Harrisburg’s Comic & Pop Con just finished up for the year (reviews and interviews from the convention will release in the coming days and weeks), and not only did we here at FandomWire have an excellent time, but we can also exclusively reveal some exciting news. FandomWire can exclusively reveal that next year’s Harrisburg Comic & Pop Con will be moving to a new, larger event space in Harrisburg that will allow for more vendors, guests, and celebrities.
We here at FandomWire got to speak to one of the Harrisburg Comic & Pop Con organizers, Andrew Melius, about the convention. Andrew, according to his bio on the convention’s website, is a “paramedic by day and a comic book nerd by night. When not helping out at Comics World, Andrew spends time talking with celebrity agents to make sure we get the best talent possible for all of our shows. He is also the workhorse of the group and is always working on one project or another for the growth of the con.”
He told us that “2019 was our first show, 2020 we had to obviously cancel, so this is our second show.” His team has been doing comic conventions in Hagerstown, Maryland for “about four or five years now”. His team came to the area due to the lack of conventions around central Pennsylvania, as the only other one in recent memory was one back in 2017 (in the same space as the current convention, in fact), but that show ran only one year.
According to Andrew, the response to the Harrisburg Comic & Pop Con is “fantastic”, and that “a lot of the people that we have talked to are first-time con-goers”. They credit their advertising as one of the primary factors that the show is successful, as many people do not see cons often and become interested once they learn about it. He estimates that 10-15% of the guest list has never been to a con before.
He says that the people they try to book for the convention are voice actors, people whose faces are recognizable from movies or TV, and wrestlers. He told us that they were excited to book the voice actors behind Land Before Time (Aria Curzon, Anndi McAfee, and Scott McAfee), as their agent said that it is the first time the three had been together at a convention together, especially since it was Curzon’s first convention).
At the end of our interview, Andrew told me that “We’re on to bigger and better things”, in regards to the new convention spaces. We here at FandomWire cannot wait to see what these things he is referring to are, and we will certainly be attending (and covering) the event next year.
Follow us for more entertainment coverage on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Letterboxd.
