It was as intimate an experience as you can have in pop-culture fandom with 15,000 of your friends at the Dallas Fan Festival at the Irving Convention Center this past weekend. My convention visits over the past decade have been measured in hundreds of thousands of fans and acres of displays. This was a breath of fresh air for the jaded convention-goer.
Buy Lois & Clark: The New Adventures: The Complete First Season DVDI’ve been to the Irving Convention Center for their larger shows with 60,000 attendees, and that’s about the limit of how you would want to experience a show in that venue. It was a beautiful weather weekend, so no hot steamy walk up to the convention, and it allowed for pleasant rest time on the nice patios provided. It was a change of pace to be able to walk through the retail booths and actually talk to the vendors and artists without yelling over the din of the room. Texas hospitality was on display with very kind and energetic retailers excited to talk about their products.
The exhibitors feel like a good representation of where I see the fandom at conventions in today’s world. There are vendors who sell classic video games. This is an area that I’ve seen expand in the past couple of years. Games that are 20-25 years old look to appeal to the adults who are now around 30 and look to acquire the games of their youth in the original formats. The anime fandom in the Dallas area has always been an active crowd, and that is reflected by this being the most represented materials at the tables and in the cosplay. Also represented were tables dedicated to card/tabletop gaming, cosplay accessories, and unique crafts. The surprise to some is that maybe only 15-20% of the convention is dedicated to comic books and comic artists. The base stock is to have graded and slabbed comic books. This isn’t a hobby to collect cheap older books. What used to be quarter boxes are now dollar boxes. That makes collecting a long run of single issues much more of an investment.
The guests for the panels fell into two buckets that generally had some crossover. There were more Supermen under one roof than you would see at even a large convention. Brandon Routh, Dean Cain, and George Newbern sat in for the Sunday panel “A Super Reunion”. The panels had different variations of the CW show stars including Arrow, The Flash, Superman & Lois, and Legends of Tomorrow. A Flash reunion with original cast members Grant Gustin, Danielle Panabaker, Tom Cavanaugh, and more was the fan favorite of Saturday afternoon. My favorite moments came from the reminiscing of Dean Cain about Lois & Clark: The New Adventures which probably reflects my age. Dean is one of those through lines as an actor that links the different eras through Supergirl. His appreciation for the different interpretations of the character is appreciated.
The size might be smaller than the current super-sized shows, but it also shows that there is a place in the market for this attendance level. I observed fellowship among the cosplay crowd, there were rooms for gamers to gather, plenty of photo ops, and areas for people to exchange pins and friendship bracelets. This doesn’t replace the larger cons with lots of panels, three times as many exhibitors, and four times as many attendees. There are benefits to the people attracted to larger shows. This is perfect for people that like to actually have conversations at normal levels in a convention. I hope that this show continues to survive. In the meantime, residents of the area can now prepare for Fan Expo Dallas on May 30 – June 1, 2025.
