NYCC Has a Lot to Celebrate After 20 Years
As NYCC prepares to mark its 20th anniversary, organizers and participants look back on its humble origins and celebrate its successes
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when many in the comics industry were skeptical that a large-scale comics convention could work in New York City. Their fears were unfounded: when New York Comic Con returns to the Javits Center October 8–11, it will be celebrating its 20th anniversary.
The anniversary looms large over this year’s convention, which is themed around Coney Island to mark two decades of close collaboration between the city and ReedPop, the organizer of the con. NYCC sponsored Coney Island’s annual Mermaid Parade back in June, and Coney Island is returning the favor by hosting variety show performances all weekend long at the con’s community stage.
“We’ve been planning for the anniversary for two years,” says NYCC showrunner Kristina Rogers. “The team always starts planning really early, but this was particularly early because it’s a great opportunity to celebrate the history and take a look backwards. The team’s done a really nice job of translating that to, How does our Artist Alley look? How does our show floor look? The programming and content is about honoring the past and figuring out what that looks like today.”
A Rocky Start
The careful planning is paying off this year, but it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for ReedPop. Alex Segura, a comics writer and novelist who was working as a publicist for DC Comics at the time, remembers the moment when industry skepticism collided face first with fan interest.
“Both the organizers and the participating companies went in a little cautiously and thought, Okay, let’s see how this goes—because there wasn’t really a big New York show at the time,” Segura says. “The booth was set up and we were in that holding pattern where you’re waiting for the masses. But it was a huge wave of people, so many more than anyone anticipated. That first day, they had to shut down the floor because the crowding was too much, it became a fire hazard.”
PW’s own report on the first NYCC, from PW Comics World founders Calvin Reid and Heidi MacDonald, covered the logistical breakdown, explaining that “a last-minute influx of ticket buyers caught everyone flatfooted” and “some 20,000 people showed up on Saturday for a venue that could hold only 10,000 to 15,000 people.” Back then, the con only had access to a portion of the Javits’s current space, and it wasn’t enough to handle the demand. Some badge holders got turned away by police and state troopers, or waited in line for hours without getting in.
(“We are planning on shutting the venue down at some point and not letting anyone in or out, just for five minutes, to set a real celebration record,” Rogers jokes—but that’s one 20th-anniversary tribute that won’t be part of this year’s victory lap. )
It wasn’t just fans who got caught up in the floor shutdown, either. High-profile guests like Kevin Smith and Frank Miller couldn’t make it to planned panels or signings, and Segura recalls seeing two more of the biggest names in comics at the time stuck in the crowd.
“I remember seeing Joe Quesada, who was the editor-in-chief of Marvel, in the crowd,” Segura says. “I was like, Oh man, even he can’t get in? Then I turned in another direction and saw Dan Didio, who I knew as the executive editor of DC. I remember being like, Wow, the two heads of the biggest superhero publishers can’t get into New York Comic Con because the reaction is so big.”
NYCC immediately took steps to make sure that such a snafu wouldn’t happen again. PW’s preview of the 2007 show noted that it had acquired twice as much floor space as the debut, and sped up the entry process so that advance ticket buyers wouldn’t need to stand in line to get their tickets printed, all of which helped to alleviate the crowding problem.
Reid, who covered PW’s first years at the show, says the crowding problem at the first NYCC was ultimately a good thing, because it proved to the skeptics that there really was demand for an East Coast convention on the level of San Diego Comic-Con.
“We were really starting to see the transformation of the comics marketplace,” Reid says. “There had been various old-school cons in New York over the years, but they were what I call ‘longbox conventions,’ focused on nostalgia and back issues. My whole idea about comics while I was at PW was that this was a parallel stream of American literature, but the American book industry did not think about it very much, because comics had been a periodical business. But manga, graphic novels, the internet were all changing things. The marketplace was changing and the audience was changing, growing younger and more diverse. Some of us realized it and some of us just needed a little more proof. The first New York Comic Con really showed that.”
Growing Gracefully
NYCC has continued to grow over the years, and as the Javits Center has expanded, the con has grown to fill those extra spaces with programming. It’s funny to remember that the initial con was ground to a halt by 20,000 people, when in recent years NYCC has regularly hosted many more than 200,000 fans across its four days. The all-time record attendance still stands at 260,000 from 2019. That record has not yet been surpassed both because of the downturn during the pandemic years and a conscious effort on the part of organizers to not overcrowd the space afterward.
The 2025 con came closest to matching the record, with 250,000 attendees, and Rogers acknowledges that 2026 could “potentially” beat it, but says creating a pleasant experience for convention goers is more important.
“As we were coming out of the pandemic and looking at quantities, we decided to let our aisles remain bigger,” Rogers says. “That capacity is an ongoing conversation. Yes, it’s a huge show, it’s going to be packed, but we can take measures to make sure it’s not uncomfortable.”
One of the biggest beneficiaries of NYCC’s careful spacing is Artist Alley, where hundreds of artists set up tables to show off and sell their work. Unlike San Diego Comic-Con, which was reportedly so overstuffed this year that organizers publicly floated the idea of turning their Hall H (their headquarters for starry Hollywood panels) back into exhibition space, NYCC’s Artist’s Alley is renowned for how easy it is to walk through.
“New York Comic Con has one of the best artist alleys in the country,” says Oni Press publisher Hunter Gorinson. “That’s my favorite part of the show, just being able to go walk around in there and meet so many great creators. I always find one or two new creators every year that we get excited about.”
It takes a lot of work to make a space flow that well, and Rogers says curating Artist Alley is always a high priority for her team. “Artist Alley has to be the first thing you think about when you’re building a comic con. We’ve got 500-plus tables, so we really look at our 2,000-plus applicants. We’re going to make sure they’re all sitting next to the right people and nobody’s buried and nobody’s stuck behind somebody else that’s going to have a longer line and things like that.”
The planning Rogers and her team does is strategic. “They sit down and really think about it and balance the traffic and thoughtfulness,” she says, “knowing that it’s going to be a really high-traffic area because it’s the heart of the show, and making sure you’re spacing it out.”
Though the con has expanded over the years to include movies and TV panels nearly at the level of San Diego, comics are still the heart of NYCC. And while the comics industry is based less in New York City than it was 20 years ago (DC moved to California in 2015, and Marvel just announced that it’s following suit early next year), Rogers wants to make sure that comics are a big part of the anniversary show. DC officially returned to the exhibition floor last year and will be back again, along with big announcements and panels from almost every other publisher.
“We’ve got an amazing comics presence this year,” Rogers says. “That footprint over on the right side of the show floor is huge. We’ve got a lot of really cool stuff that we’ve been working on with the publishers for quite a while: guest appearances at their booths, announcements, panels, programming, guests down in Artist Alley. We talked really closely with all of our partners and really emphasized that it’s been 20 years, and everybody showed up really big. I think it’s going to be an awesome comics time.”
Christian Holub is a writer and editor in New York City who runs PW’s comics newsletter The Fanatic.
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