CouchCon, Its Kind of a Big Deal!

by Matthew Russell - Posted 3 years ago

   

Oh man, We had the time of our lives at the last comic convention. What’s Up Vigilante Nation. I’m taking a break and sitting on the couch after a great con weekend.

We were invited by David Lillie of Vivid Publishing to participate in the CouchCon 2020. Let me tell you something, we had a blast. The best part was, we didn’t even need to leave our couches to do it.

What is CouchCon?

At the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic, conventions started closing left and right. There were a few startup online conventions but CouchCon started long before that. Vivid Publishing were on its second year by the time the pandemic hit.

They’ve had a lot of practice and we’re getting ready to do it again when the nation came to a crashing halt. Basically it was a full-fledged convention including Dealer’s Room, Artist Alley, Panels and vendors. This time, it was better by utilizing discord.

You see, before, you had to stand in line for hours to meet the stars and pay upwards of $150 just to talk to them for a few seconds and that was it. Now you could message your favorite panelist directly and they would hit you right back, usually right away.

David hit us up a while ago about being a sponsor of CouchCon. At the time, we were planning on hitting up the AmazingCon in Vegas at the same time. We figured that we could still make this work. So, we agreed and started planning on splitting our team into two.

It was only a few days later that Amazing Con was canceled due to social distancing restrictions and so we decided to put all our focus into CouchCon. It meant that we didn’t have to split up or try to take on two projects at once.

I was able to purchase several commissioned pieces and some great swag! It was awesome. 

Dealers and Vendors virtual tables are still up, so go check them out if you missed the event.

The one thing I was most excited about was some of the panels. I love learning from the masters and getting some different points of view on various topics.

There were some really inspirational ones such as

  • Everything You Wanted to Know About Writing
  • World Building 101
  • Light and Shadow - Digital Color From Flat to Flair
  • The Mono-Myth: Universal Elements of StoryTelling

Some of these were truly phenomenal. After a long day, we were all able to party and let loose listening to live DJ’s such as DJ Cryus, FENNEC FVUX, and the tremendous music of the Geeky Guitarist. This is more awesomeness then you can shake a stick at. How awesome is that?

We hosted 2 panels, the first one was an AMA (Ask Me Anything) and the second was a Roundtable Discussion about the future of ComicBook Marketing. Both Videos are below.

THE AMA (CryptoComics Ask Me Anything)


 


This was so great. We weren’t able to get all the questions answered in time so tune in tonight as we attempt to answer the remaining questions on the CryptoComics Couch videos every Monday at 7 MTS.


The Roundtable Discussion


 

Holy Crap, this was fun to do. We had the legendary Dan Cotes, Chad Hardin, Jemma Young, Cardell Cole, Gerimi Burleigh, and so many more.

One of my favorite moments from the convention came from this. We were talking to Chad when all of a sudden he seemed to realize who Dan Cotes is. He seemed to get pretty excited and then shouted “I used to have your Zen action figure when I was a kid!” How cool was that!

GIVEAWAYS

What would a convention be without t-shirt giveaways? We've still got some Creator Art T-shirts from all the creators on our roundtable panel. All you have to do to enter is grab the exclusive CouchCon badge by entering the code "CouchCon2020" (see my example below).

CouchCon Exclusive Badge



This will definitely be a yearly thing with us. It was so fun!