Baltimore Comicon

Only made it to one day - downtown Baltimore is in that awkward distance where it's hard to commute and equally hard to justify sleeping over.

The good:

Gail Simone. Everyone says she's nice. I can vouch that she really is. Nice, greatly valuing diversity (I did not know there was an asexual character in The Movement), open. Most comics people are nice in person, but she's definitely a gem.

They managed to organize things so the entry line was inside the convention center rather than outside. That's much appreciated (especially when thinking about the poor volunteers).

I didn't get a picture of them for various reasons, but there was an awesome Cosima and Delphine cosplay.

Most annoying cosplay award? Deadpool. With his own soundtrack. The guy was carrying a boombox around. At a fairly high volume. If you're playing Deadpool and people don't want to punch you, you're doing it wrong.

The bad:

Some vendors were unable to get a cell phone signal. With a lot of people using the cell phone dongles, this left some people unable to take credit cards. Fail.

I wanted to strangle the Geico people. They bought a booth and hassled everyone who went near them to the point of probably affecting sales of the vendors next to them. That kind of hard sell behavior should really not be allowed. (I'm talking people stepping out of the booth into your path to try and get you to play a stupid game. Reminds me of how Wizards of the Coast made themselves the Most Hated Vendor at Origins several years in a row).

Panel organization. Why can't these people grasp that you can't run panels for the full 60 minute slot then schedule guests back to back (in different rooms)...then whine when things start running late? Listen to the lit con people. That 50 panel, 10 minute buffer system works much better. Admittedly it's more important when you might have to get to the far end of the con as opposed to the next room, but...

And another convention center fail. The sound in one panel room was mediocre. In the other it was actively bad with none of the mikes calibrated correctly. Baltimore Convention Center? You should have better people than that.

Overall, though, it was a good convention. Oddly, and I can't place why, I feel safer at Baltimore Comicon than I do at AwesomeCon. Maybe it's cons with higher numbers of media guests that start to get tense? I don't know. (Thoughts?)