Review: Film & Comic Con Manchester 2016

No. 3: Film & Comic Con Manchester 2016

Credit: Comiconverse

Communication: Appalling. By this I mean a person’s ability to use their phone at the event. There was little to no signal so if you lost someone you had to first play hunt the signal, not a problem I blame ShowMasters for because that is well out of their hands but one to be aware of if you like to split party like most of us do. That’s okay I hear you say, these days we can use the internet. Well yes if you have data then you could absolutely get round the signal problems, however if you require Wi-Fi, for example if you want to live tweet with pictures or Instagram or social media voice recordings, videos or images which will eat otherwise monster your data then you are sadly out of luck. Again show insiders allege that the lack of Wi-Fi is because the venue, Event City, placed a heavy charge on providing Wi-Fi for the event. This was a problem for me because I was relying on twitter to make a short hand record of my day, that would allow me to report as the event progressed and have easy to type up information for my article later. I now realise the assumption is my problem and I need to have a backup plan in future to avoid this issue. I would say that having spoken to other people it was an issue, we are living in a share all now kind of society and many others were also saddened by a lack of being able to insta share their days’ selfies and such with people online. This again will have had a negative impact on the publicity of the event, which in no way appeared to have sold out on either day.

Timing: The Sunday of the event clashed quite spectacularly with the Manchester charity race event which meant that it was ghostly quite for much of the Sunday.

Value for Money: I would say that at the currently level of popularity and guest appearances that it is value for money to buy a regularly £8 ticket for one day. I struggled to remain entertained on the second day and spent most of it going back to buy things I had looked at the day before or talking to as many people as I could. There is plenty to do and people to see and cosplay stuff for two days if you are both wanting to attend the comic-con and see guests and stalls as well as going to all the cosplay panels and the masquerade. If you only want to do one or the other one day is plenty of time. There was little advantage to the early entry tickets, it was really quite so you could get round everything super-fast and if you only want to do it as a half day event then sure stumping up the extra cash for the £15 early entry ticket maybe worth it but I would have been disappointed by a two-day early entry ticket of £28, there just wasn't enough going on.

Now for some photos from Film & Comic Con Manchester 2016 (and before you say it, yes next time I need to take a proper photographer with me but hey I work for free here)