It’s a cloudy morning in downtown Seattle, and the sidewalks between Westlake Center Station and the Seattle Convention Center are bustling with foam craft and face paint. Every March, the city’s largest fan convention, Emerald City Comic Con, fills the streets with all manner of fanatics. I made my own way down there this past Saturday to spend the day at the convention.
The first thing that caught my attention as I navigated the streets between the Summit building and Will Call (where badges were dispensed if you didn’t order them in time to arrive in the mail) was the sheer multitude of people inside and outside. According to Forbes, ECCC expected to sell more than 90,000 tickets in 2025, spread over the course of the four-day convention, but mostly concentrating on Saturday and Sunday.
If you threw a rock down the intersection of Pike and 5th on that Saturday morning, you’d hit about five people dressed as the X-Men character Cyclops. Seeing the crowd, all gathering to celebrate these media properties, was a refreshing reminder of the community-like nature of fandom. In a conversation with UPrep junior Shay Mann, they spoke about why conventions like ECCC draw teenagers like them in.
“I do it to cosplay because that’s something I’m really into. But then also it’s nice to kind of just be with other people who have similar interests,” Mann said. “I think it’s like the community, the connections that you can make with people of various ages.”
I spent my first hour at the convention center exploring the Artist Alley and Writers Block on the ground floor of the Summit building, where individuals displayed their varying products including books, zines, posters, keychains, art prints and so much more. An entire warehouse-sized room was filled with tables, each with different vendors looking to promote themselves or sell their creations.
Afterward, we paid a visit to the exhibition hall on the underground floor. The exhibition hall is similar to the Artists Alley and Writers Block, with the exception that the floor is populated by businesses and companies rather than individual sellers. In this room, areas are designated for businesses to exhibit their products and sell officially licensed items. The exhibition floor, the Artist Alley and the Writers Block are all geared toward inciting purchases in conventiongoers, and walking among the booths, it’s impossible not to feel the consumerist allure.
“I was honestly surprised at how little I bought. I was expecting to go downright broke, but I guess I didn’t,” Mann said. “I spent $181.14 dollars which included three prints, four keychains, a Honkai Star Rail chibi figure, a Honkai Star Rail character blind box and finally a Hatsune Miku figure.”
Mann isn’t alone in spending large amounts of money at the convention. The tickets themselves can cost up to $88 for individual days. If you choose to attend the convention for all four days, a four-day pass is around $162. Combine that with the purchases one expects to make on the convention floors, as well as meet-and-greets and photo opportunities, and the bill starts to rack up. While I don’t regret the money I spent at the convention, my wallet certainly felt it.
We spent the last few hours on Saturday visiting panels and demonstrations. ECCC boasts hundreds of panels and events across the four-day span, most heavily concentrated around Saturday and Sunday. It’s nearly guaranteed that if ECCC appeals to you, they’ll have a panel or demonstration geared toward you too. We watched knights in historically accurate full-plate armor duel on the fifth floor, listened to prominent writers for the Batman franchise discuss fleshing out the character, and heard professional comic artists describe how to imbue dynamics into their posing and compositions. Walking across the third and fifth floors, we saw people playing D&D demos, meeting voice actors from their favorite games and TV shows, and competing in trivia games for their favorite franchises. The entire building was alight with a contagious excitement that was inescapable.
Asking around UPrep before and after the convention, I knew that a large portion of the school’s population would be attending the convention. However, I think it’s telling that I didn’t run into a single other student in the six hours I was walking the halls. Every corner had a new group of new faces, people who are just as passionate about their corner of fandom as you are about yours.
“It’s nice to kind of just be with other people who have similar interests,” Mann mentioned during our conversation, “Like, I have this Hatsune Miku key chain, and I saw someone who had one, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s so cool. Where did you get it?’ And they actually pointed me to the vendor that they got it from, and we chatted for a little while about Hatsune Miku. And that was really fun, because you just make friends over these different interests, and it’s just really nice.”
Emerald City Comic Con is a sight to see, and if you hadn’t heard of it before this article, this is your sign to check the website next February and see if any of the events appeal to you. Its a chance to build community, meet some of the creators of the worlds you love, and support artists and writers who use their talents to create amazing things. Who knows, you just might find some like-minded people you wouldn’t have met otherwise!
