Los Angeles Comic Con 2018 took place at the Los Angeles Convention Center Friday, October 26 through Sunday, October 28. Now in its eighth year, celebrating its “octoversary,” the convention has gone through several name changes, starting out as Comikaze Expo, then Stan Lee’s Comikaze Expo, then Stan Lee’s LA Comic Con, and finally this year, the “Stan Lee” was dropped, so now it’s just LA Comic Con.
Though a 3-day show, we were only able to go on Saturday. Unfortunately, that meant we missed out on the Tenacious D panel with Jack Black and Kyle Gass on Friday evening. Anyway, on Saturday morning we didn’t take our own advice and ended up not leaving as early as we should have. The show opened at 9:30am, but we didn’t leave our house in Fullerton (Orange County), until around that time. You’d think that would have been enough time, considering the first panel we were interested in didn’t start until 11:00am, and actually we reached the exit for the convention center around 10:15am. However, we spent the next 45 minutes waiting in the long line for parking. We were oddly directed in a long circle around the convention center. If I had known we would be directed that way, we would have taken an earlier exit off of the 10 freeway to avoid that circle.
There was a very long line to pick up your badge, which wrapped back and forth upon itself. Luckily for us, we were able to bypass this line and went in through the front doors to go to Press check-in — after going through security for a bag check first. This process went very quickly, and by the time we made it to the Main Stage on the show floor, we had missed the first 10 minutes of the 11:00am panel, which was Agents of SHIELD with Brett Dalton and Mallory Jansen.
Other panels we caught were Marvel’s Runaways, The 100, Katie Cassidy (Laurel from Arrow), and Elijah Wood’s Spectrevision panel. We’ll have recaps and photos of those panels available on the site soon.
The panels we attended were all on the Main Stage. If you’re not familiar with LA Comic Con, it is unique in the sense that the Main Stage is located on the show floor, so anyone is able to walk up and stand in the crowd in front of the stage. While this may allow for more people to have access to these panels, at the same time, there is no seating, except for ADA and VIP. The ADA section, which is on the floor, close to the stage, was usually full, though it didn’t seem like there was any staff policing the area to make sure that only ADA attendees sat there. The VIP section is located a little further away from the stage, on a raised platform. I only ever saw a handful of people sitting there.
Lunch was not a fun ordeal. The lines for every food court location were forever long and sometimes confusing. Yes, there were food trucks, but they had an odd location. They weren’t out front, nor were they in the breezeway between the South and West Hall as they usually are. To get to them, you had to go to the back of the show floor and go through the back to get outside. These lines weren’t any better than the food court lines. Also, they were in the direct sunlight. So we opted to go back inside and stand in a food court line, because at least it wasn’t uncomfortably hot. (Oh, did I mention I was cosplaying as the 13th Doctor? Yeah, so I was wearing a big jacket.)
Toward the end of the day, we had time to walk the show floor, which was very crowded in most areas. But that was to be expected; this was Saturday, after all.
New this year was Legion M’s Fan Oasis, which featured its own programming.
The U.S. Air Force had a big presence on the show floor as well, even putting a real life jet on display!
The Los Angeles Museum of Wasteland History was also an interesting addition.
You can see more pictures of the LA Comic Con 2018 show floor in the photo gallery below. Click here for our panel recaps and photos!
