Con Report: MysticCon, February 24-26, Roanoke, Virginia

We left midnight Thursday evening or early Friday depending on how you look at it. We have never been to this show before and we were looking forward to both to it and just getting away for the weekend. The drive ahead was about 8 hours but I always enjoyed road trips, which is very easy to say since I don’t drive (yet). We shared the ride with David Quiles who recommended the show. Although it’s been years since we’ve done a Sci-Fi show as opposed to a comic show we just felt it was worth the shot.

The trip was pretty uneventful considering I slept most of the way there. I had to make sure I was bright eyed and bushy tailed when we got to the show because JD had caught a cold just before the weekend and I wasn’t expecting him to be able to work the table much due to it. I’ve worked con tables while sick and it’s not fun (and I’m sure it looks gross if you’re in front of the table).

I already liked this show because it was being held in a hotel instead of a convention center. Hotel shows feel more intimate and I like being able to just hop upstairs to my room when I needed to as opposed to being trapped in a convention center. It’s also nice to be in carpeted ballrooms as opposed to warehouse style cement floors. It’s what I miss most about Pittsburgh Comicon since they moved to the Expo Center but I digress.

We arrived at the Holiday Inn Tanglewood around 9am and I have to admit I secretly raced David to the reception desk. I had called the day before and the front desk told me that King Bed rooms are rarely ready that early in the morning. But I certainly wasn’t in the mood to lose one! I lucked out with a room as did David, however I didn’t realize how perfect my timing was until later on that night. Turns out the room David ended up getting was across the hall from a party suite and their sleep was less than restful the entire weekend. See! Seconds count!

Thumbs up to Holiday Inn. Not only did we get a king sized bed, we also had a microwave and fridge in the room. Count the Food Lion supermarket down the block, we didn’t have to spend money on food all weekend except for the one night we went to the hotel restaurant. Toss in free wifi and I have my #2 favorite convention hotel (The Renaissance Hotel in Chicago is #1). If every Holiday Inn has microwaves/fridges/wifi I’m going to make sure we stay in a Holiday inn every chance we get. You don’t realize how much money you spend in food until you don’t have to!

Also a shout-out to Trader Joes for their wonderful vegan microwaveable Asian noodles and Tofurkey for their Italian sausages. I was without want all weekend. :9  And Food Lion had to be the cleanest, most well organized supermarket I have every seen. I appreciate things like that. Really.

Oh yeah, the show…

After we checked in, we were led to the artist alley which was actually a small room with about 12 tables. I was a bit disappointed more because I dislike separate room layouts in general as opposed to being in the hall or in a large ballroom. JD, with his cold in full swing gave up very quickly with setup and went back to our room while I set up our very narrow tables. Playing a lot of Tetris in my youth paid off as I was able to fit pretty much most of our stuff on the table. David had gotten himself 2 tables which made for an impressive but dangerous looking display. Because the tables were narrow, they didn’t have the support wider tables would have. He had to rearrange his display several times to keep the tables from sagging too much from the weight. Even when he was done, it still looked far from safe. I recommended he not put his knees near them as he sat.

The room was cozy to say the least however we all quickly learned why a show should not put the “artist alley” in a separate room. Even with show managers and some of the artists themselves carnival barking the room, not a lot of people wanted to come in. The few that did just quickly browsed around and left. I guess it would be redundant to state we didn’t do well the first day.

After the show, I joined JD back in the room and we spent the rest of the night watching the Gold Rush Alaska marathon on Discovery. Now that’s hard work and the payoff seemed just as small. JD complained that the one mistake the teams on the show were making was that they didn’t have merchandising to help support their digs. How many people would by a “Team Dakota Boys” shirt I wonder?

Note: I looked on the Discovery Channel site and of course they have merchandise.

The next day was pretty much the same but this time some of the other artists started getting restless. A couple of hours into the show, one artist found an empty table in the hallway next to the room and moved her table there. A couple of hours after that, another set of artists scooted into the hallway themselves. We were unsure whether they were doing this with the convention’s help or whether they were just grabbing any free table they could find. I think it’s more the latter because no one from the convention came to us offering us hallway tables. But then again, we didn’t ask and I didn’t feel like moving out stuff and risk having to move everything back.

We also learned that some of the remaining artists in the “alley” were leaving that Saturday night or Sunday morning so we would end up the only people in the room Sunday. So after a pretty much duplicate day from Friday, we called it a night and decided we would leave early Sunday. I was hoping that at least we would arrive back home before 9PM so I could get some real sleep. I still had to go to work Monday morning.

We had dinner at the hotel restaurant and then we stayed up watching Grimm and American Chopper: Senior vs. Junior.  Senior’s TRUMP bike rocked and Junior/Mikey are acting like asses. At least they have no problem with merchandising.

Around 2 in the morning, a fire alarm woke the entire hotel. JD and I dressed quickly, grabbed our bags and headed outside with everyone else. It turned out to be a failed water pump that triggered the alarm and we were all allowed to go back into the hotel. Could be worse, that’s for sure.

We hung out in what was left of the “alley” Sunday morning. The remainder of the artists (except us) finagled hallway tables and it was just us and David in the room. We actually were able to make some money (!) and we decided to pack up around noon.

Okay. It wasn’t the big success we always hope for when we go to a show but I really appreciated being away from work and just the break in routine in general. I actually had a good time with everyone so the in the end the show was just background. Although the next time we end up in a similar situation, we now know to insist on hallway tables or get in the dealer’s room instead.

So would we do MysticCon again? Most likely not. In the end we just didn’t feel like we were appropriate for the show unless we just pushed The Oswald Chronicles novels instead of comics. Small Press novels were the thing at this show and we misjudged the audience.

But either way, we had a nice time and appreciated the opportunity just to get away.

A bad day at a convention is better than a good day at work, to paraphrase a bit.