We've been talking here about Comic-Con in years past and I mentioned the El Cortez Hotel in San Diego. Here's a brief TV news item about the con when it was at that hotel back in 1975. Shel Dorf is identified as the founder of the annual event and that's not exactly true. It's kind of a mistake that Shel encouraged and which no one bothered correcting very often in the con's earlier days.
In almost every news report back then about comic conventions, reporters fixated on one of two aspects or both: People dressing up as colorful characters and/or people paying then-outrageous sums for old comic books. You rarely saw anything about the contents of comic books or about the people who made them. This report is fairly typical. Jerry Siegel, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Gil Kane and many more important figures in the industry were present at the '75 con but they go unmentioned.
If and when I post some news coverage of more recent conventions, you'll see a lot about people dressing up as colorful characters and/or the presence at cons of stars of smash hit movies and TV shows. And even this report talks about Star Trek…