Salt Lake City’s inaugural comic con outpaced even its creator’s expectations this weekend. The convention, which included panels featuring William Shatner, Stan Lee and Adam West, vendors and lots of costumes, sold 50,000 tickets for the 3 day event.
The huge turnout made the Salt Lake convention the largest inaugural comic con recorded and shows the convention may well be on its way to reaching San Diego status.
Event director Dan Farr said the convention used social media to compound ticket sales.
“Because ticket sales were so strong, we were able to parlay that into adding more celebrity guests…each time we added somebody new it became another reason somebody else said, ‘Now I’m going to comic con’,” Farr said.
The Salt Palace was filled to capacity on Saturday—prompting the Salt Lake Comic Con’s facebook page to announce the event was sold out. Many convention goers were left to wait in long lines outside for others to leave the convention before they could get in.
Despite the hiccups, convention attendees like Riley Holgate seemed very enthusiastic.
“It’s kind of like a craft fair, but everything is catered to super-nerds. Instead of having paintings of eagles and stuff like that, you have 3-D printers and drawings of Gandalf the Grey,” Holgate said.
The event will use the entire Salt Palace next year. Farr hinted at another event happening sooner than comic con 2014 and says the fans are really what made this year’s convention successful.
“The fans in Salt Lake were just phenomenal. The celebrities, all of them, commented on just how nice people were to them and how nice it was to be part of this event,” Farr said.
For more pictures, visit: https://www.facebook.com/SaltLakeComicCon
