1/9/19: Wizard World New Orleans!

First off, to all of those who attended Wizard World New Orleans and stopped by our booth, thank you very much. We had a great time buying,selling,trading, and of course eating some amazing food.

Our trip started last Tuesday, January 1st as we got the van fully loaded and started our 16 hour journey down to Louisiana. Thing were rolling along smoothly until I started my first driving shift. It’s a running joke that whenever Alex or Greg drives it is nothing but sunshine, but whenever I take over it starts to pour buckets. So there was no surprise when I took the wheel and it instantly started raining, but on top of that I must have angered one of the locals in the hills of Virginia, because it looks like I was shot at! All in all, not a great start to our trip.

Aside from dodging a bullet, things did roll smoothly going forward after that and we continued our journey down south. At the end of the first day we stopped at a local comic store to see if we could find anything to buy. While the shop had some nice keys on display, we were only able to walk away with two slabs that we will be listing on the site in the coming days. 

Wednesday was an easy driving day for us as we only had about 7 hours to complete that day. We again stopped into a few local stores on the drive down and were able to walk out with some great books! We were able to purchase a raw Tales of Suspense #39, some graded keys, and a ton of ungraded semi-keys. A lot of these will be processed and sent off to CGC in the next couple of weeks, but look forward to a future website update with some ungraded keys as well ( think ASM #316/361, Iron Man and Sub-Mariner #1, Wolverine Limited #1-4, Doctor Strange #169, Batman Death in the Family issues, and a ton more.) As for the graded keys we purchased at both comic shops and at the show, Alex is in the process of listing some of those right now! The first batch of highlights include: 

As for the show itself, Wizard put together a pretty good show for the casual comic con attendee. If celebrities and artists are your thing, I think this is a really great show. If you’re strictly there for comic books, the saving grace of this show is that multiple dealers have months of new stock to showcase. Unfortunately it seems like every year there are a few less local shops set up, and while we try to bring as much as we can to shows, those booths help fill a void for both retail customers and dealers looking to add to their inventories after not attending shows for several months. Retail traffic was slow for us on Friday and Saturday, while Sunday helped make the show worthwhile as we were able to sell some books and take in a lot of new books in trade. 

The majority of sales came out of our raw boxes, while we only sold 2-3 major graded keys. This could be due to a number of factors, but it felt like there just weren’t that many comic buyers in the room. I can’t complain about the amount of people at the show, as there were always people walking up and down the aisles. I just received the “wow, it’s nice to see comics at comic con” comment enough times to make me wonder what the average customer is expecting at these events. We will most likely go into the this show next year with a different selection of books to see if that will help boost retail sales. 

I did manage to remember to take a picture of the booth before we opened it up to everyone:

And while these trips are mostly work, we had to stop and hang out downtown for a few drinks and to take in the sights. If nothing else, New Orleans is always a great show to escape the winter for a few days, eat some great food, and hang with some of our friends! If you plan on heading down, we recommend trying out Palace Cafe on Canal St. or Cochon on Tchoupitoulas St.

Thanks again to everyone who came out to see us! Our next shows are in March for Emerald City in Seattle, C2E2 in Chicago, and Anaheim for Wondercon.

-Austin