The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have unforeseen effects on every aspect of our lives and industries. This year the San Diego Comic-Con was first canceled and then moved completely online to reach their audience and as an experiment in online outreach for this massive convention. SDCC isn’t the first con to go online since we all started spending a lot more time in our own homes back in March, but it is the largest. Many conventions have offered some panels online and many celebrities and content producers have worked to keep their names relevant during the lockdown by setting up their own direct engagement with fans through live themed conversation (a reunion with the cast of The Lord of the Rings, for example), or options to purchase small group/single celebrity Zoom sessions. The question journalists and con organizers are now asking is: have these efforts been successful?

Adam B. Vary with Variety magazine suggests that SDCC “was a bust” for a number of reasons: lack of organic social media engagement, many of the big-name studios pulled out, few panel views on YouTube, and pre-recorded panels with comments turned off were the main reasons Vary points to in his article. These are all valid concerns with the con, but I think it is pretty difficult to claim that SDCC is a bust, in many cases because of these reasons. Regardless, the question conventions and other live events will be asking themselves as we move forward in this more physically distant period of humanity is: what is (are) the essential element(s) of my event?

Obviously, businesses and organizations work to define the essential elements of their events all of the time so that they can successfully replicate the most desired, appreciated, and financially beneficial components. The difference here is the need to determine what, beyond being in the physical space, is essential to the success of a fan convention? And how can they replicate that while also providing attendees with some sense of community or shared experience. You see, every fan convention is different; there are similarities, but SDCC is different from Fan Expo Canada or any of Creation Entertainment’s Supernatural Conventions and these are all very different from the Toronto Comic Arts Festival or Geek Girl Con. So while it may seem that once one convention determines what works, they can all just follow that template, this isn’t true.

Vary’s comments in the preceding Variety article are all on point. SDCC did not have a sense of community this year, nor did it have any real organic social media engagement. The con organizers tried to give fans the sense of being there with videos of volunteers welcoming them, audio recordings from the Hall floors, and print-at-home attendee badges, recipes, and even “End of Line” signs to remind fans of the excitement of being part of the long lines to get into the most coveted panels. The problem is that the most exciting parts of those long lines were lost — meeting other fans with similar interests, chatting with your geeky friends that you only see at cons, or asking cosplayers walking by to stop for photos. SDCC@Home also highlighted one of the issues that has existed with the live SDCC for the last decade or so: a lack of social media plan for the con. During a normal SDCC year there would be a great deal of online engagement, but this is due to super active fans in the panels as well as the content producers. Not only do producers normally make more exclusive announcements at SDCC, but they also post about those announcements online with lots of hashtags and this gives both SDCC attendees and non-attendees something to latch on to and around which to focus their own conversations. This does not mean the live convention itself is successful, just that the individual marketing teams are good at their jobs and take advantage of SDCC as a space to announce major titles.

Would people still go to SDCC without the exclusive releases? Sure they would! The convention didn’t start out as a place for corporate marketing, but it has become a hybrid space, offering studios and their marketing teams a rapt audience who tend to also be quite active in communities of like-minded individuals while also offering fans a space to engage with other fans and learn about exclusive content before their peers who weren’t lucky enough to get tickets. The cultural capital this affords SDCC live attendees is something that certainly won’t be offered should the convention choose to maintain much of the experience online since everyone will have easy access. The real question though is: will people still attend SDCC if they don’t feel connected to others? What is the difference between the pre-recorded events of SDCC@Home and having a dedicated convention channel on YouTube with timed releases? Actually, a proper YouTube channel would be an improvement since it would likely have videos with the comments turned on so viewers could engage with each other. Forcing attendees to watch the panels silently without even offering or pushing spaces for online engagement through use of an official hashtag, placed us in the position of viewers rather than active participants as we would have been at the live convention.

In the act of controlling the distribution and protecting themselves, San Diego Comic-Con’s organizers removed the agency and ability to participate of its greatest assets.

Does this mean the convention was a bust? I don’t think so actually. Some attendees/viewers are better than none, particularly for smaller shows and artists. The move to online ahead of the planned integration in coming years forced the organizers to take some chances and try some things to see what could work and what won’t work in a hybrid model. People who have never been able to attend SDCC, myself included, were able to watch panels, “walk” the Exhibition Hall, and purchase merchandise. I think the convention was a successful attempt, so long as the organizers learn from it.