Another year goes by and I once again found myself at Huntsville Comic and Pop Culture Expo. This makes my fourth year attending and I went into this with a different mindset than my previous three adventures. In 2023, the event noticed a considerable increase in attendees which resulted in crowds unlike anything I’ve seen at the event before. It wound up making for a very challenging experience so this time around one of my goals was to see how they handled that problem and if the convention evolved to overcome this situation.

So I’ll start with the guests. Huntsville consistently impresses with it’s guest list and this year is no different with the cast of Deathnote, My Hero Academia, Home Improvement, the voices of Mario, Bowser and Zelda, George Takai and a wide variety of comic and wrestling guests. Once again we have a guest list that provides a little something for everyone, but the crowd issues from last year were not resolved so here we go again. The crowds gathered near the guests and on Saturday it greatly impeded any attempt to walk to their signings. I was once again relieved that I had a VIP line to get me in and out of that crowd as fast as humanly possible as I don’t like apologizing for bumping into people over and over again. One of the issues was also due to the layout of the guests. Many high profile guests like Steve Blum, George Takai and more were in the same proximity which caused their lines to crowd each other and that entire section was nearly impassible. Though I will give some kudos in the fact that I personally heard the convention owner reacting to this and changing the line layout to make things easier. While it didn’t completely solve the problem, and while I feel like this should have been taken into account after last year, I will give props for this situation being dealt with in some capacity and having a positive effect.

The panels were the same as previous years with them mainly being Q and A sessions with the guests so like every other year the panels are naturally great because the event consistently gets a lot of amazing guests. I will say though I feel like there was a missed opportunity here as they had a panel with the voices of Zelda and Sonic. Adding the voices of Mario and Bowser to this panel would have made this a must see for me without a doubt. Now I’m sure a lot of that is based on the bookings and likely out of the conventions control plus it involves a side of conventions that I have no personal experience with. So I’m not faulting the convention for this at all I just simply wish that it happened. With that being said they did a great job grouping the actors by franchise to have panels that reflect the various fandoms present with a Death Note panel, Anime panel, etc.

The vendors were also great. It was a lot of the same items I’m used to seeing year after year so I didn’t spend a whole lot of time here but there were some new vendors in the mix and my wife and I still managed to spend a considerable amount of money shopping. Some of the problems with crowding did affect our ability to walk around the vendors and there’s a good chance I did miss out on some stuff I would have bought if I was able to walk around more freely but I was still able to walk around without too much of a challenge so this only mildly effected my shopping experience.

Something new to this convention was the ribbon game. This is an aspect of conventions I greatly enjoy as it sort of turns conventions into a video game like atmosphere with the ribbons functioning as achievements. Plus it’s a great way to be more motivated to see panels and vendors just to add to the collection. I was actually pretty excited for this event but I have to go back to the crowding issue because I honestly don’t know if a lot of people just didn’t have ribbons or if I just missed them entirely but I only found two ribbons and I really didn’t see a lot of people with ribbons at all. This was the first year so it’s possible not a lot of people knew it was going on but because this is now an aspect of the convention it is something I will look into in the future to see if this improves.

So overall my feelings on this event are mixed. I’m still blown away by the quality of their guest list and the opportunity to meet people who have never been this close to home before. In that regard the event was a roaring success, but it’s still so big that it’s not able to fit in the space that it has causing the crowding issues. It’s those issues that make every action more challenging than I feel like they should be and that’s where my disappointment comes in. I had a lot of hope that I would see some kind of solution to this problem but now I’m left thinking this might be the new normal for some time. It’s still a very fun event, it’s still very much worth going to but the crowd makes this event more challenging than it should be and honestly I’m feeling the effects of that challenge as I write this.