demonakos1
Jim Demonakos, Emerald City Comicon convention director. Photo via Annie Laurie Malarkey

Our favorite local Emerald City Comicon event, which has grown by leaps and bounds over the years, announced that it has been acquired by ReedPop, a group that produces much larger pop culture shows including New York Comic Con, C2E2 and Star Wars Celebration.

Stormtroopers at Emerald City Comicon. GeekWire photo
Stormtroopers at Emerald City Comicon. GeekWire photo

In the announcement, ECCC stated that it’s a “classic superhero team-up.”

Going forward, the Seattle event will still be produced by the same team, with additional help from ReedPop “to make it even more awesome.”

Conversely, the ECCC team will work on ReedPop’s events to “help make them bigger and better,” according to ECCC statement.

Emerald City Comicon has swelled in size in recent years, topping 75,000 attendees last Spring.

“Emerald City still seems like quite a different animal from anything else in Reed’s family of conventions, which is why it will come as a surprise to many industry observers that ECCC has become part of the ReedPop group,” reported ComicsAlliance. In fact, it was the first question the website posed to ECCC director Jim Demonakos and ReedPop VP Lance Fensterman about how the two organizations will unite.

EmeraldCityComicon5“I get that concern completely, and the initial conversation we had with ReedPop was very much along the same lines,” Demonakos told ComicsAlliance. “We have a certain feel to Emerald City that is hard to put into words. And one of the things that ReedPop wants is us – not necessarily just Emerald City Comicon, but they want the people.”

“So that’s the big thing I want to convey: it’s not just some corporate acquisition where we’re just being swallowed up, but everybody who’s working on Emerald City is going to not only continue to work on Emerald City, but actually start working on C2E2 and New York,” said Demonakos, a former GeekWire “Geek of the Week” who also is the founder of a comic book retail chain. That means he will be able to assist ReedPop — which likes to say they “spread the currency of cool across the globe” — with other conventions and events.

Founded in 2003, the next ECCC will be March 27-29 at the Washington State Convention Center in downtown Seattle.

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