The not so super Supanova
It’s been a year full of pop culture conventions for Game Fanatic so far. He attended WaiCon in early March with me and it was pretty interesting but well-organised. This was a local production done by the WA anime fan group. Not long after that I saw mention of OzComicon, something Game Fanatic was totally unaware of…This happened to be at the end of March. It was a bit soon after the first one, but was a more general pop culture thing done by the Australian branch of Comicon in the US. This was its first time in Perth, though, so perhaps the scheduling next year will be more suitable. In June the past several years, we’ve had the Supanova Pop Culture show. In past years this was put on at the Claremont Showgrounds exhibition hall, a pretty old venue that has considerable limitations for an event this size. Game Fanatic and the Scientist went last year and it was pretty rough going with the crush of people. The venue was too small and they both said it was poorly organised.
This weekend was the annual event and it was my turn to take Game Fanatic. We’d made plans to meet up with a friend and her daughter while there….it was a first time for both of them. Anyway, the venue was changed to the Perth Convention Centre, the same place the other two cons have been held. It’s a much larger space and we saw how well the other cons handled space. Well, it obviously wasn’t meant to be enjoyable unless you liked being crushed between people and moving at a snail’s pace. The line just to get in was quite long, although apparently this is pretty normal for the larger shows. I don’t have so much complaint about this but they could have organised the line a bit instead of leaving it to snake around the outside area and all the way across the bridge over a main street in Perth. Fortunately the line did move pretty quickly and soon we were able to line up to buy tickets. In all, I’d guess we spent half an hour just getting in. The place was already pretty packed and was likely be be worse as the day went on thanks to the predicted severe storms coming through. In the end the storms weren’t that much of an issue although there were periods of some heavy rain.
The main problems were the bottlenecks in the crowds everywhere but worst around the entrance/exit. It was hard to get around and took so long we lost track of time. We had wanted to see a couple of the panels but missed out on them and then they were closed off as being too full. I was mostly interested in seeing John Barrowman from Doctor Who and Torchwood…alas it wasn’t meant to happen, I guess. In the end, none of us enjoyed it that much. It wasn’t easy to get a good look at costumes and there were plenty of them around. I think we saw much more from outside the main hall. I think they could have spread out events a bit more than they did and made good use of the theatre for the panels instead of being curtained off inside the main hall.
Game Fanatic was far more disappointed than I was…this was the second one in a row to be so packed full and he’s not keen to go back next year unless there are better changes to the organisation. Perhaps they crowds were far more than they expected, though, so their larger venue seemed like it would be okay. I’m really glad it will be several months before the next big event.
