My review of ECCC 2022:
I took a different approach this year and that was drastically lowering my expectations of the con and primarily treating this trip as my summer vacation and ECCC as just something going on during my vacation. In that regard, I enjoyed myself quite a bit. I stayed at the Hyatt Olive 8, which had a spa that had some parts that were free for guests, and Tidal, their onsite restaurant, had a great happy hour with $2 oysters. I went to see The Killers and Pat Benatar. I also really loved being in Seattle when it was in the 80s and sunny rather than the 40s-50s and drizzly and a part of me wishes it would stay in August every year.
The con itself was definitely better than 2021 though that’s not saying much. At least they had panels with featured guests. However, a major concern is that there were still multiple guests that didn’t have panels. Not just ones that charge $100+ per autograph but run of the mill guests too. Neither of the Smallville guests or Elvira had a panel which I found extremely disappointing. Felicia Day and Billie Piper didn’t either. I had really hoped that 2021 was an anomaly in that regard but it seems like this is going to be the case going forward. As I mentioned last year, I can’t get excited about guest announcements if I can’t trust them to have panels. On the upside, I will give them props for getting Brendan Fraser and having a panel w/ him and Oded Fehr. Other panel highlights were the TMNT Reunion and Twisted Toonz doing the Breakfast Club. Smaller panels were a wash. How Not To Break Into Comics was clever and amusing. But the Microsoft designers one, despite having a slick slideshow, bored me to tears.
The exhibit hall was about half the normal size and the lack of Funko was definitely felt. It took less than an hour to walk through the entire thing. When I first walked in I was impressed by how big Bait and Tokidoki’s displays were but I quickly realized that they were just displays, and they had no more product than usual. No Hallmark/Popminded either. I did make a new discovery, Handmade by Robots, which was cool. But overall the exhibit hall was much weaker than even 2021, however my guess is that this will probably be back to full strength in the next few years.
The Artist’s Alley was very strong, as usual. Also, there was one very pleasant surprise that happened and that was when I was leaving the con at 4:15 PM on Sunday, a band called King Youngblood was playing a concert on a truck parked right in front of the convention center entrance. (They had a panel about a story they are doing which was added to the schedule last minute, though I wasn’t able to make it to that since it was at the same time as the Pat Benatar concert.) I wish this truck concert would have been advertised anywhere because I would have gone out my way to see it, though I’m glad I stumbled upon it.
In a way this year’s ECCC was cathartic. It felt like the one we were supposed to get in August 2020 when it was rescheduled the first time. I’m curious to see if the newly expanded convention center will help ECCC be bigger and better next year but IMO, this is no longer the premier con of the Pacific Northwest, it’s just in the premier city of the PNW. Rose City is the better con and honestly probably passed it a few years back. It does ECCC’s biggest strength (independent artists) equally well, and just plain has more and better of guests and all kinds of programming. The only area I can think of where RCCC is behind ECCC is name-brand exclusives.
