Comic-Con — Comics Schmomics, What About The Games? |

Comic-Con — Comics Schmomics, What About The Games?

Shawn Deena

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Yes you read that right. As we celebrate almost 40 years of Comic Con, the evolution of this little gathering of basement dwellers who sat around and talked about … well what did they talk about back then? Before it got the catchy title known to nerds worldwide, Comic Con was called the Golden State Comic Book Convention. Initially designed as a 4-day event centered around comics, sci-fi and and film and television you could go to this nerdvana convention and meet with fellow sci-fi/comic enthusiasts (a.k.a. nutters) and also find some cool stuff, maybe meet the occasional celebrity or two. Back then you would stand a better chance getting a celebrity to go to an orthodontist’s convention. That whole stigma of these loner dudes (mostly dudes) who spent way too much time in pouring over characters and tiny details about things other people could give two tribbles about was enough to evoke fear in the hearts of a celeb who dared show up at one of these things.

That was then.

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Nowadays, with everything sort of blurred together in a massive movie/comic book/videogame hybrid you have cross marketing of a major studio release tied into a graphic novel and a game. Now in the 21st century, Comic Con is a massive convention of comics, film, technology and gaming that gets actual media coverage, massive attendance and money and of course has become a great way to market more than just the latest issue of Amazing Spiderman. There are notables in the comic and film biz doing workshops, sessions, seminars, special guest appearances, way more celebrities (because it’s cool now) exclusive trailers, toys and previews and in the last few years — videogames.

Microsoft has a booth there, Capcom is showing off some of their upcoming titles and retro-arcade releases and various and sundry developers and publishers (Konami, Bandai, etc.) are banking on the fact that comic-book folks are also gamers. This is only partially true. It turns out that being a comic-book, sci-fi geek does not necessary translate into you being a gamer. In fact it’s quite the opposite. So why then go through all the trouble to market your gaming wares at a convention that’s more about collectibles than achievement points? The comic book community is a vast and diverse global collection of people. They have their own language and social interactions that are entirely different than the gamer culture you would see at E3. So back to the question of why?

Think about it. With more and more comic book movies on the horizon, amazingly popular galvanizing comic book issues like Civil War, Final Crisis, Sinestro Core and the death of Captain America, this genre of entertainment is no longer the object of ridicule it once was. It’s actually okay to talk about comics out loud. The videogame industry knows well enough that if they could generate a Halo like maelstrom with a killer game based on a comic then you would get a whole mess of converts and a whole lot of revenue. We’ve seen attempts at the the reverse in the last few years with literature from the Halo franchise (paperback, comic books) and a Prince of Persia graphic novel along with a wide variety of titles looking to go from game to comic. It’s been greeted with mixed results.

The challenge the game developers and publisher face is figuring out a way to bridge the two worlds. While many gamers are also into comics, the same cannot be said for the reverse.

Have a go at any recent comic in the stands though and you’ll see a good amount of video game marketing. It’s understandable that they would want these two universes to meld. A video game many times is like a comic book come to life. Comic book fans are as ravenously devoted to their medium as gamers are to theirs. And the chance to expand the horizon of gaming even further by fully breaking through the niche of die hard comic book fans? Golden to say the least.

Sure they’ve been a good batch of quality comic-book video games — Marvel Ultimate Alliance, the Spiderman franchise and the recent Wolverine game to name a few. But has there been a game that would get comic book fans as excited as they were about the aforementioned Captain America issue? Not as of yet. Maybe Eidos’ Arkham Asylum might be the ticket but for now they’re still trying with a combination of comic book like games and just games they think comic book fans will dig. Lots and lots of games. There are even developers who come out and talk games, special previews of games coming out and so on and so on. This is kind of like E3 having a big booth at Comic Con. And at this level of involvement the booth is continually getting bigger. The question as to whether the continued push to get comic book fans, or maybe the new hybrid comic book fan/gamer will work — remains to be seen.

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