there’s several possibilities. And the kicker is, I really do want to go back to Anime Boston again. If somebody out there could pull some strings and get my travel expenses covered, I’d be all over that. But alas, it hasn’t happened yet, and that’s also why you won’t see any Conventional Wisdoms about Anime Expo or any other West Coast cons any time soon.

But then there’s the… awkward answers. The cons that DIDN’T get pushed off the queue due to circumstances beyond my control, but because I specifically chose not to do it. Do I just hate your favorite con? Not necessarily. Sometimes it’s just a question of the cost/effort versus the size of the con. This isn’t quite the same as the previous answer, since I still COULD make the trip, if I felt it would be worth the trouble. For example, I haven’t been back to Intervention since 2013, even though I could make the trip up to Maryland just as easily as I could any of my usual DC cons. No, the problem there is, well, Intervention is small. The two years I went, it was REALLY small. It was a struggle to get enough material to fill an update, and there wasn’t much of an audience for that update when it went live. Eventually, I just had to make that unpleasant call that the trip wasn’t worth it. If it was closer (like, say, an in-state con) or if I could find some other way to offset the cost, I’d put Intervention back on the schedule in no time, but for now I just can’t justify it.

But at least Intervention is a con I WANT to go back to, there’s also the awkward example of a con that I just don’t WANT to go back to. I’m not talking about the old “I had a terrible time this weekend, I’m never going back to this con again!” rant, I actually try to avoid that kind of thinking. There’s no guarantee the things that made one weekend lousy will be back the next year, or even that they were actually a problem beyond your personal experience. I’ve had a number of really lousy weekends at cons that went just fine the following year, so I don’t drop one from the queue lightly. HOWEVER, sometimes I’ll put in my time at a con and feel like I just didn’t have any reason to be there. I didn’t go back to NC Comicon in 2015 because, frankly, there just wasn’t that much about a straight up comic book convention to interest me. A room full of artists whose work I don’t read and bins full of old comics I’m not going to buy just doesn’t give me much to work with. In fact, I have more memories of the Comiquest Film Festival tied into the con than the main event. And even if tiltEXPO hadn’t gruesomely imploded like a corpse in a pressure chamber (eew) I still wouldn’t have been back to a tiny gaming con. MAGFest works for me because it’s HUGE, so there’s always something going on. tiltEXPO, at least on the convention side of things, was probably fine for somebody who really likes indie game developers and tabletop games, but I’m not either of those, so I wound up with long stretches of just not having anything to do. And that’s not comic material, right there. That’s the main reason I don’t bother with single-topic cons either, I just don’t think I’d be able to get an entire update out of a con devoted to a single, solitary show. And even if I did, I probably wouldn’t be able to get anyone outside that specific fandom to read the update. So for those of you who keep trying to get me to go to Bronycon or ReGeneration Who, that’s why it’s probably never gonna happen.

And then there’s Katsucon. Remember how I said I try to avoid dropping a con because I happened to have one weekend that wasn’t very good? Well, even I have my limits, and Katsucon eventually crossed them all. I can’t blame them for having to share a location with a second, difficult group, or being in a location that’s not on very good terms with them, or bad weather or anything, but when it’s SOMETHING bad happening every single year, eventually even the most forgiving soul will decide it’s just not worth it. And furthermore, being a panelist at Katsucon was just never a good experience. Ever. I’m not even sure who they were shafting the panelists in favor of, because I’ve literally never heard from ANYONE who felt like they were getting good treatment from that con (it was probably oe of those cosplay events, you know the ones). AND EVEN THEN, I nearly went back to Katsucon this year. Not as a panelist, mind you, but just to document whatever lunacy managed to go wrong THIS time. Buuut it was too close to MAGFest this year, and I wasn’t going to do two huge cons in a row. So Katsucon was gone, and I gotta be honest, I don’t miss it.

But I DO miss some of the other cons I mentioned up there. I really do want to go back to Anime Boston or Intervention again, if I could just make the expenses work out. And hey, YOU can always help out in that department by upping your pledge or encouraging others to start doing the same. The more cash I have coming in, the more flexible I can be on travel expenses. And make no mistake, I AM willing to put a con back on the queue even if I’d previously dropped it. Despite all my complaining earlier, I AM seriously considering going back to NC Comicon this year, if only because it’s so close. Not having to pay for a hotel room makes it a LOT easier to justify not having much comic material afterwards. So don’t stop asking why your favorite convention’s not on the list, just keep in mind that there’s probably a better reason than “I just didn’t feel like it.”

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