My Experience at Manchester Comic Con

From a first-time Comic Con attendee

I attended the Manchester Comic Con yesterday. I’d been to a local independent horror convention back in April, but this was my first big comic con, and I was looking forward to it.

For months, I got excited when a guest announcement was due. There were so many Walking Dead stars that I hoped Norman Reedus or Jeffrey Dean Morgan would be added to the list. Unfortunately, they never were. I also kept an eye on the Liverpool event that happened back in May. I was trying to decide whether I should go for Manchester or Liverpool (which is definitely the bigger of the two).

My decision was based on the fact that I live in Manchester. I looked into getting to Liverpool, but with the cheapest accommodation at just under £200 a night on those dates, it wasn’t affordable for me.

In the few weeks before the Manchester event, several guests pulled out. I guess it’s to be expected – and I’ve seen this happen on the Facebook pages for events in other areas. Catherine Tate (who I wouldn’t have minded seeing) and Karen Gillan (who my husband wanted to see) were the two biggest names to pull out. Tommy Fury also cancelled - but I always thought he was an odd choice for a comic con guest anyway.

The social media page announced that Catherine Tate’s panel was going to be replaced with a Pearl Mackie panel. I stopped watching Doctor Who for a little while during Peter Capaldi’s time as the doctor – not because he isn’t a good actor – but because I thought the writing and storylines were rubbish. So, this might be why I didn’t recall who she was at first. Either way, I didn’t think she was a reasonable replacement for Catherine Tate. Although, I understand that running an event of this size must be challenging. I imagine it must be stressful when after months of planning, guests cancel at short notice and they have to find a replacement. So, I can’t really criticise them for that.

On the day itself, the new panel line-up hadn’t been posted to social media and it was only because I decided to check the website that I found it. We arrived just before 11am to look around and get an early lunch before the cosplay championship.

There were loads of people, but it was manageable when we first got there. In other words, we could turn around without bumping into anyone. We had to eat standing up as there were no free seats in the food area. Not everyone on the seats was eating or drinking. They were just sitting. I later discovered why, but I’ll get to that.

We went back to the stage area to watch the cosplay championship. I say watch, but the seats were all full and we were standing behind lots of people, so as someone who is only 5ft1, I couldn’t see much. I struggled to hear from so far back too.

Even though I haven’t attended a big comic con before, I’ve watched some panels online and it always seemed like they took place in a closed-off room, but it’s possible that was just good visual and audio editing. The stage here was in a big open plan area, so sound drifted in from the attendees who weren’t watching the cosplay or panels. Unless you were in the seats, you didn’t stand much chance of actually hearing anything on the stage.

I feel like this was bad planning. I didn’t book any photos and was just there on a basic ticket. So, I wanted to get my money’s worth (about £25 a ticket plus booking fees). I hoped to see Amy Acker’s panel as I loved her in Angel, and my husband said she was great in Person of Interest.

When the cosplay finished, we took each other’s photos with some of the set builds and my husband was brave enough to have his photo taken with an extremely large person in a Darth Vader costume.

Some of my favourites included a dinosaur (Jurassic Park), The Tardis, and Platform 9 and 3 Quarters.

There were also Monster’s Inc set builds, The Ghostbusters car and Batman, among other photo opportunities included in the basic ticket price.

We made a point of getting back to the seating area half an hour before the Fear the Walking Dead panel, but all the seats were taken – or at least, some people had placed bags and coats on the seats next to them to save these for someone else.

By this point, both of us had been standing for about two hours and we gave up and sat on the floor for ten minutes while we waited for the panel to start. That’s when I realised the people sitting but not eating in the food area just needed to sit, especially if they had been there since 9am when the event began.

While we were waiting, there was a woman with a walking stick who was struggling to stand for about 15 minutes. We couldn’t help as we didn’t have a seat to give up for her. The seated people clearly saw her. I know not all disabilities are visible, so I’m not going to criticise everyone who didn’t offer her a seat, but I can’t believe that everyone seated had a disability. The poor lady eventually had to start asking people for a seat, but even then, it took another five minutes for someone to let her sit down.

We stood up (from the floor) again when the panel began, but still didn’t have a clear view because an attendee decided to stand right in the middle of the aisle with her baby. We could just about hear Lennie James and Maggie Grace and the interviewer on the stage, but when it was time for audience members to ask their questions, we barely heard a word of what they were saying. The actors could hear, but the audience couldn’t. It wasn’t always possible to guess what the question was and this could easily have been fixed by having the interviewer repeat the questions, but she didn’t.

The sound issues were probably the reason two women left early, which meant we got to sit down for the last five minutes. Then we had the choice to stay on the chairs and wait more than half an hour for the next panel – which neither of us was bothered about – or to walk around for over an hour and a half until the Amy Acker panel. I assumed this would be more chaotic as she was easily the biggest star doing a panel on the Saturday.

We decided to leave instead, and it turned out we weren’t the only ones. On the way back, I saw a Facebook comment from another attendee, saying they left with their partner after one panel, for the same reason we did – lack of seating.

The social media team’s response to this person was that it was a standing event and not a seated concert. They quickly started hiding comments and pretending they hadn’t said this. Although they must have realised this was a bad idea and unhid the comments later - which is how I got the screenshot below – just in case they decide to hide it again.

Of course, when you attend an event like this, you usually expect to be standing for a large amount of the time you’re there, but there should be an option to sit when you need to. Not only is the comment not helpful to disabled people, but it’s not helpful for non-disabled people either. Many people may struggle after standing for a long time and it’s unreasonable to potentially expect people attending the entire day, starting from 9am, to not sit down all day. I can’t help but think that the organisers would know how many ticket sales they made and would add more seats to the food area and to the stage area, as well as improving the sound quality. I’m not suggesting adding enough seats for every attendee, just more seats than there was.

Before we left, we looked at the stalls. There were some we could fight our way to looked interesting, and if it hadn’t been so busy, I would have doubled back and bought one of the Supernatural mystery bags. By that point, I just wanted to get outside and not feel like cattle. I later discovered (after watching a video someone else made on the day) that there was a stall with Gizmo (Gremlins) merchandise. I would have liked to buy something from there, but there were a lot of stalls we couldn’t see because of the big crowds of people.

The only thing we bought from the stalls was 3 pieces of fudge each, which were nice, especially the aero flavoured fudge, but I would have liked something that I could keep as a reminder of my first chaotic comic con.

The lessons I learned for myself include being more careful with my planning. If I went to another comic con, I would either only attend if I was paying for photos with several guests, and try to plan my visit so I arrive about 45 minutes before the panel I want to see the most.

Overall, I can appreciate how much work goes into these events, but I can also see things that could have been done better. Perhaps the solution would be a bigger venue as by the afternoon, we couldn’t move more than a few inches without bumping into someone and it just felt like we had all been crammed in there.