Originally founded as a kind of fan-fest and back-issues swap meet for comic book, science fiction fans and retailers, the just concluded San Diego Comic-Con has grown to become an international platform for popular culture, servicing the fans that love it as well as the artists and publishers that create and distribute it. When the book industry is openly questioning the usefulness and mission of a strictly trade convention like BookExpo America, the San Diego Comic-Con has become a media juggernaut, barreling ahead with a shameless blend of consumer-driven hype and blockbuster promotional bombast. Has the San Diego Comic-Con become a possible model for what a contemporary publishing/media convention should be?
 

Although focused on comics—a sometimes tenuous connection in a show that could easily be called the San Diego Media-Con—the San Diego Comic-Con has emerged as the perfect example of the convergence of all manner of pop cultural phenomena under one roof. It's a big tent, a four-and-a-half-day carnival of panels, press conferences, business meetings, previews and bare-faced hype that has become so popular that San Diego fire marshals were forced to cap attendance at about 125,000. It's not simply that San Diego Comic-Con is popular—it's wildly popular.
 

Indeed, if fans attending the show were happy to leapfrog from one media format to the next in pursuit of their favorite stories and characters, why shouldn't a contemporary convention be a place that caters to an array of splintered entertainment obsessions? Perhaps we're seeing the emergence of a new kind of International Media-Con, an all-encompassing event that attracts all kinds of fans interested in all kinds of stuff; from comics, books and movies to TV shows, video games and merchandise. In a pre–Comic-Con interview with Milton Griepp, CEO of the pop culture news site ICv2.com and organizer of the Comics and Media Conference at this year's Comic-Con, he noted that some media professionals were beginning to say that the crossover between “comics and all the rest of this media stuff is all one business now. Not everyone shares this view, but it's a viewpoint that is growing.”