Fangoria 2008 (0)

Posted on 28 April, 2008 in News Blurbs

Well, we have returned from the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors in Los Angeles. This was our second year exhibiting at the show and the first year it was held at the LA Convention center.

I’m having some mixed reviews about the whole experience. Luckily the positives outweigh the negatives, but the negatives were huge and psychologically damaging.

Let’s start with the negatives… Everything was looking cool heading up to the convention, we put in our order for a table early, picked a cool spot, and we thought everythign was cool. Four days before the show we get an email from Creation Entertainment, who run organize the show, that they had previously been mistaken on the type of seller permit we needed for the show - and that we had to get a new type of permit or we couldn’t sell anything. Four days before the show? Since when have you known any major city to just - poof - issue a permit of any kind. We were terrified that we had spent all this money to get ready for this convention and at the last minute we had to get a new permit. WTF? So, Kristen and I sprinted into action, handling the paperwork, faxing it in, calling the City of Los Angeles… it was a pretty fucking stressful situation around here for a few days before the show. On Thursday, Los Angeles finally issued our permit and we heard that there had been a large number of others sprinting to get their permits issued also.

The other cluster fuck about this show was in part due to Creation Entertainment and GES, the union that runs setting up the convention hall. Creation Entertainment issues each vendor two wristbands - but GES only issues you one table and one chair. Additional chairs are $97 per day, per chair. Again, WTF? On top of that, even though electricity was included in every other vendor event I have attended, they wanted another $105 to set up our electricity? Fuck them. We didn’t pay it.

On to the positive about the show… our Hotel was nice, just right up the block from the Convention Center. We had a nice large room that was close to the elevators - this was especially good because we gound just hop into the elevator, go down a few floors and get off at the restaraunt and bar area.

The show went well over all. I personally don’t think. besides all the hype, that there were alot of customers at the show. Now, this could have been because it was in a larger venue and much more spread out, but we had a booth in a good place and I didn’t see that much foot traffic. It will be interesting to see how many fans showed up and how many vendors bailed because of the screw up over the permits and fees.

We had the lovely Caroline Pierce at our booth for the entire weekend and even Dr. Phobia made a few appearances as well. It was pretty funny because this was a horror convention, yet there were a number of people who were absolutely terrified of Dr. Phobia.

When it was all over we had seen old fans and made some new ones. We had seen old friends and made some new ones and we had made some good networking connections in the horror community. If anything, this little convention lets us practice for Comic-Con which is a little less than 3 months away. Whoo Hoo!

Tags: Conventions