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We’ve always heard good things about MCM Expo, mainly from friends of MOMB Ian Sharman and David Wynne. But this weekend, they had a bit of a weird time of it:
Ian gives a bit of background here:
This weekend was my eleventh London MCM Expo, it will also be my last.
Why? Well, let me give you a bit of background here…but I’ll say first that these are gripes. We understand that mistakes happen at shows, and we could have easily forgiven them, but it’s what they led to that is the real problem.
Now, MOMB thinks that a lot of what David and Ian complained about are fairly standard convention whinges – things that are annoying, and sometimes expensive, but ultimately between the exhibitors or punters and their wallets – but what’s a bit more problematic for us is how the MCM Expo organisers apparently handled criticism. Ian brushes on it in his post. David talks about it more in the audio attached to this post.
David is understandably upset – nobody likes to have that sort of attention drawn to them – but it’s important to note that MOMB wasn’t actually there. Between us we know and respect people who worked/work on MCM Expo, and have heard a lot from pleased punters in the past.
However, separating exhibitors from the convention floor and suggesting that they have to answer for tweets that they’ve sent is problematic. In the case of most people – David is a bit of a giant, and quite self-possessed – it’s practically intimidation. Whether this behaviour was a glitch, down to MCM policy, or just a matter of frayed nerves or overzealous staff on the day, we don’t know, but if anybody from MCM wants to get back to us, either by mail or in the comments, we’d be happy to hear from them.
Hopefully it’s obvious from the slightly craven writing of this post, but the opinions of David Wynne are his own, and MOMB takes no responsibility for yadda yadda yadda. However, if staff at a convention are handling dissenting voices in this way, we’d certainly like to know what the thinking behind it is.
A rather interesting and quite sinister insight into the MCM Comic Con. It seemed like they did everything they could to intimidate this exhibitor when it would seem that they were in the wrong. I’d be intrigued to hear their side to this story too, but it does sound like a horrendous manipulation technique to provoke David and if I was kept behind the scenes for over an hour being told off, well, it would drive me potty!
Wow, i was not expecting this. I just read Ian Sharman’s blog post on this and listened to the file above and MCM are just bully’s who want to stop any bad press from getting out there. This should go viral, its bad on sooo many levels.
Lets just hope that next years London Super Comic Convention organisers do a better job in both attracting comic fans and keeping the exhibitors happy.
I like to imagine that they have a special little Gestapo squad trawling through Twitter feeds and racing out to confront dissenters.
Someone could make a story about that; an allegory to World War 2 if you like.
Oh, my! It’s early in the day to be invoking Godwin’s Law!
That’s the death of any internet conversation…
It does paint a slightly ridiculous and neurotic picture, though, doesn’t it? The Nazis probably would have been too efficient to monitor twitter streams during such a busy event.
I mean, if Nazis ran comic conventions.
I remember when I was setting up Fuyucon 2007, we had out dates out in the public domain for arond 14 months, we built a lot of hype and buzz about the event but then we got told by MCM Expo that we had 3 options, 1) move dates, 2) shut down or 3) run our chosen dates and be crushed by MCM Expo.
MCM had chosen to run on the same dates as us and they was not happy about it, apparently we was trying to steal the spot light and ruin them… now take into consideration that we ws a 500 person anime event and MCM is around 20k? in the ned after a series of nasty emails from them trying to get us to move dates we ran anyway but that was the last thing I have had to do with MCM, I now stick to smaller comic book events when I get the urge to go to something.
Yeah, Expo are like that. From personal experience I know they only care about the money. They are charming enough to your face but if they think you are connected to a rival event, and by rival that means even tiny fan events that are in no way a threat to them, then they will try to crush you. If you criticise them, no matter how legitimately, then the mask of charm drops very quickly. And just in case anyone thinks their main rival, Collectormania (a.k.a. London Film and Comic Con, a.k.a. the Entertainment Media Show) are any different, don’t fool yourself. The organisers of that are cut from the exact same cloth.
[...] at the London MCM Expo Description Found via: Ian Sharman’s Twitter – Original Sources: Mombsite and Ian [...]