I recently got to attend Texas Comicon in San Antonio. This was my first con and I wasn’t sure quite what to expect. Sure, we’ve all heard stories of San Diego Comic Con, or Dragon Con. But not many people go in depth about the smaller, local cons. I had done some research, I knew the celebrities who were gonna be there and some of the artists who would be displaying their work. But that doesn’t tell you what the experience will be like.

Let me preface this by saying that San Antonio doesn’t come off as one of the most dense in geek population. So I was a bit skeptical at the crowd size to expect. I had been guessing around a hundred to a hundred and fifty. I was proven wrong. I also didn’t expect to see many cosplayers in either number or quality. Again, egg on my face. Some of the

costumes were mindbogglingly good, and I’m talking about the people outside of the 501st that were there.

Walking among the booths, sticking to a budget obviously went right out. There were toys, decorations, games and collectibles. There was also so much original artwork you couldn’t walk twenty feet without something catching your eye. Some stand outs that I have to mention are Jamie Owen over at The Digital Art Tree, and Amy Meyer from Dicepouch.com.

But none of this really conveys the feeling of being there. Imagine being in a room filled with people and making an obscure reference to your favorite geekdom. You expect crickets, right? Now imagine you do the same thing and at the very least, one person gets it, and then gets the next one, and the next. And there is no shortage of people saying the love your Fallout/Doctor Who mashup t-shirt and will talk with you for 10 minutes solid about either one or both of those topics. It’s impossible to think of geeks as solitary, introverted creatures in this scenario. One reason geeks quote movies and T.V. shows as a language is that we love to share our enthusiasm.

And a con is the prefect place to do that.

Basically, if you have been thinking about going to a con,m but San Diego is too far or you don’t like monstrous crowds, find a local con. There are literally hundreds across the U.S. I haven’t looked into other countries, but the internet is a great place to try and find them. And most of them are very reasonably priced. If you have read this and any of it seems even slightly interesting, you owe it to yourself to go and try it out.