Founded by Regina Carpinelli and her two younger brothers in 2011 as ComiKaze Expo, L.A. Comic Con has spent the past thirteen years evolving and providing enjoyable experiences for fans, friends, and family. Known now as one of the largest independent conventions in the United States that encompasses several pop culture categories, fans may be surprised to learn that L.A. Comic Con came from a humble beginning. For example, it first debuted in the basement parking lot of the Los Angeles Convention Center, eventually making its way to the main show floor and attracting more attendees each year. In 2023, the show attracted up to 85,000 attendees. This year, event staff anticipate around 100,000 attendees.
As a fan-driven, community-oriented convention, Los Angeles Comic Con has gone through several rebrandings, ranging from ComiKaze Expo in 2011, Stan Lee’s ComiKaze Expo in 2012, and Stan Lee’s L.A. Comic Con in 2016, over the past thirteen years. Now known nationwide as Los Angeles Comic Con, L.A. Comic Con is set for early October and is fast approaching. In anticipation of the annual event, I was given the opportunity to interview the CEO of Los Angeles Comic Con Chris DeMoulin, who has been running the convention since 2012.
Founded originally in 2011, how has this convention evolved over the years? How would you describe its history and legacy as a comic convention?
The first show came about because there was a small group of siblings and friends who were frustrated that they couldn’t always get tickets to another show that was near here, so they just decided in 2010 they were going to create their own show. So the first show in 2011 was in the the parking garage downstairs at the Los Angeles Convention Center. They were super fortunate in that Stan Lee was a guest and came to the show, and he really liked the vibe, this very fan-centric vibe. So Stan ended up doing a deal with the group that founded it to license his name, and that’s how it became Stan Lee’s ComiKaze Expo in 2012.
At the same time, I was working for a trade show company, and we were introduced to the founders, became involved, and became kind of co-owners of the show. We moved up into the South Hall and just expanded everything. And so that was the beginning of the journey of being a little more mainstream. And you know, the evolution of, after a couple of years, the name was changed to Stan Lee’s Los Angeles Comic Con, and then Stan’s company got bought, and the license expired, and it just stayed from 2018 it’s just been Los Angeles Comic Con. I think the evolution has been trying to keep certain things the same, which is being a show that’s run by fans for fans, always asking the fans what they want to see, and then always trying to build our content for the next show based on the feedback from the fans.
We so we were fortunate to sort of grow through 2019. COVID stopped everything in its tracks for all of us, and coming out of COVID, rather than just try to go back in 21 and create what we had in 2019, we asked fans what else they wanted to see, and that’s where we got the feedback about anime and gaming. And that’s, you know, the expansion you’ve seen, where we added West Hall, and the show got bigger, and we kind of complimented the traditional con with Gaming and Anime in the West Hall was really all just driven by fans in Los Angeles telling us what they were interested in, and us saying, you know, we’re really a pop culture convention. We all call ourselves comic cons, and comics are sort of the beating heart at the center of it, but it’s not the totality of it.
We wanted to embrace the diversity and eclectic nature of pop culture in Los Angeles and have the show represent all of that. And so that’s how you’ve seen us grow, why we went from about 1.2 million square feet of space, indoor and outdoor across the whole L.A. Convention Center. In the South Hall is the more traditional comic con stuff. But then you’ll see a much bigger presence of celebrities now in our Signing Hall. And then the whole anime and gaming, gaming tournaments, and all sorts of stuff going out of West Hall.
And so it’s been a fairly dramatic expansion from 2012 to 2024 but really all driven by fans saying, “I’d like to see more of this,” “I’d like to see more of that,” “I’d like to see this person, and “I love this property. Could you please do something with that?” And so part of the fun for us every year is, is that post-show, we survey process to figure out who, who should we be going after next year, right? And then that really becomes, sort of our mantra for the year, is, how do we get as many of those, that content in those and those celebrities and creators into the show as possible?
How does L.A. Comic Con differ from competing conventions? What makes it special compared to other conventions?
I’ll tell you what we try to do, and I hope that the fans recognize and appreciate this. The idea of being for fans is at the core of everything we do. So I’ve already talked about sort of what that means in terms of what talent we try to bring in, but it also means we look at our processes every year, and we’ve moved now to shipping badges to people. So more than half the people get their badges before they show up. So when they get on-site, they go right into the show, and we look at our ticket, and our badge pickup process to make sure that nobody, even at the busiest times, nobody has to wait in line for more than 25 or 30 minutes. It’s a constantly moving line to get inside. I think we’re the only show that takes our main stage where our best content is and puts it in the middle of the show floor because I’ve been to shows where there’s a hall somewhere else and the good stuff is somewhere else, and you have to leave what you’re doing and go wait in line sometimes for two or three hours and hope you get in to see what you want to see.
And we just don’t think that’s fair for the fans. The fans have decided to come and have a fun day or three days, you know, kind of nerding out with all this stuff, and to make them leave to see the good stuff. And that just didn’t seem right to us. So even though it’s a little chaotic, sometimes we put the main stage with all the best panels right in the middle of the show floor. And you know, for instance, last year, when we had the four hobbits from Lord of the Rings, there were half of the South Hall people were standing in concentric circles around that stage, watching that 10,000 people were participating in that panel because we built the hall to accommodate that. You know, the average panel might only have two or 3000 people, but it can really accommodate as many as want to be there. And that’s why there’s a big Jumbotron. That’s why there’s a big sound system.
Every decision we make, big and small, is all about how we make this more fun for the fans, more accessible for the fans, and a great value for the fans. We consider the hardcore fans because we have a lot of those people who are really into their fandom, but we also about a third of the people that come have never been to a con before. They’re coming with their families and their kids because they’re doing it instead of going to the movies or going to Knott’s Berry Farm or going to Universal Studios for the fourth or fifth or sixth time, and those are all great things to do, but they’re now realizing that this is an amazing experience that a family can have and create those sort of the same kind of lifetime memories that you get when you go to Disneyland because you’re going to have those experiences and see those things and experience them together as a family in a really fun and unique way. So we really try to just do everything to recognize and acknowledge the broad spectrum of fans that are in LA and then make sure that everybody who comes will be surprised and delighted by something.
How does L.A. Comic Con resonate with the culture of Los Angeles?
It’s really important to us that we are Los Angeles Comic Con. And so in some ways, if you took our show and put it in Florida or put it in Dallas or put it in Oregon, it shouldn’t make as much sense, right? So we try to incorporate all sorts of elements of the city. We have a relationship with the Los Angeles Football Club, and the year they won the MLS Cup, they were at the show the following with the cup, and 1000s of people were coming by and taking pictures with it. We have a relationship with L.A. 2028 and so we had the US Olympic archery team at the show last year, and we’re hoping next year, the year after, the US skateboarding team, because we want to be reflective of what’s going on in Los Angeles.
And Los Angeles has the privilege of being the cultural kind of creative hub, not just in the movie and TV business, but the music business and streaming and comics and gaming and all of these things. There are so many creators here. So we want to make sure that the diversity of Los Angeles and its creative community is represented in the show. That’s one of the reasons why we have the largest Artist Alley, I think, of any con in the country, and we have two of them this year. We are going to have almost 500 artists, both in South Hall, and we’re doing a second artist alley in the Gaming and Anime Hall with artists that are more inspired by sort of anime and gaming creative styles. So it just, we try to do those things to make sure that we’re from a creative and a fan standpoint. What we’re doing is a microcosm of the broad spectrum of fandom in L.A.
With San Diego Comic-Con potentially moving out of its main city, can fans foresee the same for L.A. Comic Con?
We love being in Los Angeles. We love being at the L.A. Convention Center. You know, the convention center is looking at doing an expansion, which hasn’t finally been approved by the city council yet, but they’re seriously considering that and going through that process. We’re totally supportive of that because I think having a bigger center, more hotels, and more room to do stuff, would be terrific. I can’t imagine what it would take for us to want to take this and move it elsewhere. We love being here. We love being L.A. Comic Con. And so you know, hopefully, 40 years from now, when you know your grandkids are interviewing my grandkids about this show. It’s still in the same venue, and people love to come to it.
As a convention often described “by fans, for fans,” what would you say are L.A. Comic Con’s strongest features?
The panels that go on the main stage and then the 150 to 180 panels that we have elsewhere. We try to make sure that every fandom is touched on, so there’s something for everybody. We’ll have voice casts from animated shows from the 80s and 90s. We’ll bring back actors from beloved cult movies. This year, more than any year we’ve kind of got some blockbusters on the main stage in terms of guests like Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen and Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd in the Back to the Future cast and Angelica Houston and Christina Ricci from The Addams Family. And we were just super fortunate this year that people’s schedules aligned and we asked early enough. And you know, when we had Christopher Lloyd and Christina Ricci and we had this idea of doing something with Addams’ family. We reached out to Angela Houston’s agent and said, I know she doesn’t really do cons, but it’s hometown con. We’ve got the cast there. It could be really fun. And we were just delighted when she said, “Yes.”
Accessibility is also huge, as, with some other conventions, you have to go to all these different locations, whether or not it’s off-site or on-site. And yeah, it can be a lot. It can be a lot for people to navigate. At L.A. Comic Con, there are a lot of things put closely together, and the main stage is where it’s accessible to everyone.
I worked in the trade show business for 12 years, and I’ve always been a fiend about having enough signage around so that it’s really easy and intuitive to figure out where the thing is that you like. You don’t want to have to spend tons of time in lines and you want to be surprised and delighted by the things that you see. And so we try very hard to do that and always take feedback from the fans if we haven’t gotten it right, to make it better the next year.
In your opinion, what keeps fans coming back for more every year?
Well, I think fans come back because we ask them every year about what they liked and disliked about that year’s show. There’s always something or someone new at every single show. Keeping the programming fresh is why the fans come back. And then for us, we just have a very clear first quarter after the show is all about getting input from the exhibitors, getting input from the fans, understanding what went right, understanding what went wrong, and starting to plan for the next year. We start advanced planning on guests and inviting people to come. And then each quarter, as you go, it goes from, you know, the balance of planning the operations shifts as you go through the year and you get as you get closer, it’s more operational as you’re farther out, it’s more planning and lead stuff and so we have, you know, a couple of marketing people and a couple of operations people and talent and all that. And so we all just sort of do what we do all year long, to make sure that we’re setting up all the dominoes over the year so that when the show date comes, we can hit them and the whole thing goes and everybody has a good time.
What can you tell us about the future of L.A. Comic Con? What can fans expect in future years?
From a guest standpoint, we’ll do what we always do, which is reach out to the fans and see who else they’d like to see. And, you know, there’s always new things. There are always new shows coming out. And so people, you know, last year we were able to bring in a bunch of the Ahsoka cast, which was amazing. And, you know, we got everybody except Rosario Dawson last year. So Rosario Dawson is coming this year, and I think that there are so many big fandoms, whether it’s Marvel and Star Wars and Star Trek or some of the latest and greatest animes. So we’re always trying to bring people in from those because they have a fan base that spans generations, right? It’s always fun when parents can introduce their kids to the things they love and the kids like them, and then it becomes a thing that the whole family can do together. And so we’ll always be refreshing our content every year.
Interested to see what L.A. Comic Con has up its sleeves this year? Click here to learn more about its 2024 lineup of talent, or download the official app to find out more about specific panels, signings, and gaming opportunities.
