Heroes Copenhagen Comic Con 2018

Last weekend was our first foray into exhibiting our comics and games at the Heroes Copenhagen Comic Con.

Copenhagen’s Forum centre was host to the two-day weekend festival. The Copenhagen comic fan base was out in force, dressed up and ready to cosplay with the best of them. That’s because Heroes Comic Con hosts a key stage in the Nordic Cosplay competition.

Cosplay and Comic book fans a plenty

Saturday we were greeted by a wild hoard of princesses, warriors, robots and everything in-between. It wasn’t just the usual Marvel heroes we saw representation from all walks of comic book story life. But “we’re here for the comic and games,” you say. You would not be disappointed. The Comic Village provided a fantastic selection of comic publishers, retailers and creators alongside the Artists Village who presented their original creations including limited prints, craft work, sketches and paintings.

Setting up in Artists Alley

We dipped a careful toe in the exhibition water and took a table in the Artists Alley. This was a great way to meet other artists as well as meeting the public. We setup camp next to Sarah Mineur aka Geekonista from northern Sweden, who crafts fine silver jewellery inspired by cult movie, TV and comics. Sarah displayed a fantastic selection of her hand cast and engraved sterling silver products. Being next to Sarah gave us a lot of encouragement to get stuck in and meet people and ‘press the flesh’.

Networking

It didn’t take us long to strike up a friendship between the two companies and we hope to keep in contact and collaborate on future projects. On our other side were a collaboration of Spanish fantasy artists from Madrid and other creators from Germany, Denmark and France. Our Spanish team were very popular and sold a range of digital prints covering fantasy subjects such as Magic the Gathering. It was interesting to see fans in costume pick paintings that truly reflected their characters. There were lots of happy customers.

Blue Donut Studios had a great time meeting people and the feedback people gave us was phenomenal so it was well worth the journey. We presented Line: The Skateboard Card Game, The Last Dead End, our Augmented Reality Horror comic and our Medieval Fantasy Graphic Novel, Blood & Valour. We also previewed our latest development of KomikAR our new AR comic app. More about that in the coming months.
Horror fans made a beeline for The Last Dead End and we had an amazing Wednesday Cosplayer called Freja who also snapped up a signed poster. She would have fitted in perfectly with the artwork

Getting to Forum

The Forum Centre is well situated near the centre of Copenhagen and there are plenty of places to stay and eat around the main Conference and Exhibition Hall. Getting to Forum from the Airport is very easy with the City Pass that can be ordered through https://dinoffentligetransport.dk/ and used on the Metro. A short journey will take you to the station outside of the Forum.

Setting up the stand

Our team was greeted by the convention staff and taken to our location and we quickly assembled our small stand display. Rather than taking bulky equipment in special boxes we used pull-up banners and a wireframe display stand for the products we were selling. This all fitted into our luggage with our personal items. We had to be careful of the weight in transit. Flying Norwegian meant that we only had a 20Kg baggage allowance and that is very strict, so they can charge extra for more allowance. We got hit with an extra charge for being 9 Kg over that meant we needed to pay £70 to get the luggage onto the plane!

Thankfully we sold enough stock so that our travel weight was under when we repacked. But it does impact on your bottom line so if you are thinking about exhibiting as a small comic publisher or artist beware the costs that can creep up on you if you don’t check the airline details and restrictions very, very carefully. Planning any show is hard enough to get the costs down and still make an impact but if you want to go overseas you’ve got not just the travel tickets and accommodation to worry about.

[vrview img=”https://www.bluedonutstudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IMG_20180505_105534.vr-converted.jpg” stereo=”true” width=”736″ height=”400″ ]

(Google VR Image of the show.)

We had a great group of fellow creators in the Artists Alley area and they were from across Europe. Everyone was very friendly and we hope to keep in touch with those who we talked to. The standard of artwork was brilliant and there were a range of very talented artisans creating jewellery and even knitted products with a fantasy or comic book theme.

Selling

Selling is pretty straightforward- we did have to change money in Danish Crowns (DKK) but we brought our trust PayPal Here machine and that meant we could service customers with all the credit cards and if they had a PayPal account. So not having cash was no excuse not to buy! Not that any one complained about having to buy. The people who came to see us were very enthusiastic and their passion and support is what keeps us going!

So that’s an overview of our first overseas Comic Con. We hope to talk more about the relationships we’re building with our fellow European creators and retailers.