Wizard World Indianapolis: Hoax, Dream, or Imaginary Story?

2014 has been a groundbreaking year for geek conventions in the city of Indianapolis, which has never in my life hosted enough geek conventions for my tastes. We’ve had two Star Wars Celebrations and we’ve welcomed GenCon since 2003, but large-scale comics and entertainment conventions were beyond our grasp for decades. Then came 2014. We saw the Indiana Comic Con come and implode in March; we enjoyed the heck out of Indy PopCon in May; and I recently heard word of something called Awesome Con that’s expanding from its home base in Washington, DC, and establishing an Indy beachhead this October. This trio plus GenCon are going a long way toward making up for lost time, by which I mean my largely conventionless childhood.

But wait! There’s more! From the Department of Unannounced News, I was privileged to catch the following tonight, courtesy of Tony Troxell at Geeking in Indiana, which you should visit for more fun and geeking:

Hey Guys? Wizard World Indianapolis is searchable on their website, just not listed on the main page.

Heads up.—
Tony Troxell (@IndianaGeeking) June 25, 2014

Sure enough, ’tis a curious thing: searching Wizard World’s main site for “Indianapolis” yields results. Granted, all the pages are placeholders yearning for future updates with concrete information. We have tentative info of a $75.00 price tag for a three-day pass and a save-the-date implication of February 13-15, 2015. My wife and I wouldn’t be opposed to spending our Valentine’s Day on this, assuming it’s real and the guests aren’t terrible.

Corroborating this calendrical allegation is a line item on the Indiana Convention Center’s official schedule confirming Wizard World’s reservations for that weekend. Just in case it disappears a month from now, here’s a screen cap so future generations won’t peg today as the point in time when my brain began shedding puzzle pieces:

They’ve (allegedly) chosen a famously busy weekend for it. Besides the Hallmark holiday itself, the Indiana Home and Garden Show is a well-known, not-small event. This isn’t like that Democrats’ gathering that was booked next door to Indy PopCon and whose ten or fifteen suit-wearing attendees kept looking at us funny. The Home and Garden Show plus a concurrent Wizard World would create a fair mob scene downtown.

Related note with extra panic: they’ve only reserved 5,000 square feet. If you scan down the Indiana Convention Center schedule as of tonight, next year’s Indiana Comic Con (Lord willing) has reserved 20,000 feet on March 13-15, 2015. That’s much wiser, if enough Hoosiers forgive them in time.

(Quick sidebar: as of tonight the second Indy PopCon is not on the Convention Center’s list and, their previous ad materials notwithstanding, now lists its 2015 dates as “TBA” on their official site. I’m trying not to take that as a bad sign, and I’m looking forward to their updates.)

Anyway: 5,000 square feet for a comic convention held by one of the biggest names in comics/entertainment conventions sounds inadequate and hazardous. Hopefully that’s just an initial order and we’ll see negotiations for tripling or quadrupling the space sometime between now and next February. Indianapolis doesn’t need another convention fiasco.

If you’ve never attended a Wizard World con, here’s some context for comparison — a cross-section of the intoxicating celebrity guest list for this year’s Wizard World Chicago in August:

* Doctor Who‘s Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, and John Barrowman
* Guardians of the Galaxy‘s Dave Bautista. And, once again, Karen Gillan.
* Star Trek: the Next Generation‘s Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, Levar Burton, Michael Dorn, Brent Spiner, and Gates McFadden
* Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s Joel Hodgson
* Angel‘s David Boreanaz and J. August Richards
* Sleepy Hollow‘s Nicole Beharie
* X-Men veterans Evan Peters, Shawn Ashmore, and Booboo Stewart
* Legendary director John Carpenter
* Peter Criss from KISS
* Also, some people who make comics!

I’m stopping there because I’m tired of typing, but you can see more more more more more on the WWC home page. If Wizard World Indianapolis becomes a real thing and lines up a guest list one-hundredth as interesting as this lot, this should be quite the memorable shindig if we attendees don’t all asphyxiate or crush each other.

Updates as they occur, right here on Midlife Crisis Crossover! Even if one of those updates is Wizard World canceling and cackling wickedly at us. But they better not.