Hartford Comic Con And ComiCONN Merge
Today two conventions in the Nutmeg State announced a merger, and the new Hartford ComiCONN was born.
Scheduled for Sept. 24-25, 2016 at the home of the previous Hartford Comic Con, the XL Center, the convention combines Connecticut ComiCONN and the above mentioned HCC. If you don’t hail from Connecticut, you may not know about ComiCONN or the issues it has had in the past couple of years, but it essentially was the victim of a split between two founding partners, Erik Yacko and Mitch Hallock, announced back in August after the show moved into the casino Mohegan Sun for its 2015 convention.
Yacko retained the name and brand and Hallock has already announced a new convention to be held at Mohegan Sun in August 2016, called TerrifiCon.
For its part, Hartford Comic Con held its second event this past summer. Steve Perry, the owner of Altered Reality Entertainment and one of the founders of HCC made the new announcement of the merger with Yacko. Perry’s company also puts on Rhode Island Comic Con in Providence, one of the fastest growing conventions on the East Coast, with approximately 60,000 attendees this past year — only its fourth.
This isn’t the first such announcement involving ComiCONN. In 2010, after its first year, Wizard World put out an announcement that it was buying ComiCONN and turning it into Wizard World Connecticut Comic Con. That deal apparently fell apart, but I can find no information on it and as of post time, no one has responded to my emails. The show has been a traveling event, holding its first convention in North Haven, then moving to Stamford. It went to Trumbull for two years, then to Bridgeport for 2014. According to the always questionable Wikipedia, that 2014 show drew “over 13,000” attendees over three days.
