Tampa Bay Comic Con expects record crowds this weekend

Organizers of this weekend’s Tampa Bay Comic Con say they’re expecting about 60,000 to come to the Tampa Convention Center for this weekend’s event. That’s about 10,000 more than last year’s record crowd. And it’s about 100 times more than the first Tampa Bay Comic Con just six years ago.

A lot of the increase is due to the high-profile celebrities who come to the convention every year. This year’s lineup includes Norman Reedus of “The Walking Dead,” Charlie Cox and Elodie Yung of the Netflix series “Daredevil,” Jack Gleeson of “Game of Thrones” and Sean Astin of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

It’s mostly big names such as those, the TV and movie stars, that bring the crowds to downtown Tampa every year for the convention. But organizers say they have never lost sight of the event’s roots.

“A lot of the people, maybe most of the people, come for the celebrities,” said convention spokesperson Halia Smalczewski. “But we’re a comic book convention at heart.”

When it started in 2010, Tampa Bay Comic Con drew about 600 people to a conference room in a Largo hotel. It celebrated comic books, the writers and artists who created them, and the underground subculture that read them.

“For a long time,” Smalczewski said, “It wasn’t cool to be into comic books. Now they’ve become popular. They’ve become a fad.”

Movies based on comic books and comic book characters dominate theaters across the country. Even once-obscure superheroes such as Ant-Man and Daredevil are the stars of feature films and television shows.

So, at Tampa Bay Comic Con, comic book artists are held in just as much prestige as movie actors. Organizers take care to ensure that the lineup of comic creators is just as impressive as the the lineup of A-list celebrities. The comic book people may appeal to a niche group, but it’s the group that helped build Tampa Bay Comic Con and the comic book subculture in general.

So if you’re a comic book nerd — a moniker that a lot of aficionados of the genre embrace with pride — you’ll probably be at least as impressed with the presence of such artists as Neal Adams of “X-Men,” Allan Bellman, who worked on many classic comic titles in the 1940s and ’50s, and Bob Camp of “Ren & Stimpy” fame as you are with the guy played Samwise Gamgee.

It’s not just all about the mainstream celebrities and the comic creators, though. Tampa Bay Comic Con has a full, and always growing, schedule of activities.

A series of costume contests is a big attraction. The prizes are moderate, from trophies to $500 for the Best of Show award, but some of the entrants work all year designing and creating costumes for Tampa Bay Comic Con, Smalczewski said. It’s worthwhile to stop in at the costume contest just to take a look, she said.

“They’re just so beautiful, and so intricate and so creative,” she said.

Tampa Bay Comic Con introduced a one-day film festival last year, and it proved so popular that it’s been expanded to all three days this year. The films are all shorts, mostly from filmmakers in the Tampa Bay region, and mostly in the sci-fi/superhero range of genres.

This year there’s something new at the convention: two couples are getting married at Tampa Bay Comic Con in separate back-to-back ceremonies. Comic Con visitors are invited to attend the weddings, but they’re asked to respectful, Smalczewski said.

She said she didn’t know what kind of costumes the brides, grooms and bridesmaids would be wearing.

This story was originally published August 3, 2016 at 5:14 PM with the headline "Tampa Bay Comic Con expects record crowds this weekend."