Geekscape’s Book Report: BookCon 2015!
This weekend was the second BookCon in New York City, and probably the last one for now. The convention just announced a few hours ago it will be moving to Chicago in May 2016. That’s one less convention I’ll be at in the Javits Center.
Like Comic-Con, BookCon is a celebration — a slightly controversial one, but still a gathering place for fandom to gush about stuff.
Unlike Comic-Con, it’s quiet.
The largest difference of course is BookCon’s attention towards books. That includes all kinds of books: literature, young adult, cooking, comic books, autobiographies, memoirs, how-tos, parenting, all books! And that’s great, and makes me wonder why something like BookCon didn’t take off sooner. Books formed the first fandoms after all.
But because of that, there’s a notable — and refreshing — exclusion of “everything else” that Comic-Con has come to include. Video games, movies, TV, they were next to absent. There was maybe one movie that was being promoted the whole time. Any TV guest, like Aziz Ansari, Khloe Kardashian, and Mindy Kaling, were actually there to promote books.
And as much as I love cosplay, you can always expect foot traffic to slow down because someone is a god damn t-rex or Transformer. Almost everyone attended in casual, normal attire.
Maybe there’s just something in its nature, but New York Comic-Con can be best described as overwhelming. There’s just so much going on at once, it can be hard to do something as simple as talk to somebody. There’s always music, some douchebag on a microphone, live game demos with surround sound, screaming and yelling and lights and colors and sound and more sound. It’s an ADD nightmare.
BookCon was exactly the opposite. Books are a naturally quiet activity unlike video games, but there were no d-bags on a microphone telling people to tweet with a hashtag, no booming music, nothing. Just publishers with nice displays and authors with tables with copies of books ready to sign. It’s easy. There’s room to walk. Room to breathe. I could do a jumping roundhouse kick and not hit anybody.
I didn’t think much about how different of a breed book nerds are versus the typical, mainstream image we know today. I was accompanied by friends who have been to Comic-Con or are regulars, but they too noted how easy BookCon felt.
New York Comic-Con raised some ire this year due to complications with their ticket registration. BookCon — simply because there’s less people — was about as simple as it can be. I waltzed right into the Javits Center, walked up to press, and was on the floor in seconds.
That’s not to say BookCon isn’t hassle-free. The largely volunteer staff is still uninformed of important, basic questions, like “Where can I go for ___?” I noticed a lot of people getting frustrated at autograph panels simply due to logistical cross overs.
But it wasn’t bad. If you’re used to the pandemonium that is Comic-Con, BookCon was a breeze. But since BookCon is attracting a generally non-Comic-Con crowd, those guys might be in for a rude awakening.
But it’s important to remember that BookCon is still a convention. It’s laid out exactly like you come to expect Comic-Con to be: There are the big publishers, like Macmillan and Penguin, and some offer free books if you sign up for newsletters, or just for shits and giggles. The smaller publishers are off to the side, and the self-publishers have their own tables. There were some comic book publishers there, and there was a significant Marvel presence, but nothing on the scale they would be at for Comic-Con. IDW was there. DC wasn’t.
I didn’t meet a lot of the celebrity guests in attendance, nor did I attend any of the panels. I only had one day and I had meetings with publishers and friends, couldn’t spend a lot of time to sit and listen. But I did notice a few things: For one thing, one of their main panel rooms was right on the floor, something New York Comic-Con had to ditch entirely. If you remember the 2011 NYCC when the cast of The Avengers were there, it was like that but with, again, less people. It could seat maybe fifty people max. And despite the generally chill atmosphere of BookCon, it was still difficult to clearly hear the panel (in the five or so minutes I hung around it).
I didn’t bother with panels for guys like Nick Offerman or Mindy Kaling. I had friends who attended and had fun, but I wanted to see the convention and their wait times were too long.
There’s really not a whole lot else about BookCon I can say except that it was a wonderful, fun convention that produces less stress and feels far less overwhelming than any Comic-Con I’ve been to. Even the smaller, lesser-known conventions I’ve been to had more foot traffic and business than BookCon, and the whole thing was honestly refreshing.
The Internet got a little mad at Simon Pegg awhile back when he lamented how “geek culture” is making us a little childish. Perhaps he didn’t word it right, but there’s merit to his words. BookCon was a nice palette cleanser to the exhausting, commercializing, totally bombastic geekiness that has surrounded us. Yes, I love comic books, and yes, book nerds are still nerds. I have no doubt anyone who was at this con wouldn’t be willing to talk about X-Men or Doctor Who or Mass Effect.
It was just nice to be in a place where it wasn’t expected for once.
