Practical advice for people at Phoenix Comicon

7 JUNE 2014

 

We're on day 3 of a massively growing Con in a very hot city. Here are a few tips for those of you who still have yet to get here:

 

 

• Get here early. The traffic snarls around the convention center are ungodly. The Batman cast missed half their own panel because of the traffic. This isn't helped by the fact that...
• Some of the parking garages only accept prepay cash and check (?) and you don't find that out until you're halfway pulled into the garage. Then, because there's a line of cars in both directions waiting to turn into the garage, you have to back out, have them up back up, etc. If you're looking for a garage that lets you pay on exit with a credit card, try the Arizona Center garage.

• You need to get your badge in the south building - not the north. Yes, you have to cross the street but the Fright House is in that building if you want to visit it while you're there.
• Drink a lot of water and wear sunscreen. It is unusually hot this weekend and I've seen plenty of sick/dizzy/sunburned tenderfoots about. Really sunburned people. Two girls at my panel were wondering why they were so exhausted. It's the heat.
• Give yourself time to enter the building. The bag checks are causing massive bottlenecks. For instance, the Batman panel released about 4500 people into the street, since they made us exit through the doors, walk down and around the corner and back into the building through one set of doors - and it got congested very fast. I was in a later panel where the panelists were late because they were held up just in a hallway bottleneck.

On the whole, today felt more like a big Con than the last two days.  Maybe that's because I went to a big-room panel (the surprisingly emotional Batman panel, where fans cried and one guy proposed on stage to his girlfriend) and because the Exhibit Hall was so packed.