Five thirty-eight, the go-to site for stats of all kinds, put up this about San Diego's Comic-Con.
[San Diego's Comic-Con] has never been more relevant for the entertainment industry. Expanding beyond the comic book industry, the annual gathering has become a prime place for TV networks and movie studios to announce future projects.
Only recently did these conventions, which originally appealed to a small subset of media consumers, begin to get coverage in the mainstream press. Comic-Con started with 300 people in the basement of a hotel in 1970. Today’s Comic-Con is a hive of commercialization; State Farm Insurance, for example, is sponsoring all of Adult Swim’s panels.
Over the past several years, coverage of “comic-con” — be it the big event in San Diego, or any of the other popular conventions, such as New York Comic-Con — has exploded. ... And while the commercialization of the San Diego Comic-Con may rub some purists the wrong way, it has become the definitive genre event of the year. ...
The trade press (unsurprisingly) covers this whoop-dee-dooh with gusto. And the studios have long-since bulled their way in to publicize (exploit?) their upcoming crop of science fiction and super hero movies.
What's a wee bit amazing is the amount of space the mainstream press gives to the event. But (on reflection) maybe it's not so amazing after all. Maybe the world is turning in to one big Hollywood Reporter-Variety-Star magazine, and space operas and movie stars are what's important now..
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Dear Subset Members-
It's taken awhile (about 45 years) but you've finally made an impact on the universe of pop culture. Congratulations!
According to fivethirtyeight.com, the seed for the San Diego Comic Con that was planted back in 1970 has given rise to a convention that represents billions of dollars of pop culture, entertainment, movies and merchandise.
"Only recently did these conventions, which originally appealed to a small subset of media consumers, begin to get coverage in the mainstream press. Comic-Con started with 300 people in the basement of a hotel in 1970. Today’s Comic-Con is a hive of commercialization;"
Current attendance for the San Diego Comic Con hovers around 130,000 or more, creating a huge bonanza of welcome income for San Diego's hotels, restaurants and cultural attractions.
Shel Dorf, one of the founders of Comic Con, died in 2009 but lived long enough to see his efforts grow from a one-day convention in March, 1970 (with an attendance of about 100 fans) followed by another convention in August of that year, (attended by over 300 fans,) to become one of the biggest comic conventions in the world today.
According to the San Diego Convention and Visitor's Bureau the convention had a regional economic impact of $180 million in 2011. Surely it was more than that this year.
Hollywood, and everything connected to it, has thoroughly embraced Comic Con. All you subset writers, artists, fanboys and fangirls who spent years and decades grinding away creating comics for embarrassing pay and no ownership or royalties have changed the game dramatically. Looking back at the history of comic books and the legendary characters created by writers and artists at DC Comics (Superman, Batman), Marvel Comics (X-Men, Spider-Man, Iron Man), Dark Horse (Hellboy, Sin City), to name a few, thanks and congratulations are due for hanging in there and providing the fodder for some great entertainment, sometimes decades after it was originally created.
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