People keep asking me how long I think the Comic-Con International will remain in San Diego. I have no inside info on any negotiations between the convention and the city but I have a prediction: A long, long time. San Diego officials would be six levels below Brain Dead to let it get away…and the convention operators have that space so well mastered and figured-out that they shouldn't want to go elsewhere.
I've run through the alternative cities before here but briefly, assuming they don't want to move to another part of the country, you have Vegas, Anaheim and L.A. In none of these venues would we be the Main Event in town the way we are in San Diego. There, the con just isn't just inside the convention center. It's in every hotel, restaurant and available space for miles around. In any of those other towns, the local industry (gambling, Disneyland and show business, respectively) would upstage the con.
The summer heat in Las Vegas is reason enough not to go there. The tourist traffic in Anaheim during the summer is oppressive enough without Comic-Con there. And the Los Angeles Convention Center is just a terrible, terrible place for any convention. (You think traffic is bad around Comic-Con? Try going to anything at the L.A. Convention Center the same night there's a sports event at the Staples Center and a concert at the Nokia Theater.) San Diego is Shangri-La compared to any of them, especially in and around July.
And the San Diego Convention Center, as you'll see in the video below, is expanding. This is a promotional tool for them and it may be promising some add-ons that won't happen or won't happen for a long time. In any event, this is the direction that place is moving. And the stats they give for how valuable the convention center is to the city? They're probably true and Comic-Con had a lot to do with that whole center being built, along with the hotels and tourist-friendly areas around it. I remember what that part of San Diego was like before the city planners realized how a new convention center could revitalize that ghetto of sailors' bars and tattoo parlors. (This was back when tattoo parlors were low-class places.) It was Comic-Con that convinced them.
Watch the video. And thank Douglass Abramson for letting me know about this…