For years, 30,000 comic book fans flocked to this Lexington event. Will they again?
After eight years of organizing the Lexington Comic & Toy Convention, Jarrod Greer was ready for the latest show on March 26-29 at the Central Bank Center and Rupp Arena. He had sold thousands of tickets in advance, arranged for 500 vendors and booked airfare and hotel rooms for 100 celebrity guests and comic book creators.
But in the early days of March ...
... well, everyone knows what happened in the early days of March.
Nobody in authority gave him a direct order. But with COVID-19 closing everything, Greer wondered if there was any safe way to hold Lexington’s biggest convention, which draws more than 30,000 people to marinate in nerd culture inside crowded exhibition halls.
People who had bought tickets and made travel plans from as far away as Florida were posting worried questions on the show’s Facebook page.
“We were just two weeks out,” Greer said in a recent interview.
“I kept thinking, ‘There has to be a way, there has to be a way,’” he said. “But finally it became clear that even if we could do it, maybe we shouldn’t do it, you know? You have to take a step back and ask, ‘Is this the right thing to do for our fans and vendors and guests?’ And obviously the answer was no, it wasn’t.”
So on March 12, Greer changed his plans. He re-booked as many guests as he could, spread the word on social media, and the convention was postponed two months until May. Surely that would be enough time for a return to normal life.
It was not. Greer scrambled again and moved the convention to June.
Finally, he wrote off 2020 altogether. The comics convention was bumped back a full year to March 2021.
Recently, Greer changed his mind once more. After studying news about virus infection rates and the pace of vaccine distribution, he has decided to hold his next show Sept. 8-12, 2021.
For now.
“I think next September should be OK, but honestly, we’re just going to have to see where we are at that point,” he said.
Planning a major public event requires knowing how thousands of people will interact when the event takes place. During this pandemic, however, nobody is sure what life will look like in coming months, Greer said.
When will state and local officials allow the convention center to reopen at anything close to full capacity? When will most of his customers be vaccinated? Even if they are vaccinated, when will they feel comfortable in crowded rooms again?
When will his guests — many of them older, the stars of movies and television shows from a generation ago — be willing to get on airplanes and fly across the country to meet a long line of fans?
“I think it is an impossibility right now, for all the same reasons as last March, to have any kind of a viable show next March,” he said.
“I can’t in good faith start to do the things I need to do to have a show in three months. I can’t start screaming, ‘Hey, it’s gonna be awesome, everyone come on down!’ when I don’t know what next March is going to look like. We won’t yet have a big chunk of the population vaccinated. Basically, we have no idea.”
$30 million loss as events cancel
Greer’s comics show is Lexington’s biggest special event but it’s hardly the only one.
This year, Lexington expected to host several hundred events of different sizes, ranging from large conferences downtown at the convention center and adjoining hotels to athletic competitions at Fayette County schools and the Kentucky Horse Park.
Most were canceled once the novel coronavirus hit in March.
“It literally happened when the Sweet 16 was in Rupp Arena playing basketball, and then all of a sudden it was like, screech, everything stopped,” said Marci Krueger-Sidebottom, vice president of sales and services at VisitLEX.
VisitLEX, which promotes the city, estimated the economic impact loss to Lexington at $30 million just for the events with which it was involved. That sum covers hotel rooms, transportation, dining, entertainment and other spending by visitors. Cancellations are still coming in through the first half of 2021, Krueger-Sidebottom said.
Some event planners soldiered on with “hybrid” meetings that greatly reduced the number of people who attended in person, she said.
“The reality is, if your ballroom used to be able to handle 350 people, under the new restrictions you only could have 50 people in the ballroom, socially distanced. Everybody else was brought in via a Zoom call,” she said. “For the planners, that means you’re now having to organize two different events, one for the people in the room, with food and all that, and at the same time, another one for the people who need to connect online.”
The city’s second-largest convention is ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference, where several thousand people gather from around the world in downtown Lexington to discuss important issues affecting the planet’s future.
Alltech decided to hold its conference online in May. More than 24,000 people attended virtually.
Although the event was a success, “we are committed to bringing the in-person experience back to Lexington as soon as possible,” said corporate spokeswoman Lauren Dozier.
‘Watching it all slip away’
A few of the nation’s oldest comics shows, like the San Diego Comic-Con, tried going virtual this year. They offered online panel discussions — sometimes for free — so celebrities, comics creators and fans still could interact without having to travel or breathe on each other.
That wasn’t a serious option for Greer.
His less established convention annually spends and collects hundreds of thousands of dollars, mostly in that order. He rents the convention center and books flights and hotel rooms for scores of guests, from Star Trek’s William Shatner and Walter Koenig to comic book artists like Neal Adams and Jim Steranko.
The numbers only work for him once enough fans buy an entry ticket to cover his expenses. And fans buy a ticket in order to get autographs from their heroes and browse a sales floor full of collectible items, not to spend the day on Zoom.
When Greer canceled this year’s convention, he announced that ticket-holders either could get a refund or hold onto their tickets until it’s safe for the show to resume. Of about 6,500 people who purchased tickets in advance, about 1,000 wanted the refund, which was a pinch, he acknowledged.
Most of the feedback on his show’s Facebook page was sympathetic, thanking him for the transparency provided by his frequent and lengthy explanations.
“This wasn’t an easy decision,” one woman posted. “I know that. Ensuring the health and safety of all involves is at the forefront of your mind and you’ve made the right decision.”
However, a man asking Greer for his money back posted: “Sadly, you should have insurance or a bank account set aside for the possibility of such things. I’m not going to be made to feel guilty for requesting a refund for a date that has been canceled and then pretend like I can’t use that cash.”
Greer said he’s confident that when he finally does restart his convention, most of the fans will return.
“I don’t even care about it being profitable anymore, I just don’t want to lose any more money,” he said. “This year has been very painful on that point. I just want to prove that we can hold another show, that we can do this, that we can make people happy and start over again and do it safely.”
“It’s just no fun when you’ve worked for 10 years to build something up, to get where you are, and then, whoosh, you’re watching it all slip away.”
