ReedPOP has been putting on New York Comic Con for ten years now, and the show has grown exponentially, especially in the last few years. In 2014 and 2015, the show put up attendance numbers that rivaled – and even beat – Comic-Con International: San Diego.
The problem is, there’s not necessarily a place to expand the convention further. The Javits Center in New York got a boost from the addition of a new subway station across the street from it, but it needs more square footage in order to expand. That’s become a central issue for Lance Fensterman, Global Senior Vice President of ReedPOP. The goal is to expand into more of New York City, with the square footage to spare.
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“I really want to get New York Comic-Con all over the city. We’ve been chipping away at that, with some success,” Fensterman told ComicBook.com in an interview. ” Being in Hammerstein Ballroom and programming content there, great. Getting some of the NYC Super Week events out there,” he said. That’s the goal going forward then. ” We really want to take a big step forward in kind of growing outside of the Javits Center, because that’s the only place we can grow. But really taking that event much more city-wide is a big goal.”
To that end, ReedPOP will be re-focusing their efforts on the core NYCC experience this year, and won’t be putting on their secondary show, Special Edition: NYC, held early summer for the last couple of years, a spokesman told ComicBook.com. That show had a much stronger focus on comic books, but the added two days of content to produce had to go toward trying to make NYCC a city-wide event.
“It’s more stuff for more people,” he explained of the NYCC expansion. “There’s such a demand for tickets that we can’t satisfy. We want more people to be able to enjoy the show. For those people that are at the show, we want more content. More stuff for them to do. More of what they crave and love. Our canvas is pretty packed right now if our canvas is just the Javits Center. You know?”
A recent proposal to expand Javits Center “seems quite viable” to Fensterman, but would be a few years out. It would also cause problems for them during the construction phase, even if the end result is what they were hoping for.
New York Comic Con takes place October 6-9, 2016, with New York Super Week events starting October 3 and running through the convention weekend.
