VINNIE BARTILUCCI: ComicFest from the inside
In the early 90’s I had made a fair to middling name for myself in comics fandom. I was a regular on the CompuServe forums, was running a comics APA of my own, THWACK!, and had started submitting to CAPA-Alpha. I had started writing articles for Wizard magazine, which is how I made friends with Pat O’Neill, their first Editor-in-Chief.
One night Pat contacted me to tell me that Gareb Shamus (Wizard‘s owner) was looking to do a comics con, and wondered if I was interested in running it. Well, he was close to being right — it was a friend of Gareb’s, David Greenhill, who had made a fortune in the sports card industry, and was looking to move to comics. Not as a speculator (there were soon to be plenty of them) but as the promoter of a comics show.
David’s idea was to bring a lot of the "business" of the card industry to comics. His ideas were good – too many comics shops were (and still are) run as if they were hobbies, and most comics shows didn’t make any attempt to market to the general public. He planned to change that. He planned to hire a major PR firm to push the show, get the publishers to invest in the show both financially and with publicity, a lot of big ideas. He just didn’t know how to actually run a show.
Well neither did I, but I wasn’t tellin’ him that…