MCM London - the last MCM of the year for us.

Last weekend Accent UK had a couple of tables at the London MCM event in the Excel Centre.
We've been to a few of these events now and yet we still find ourselves somewhat stunned by the number of people who attend, dressed in costumes that range from Arthur Dent through all manner of Anime characters that I'm not familiar with to Galen from the Planet Of The Apes.

This event now spans three whole days in order to cope with the number of people who want to attend is without a doubt the most colourful event in the Comic book calendar,
But it's not just a media show. London MCM has a very impressive Small Press Village that has grown into a Small Press Town really with a huge array of great looking comics, fantasy art and all things in between.
Competition is fierce.  

So, we never really know how well we'll do at this event.
This time around I missed Friday, with Colin taking all the stock down on Thursday and setting up on his own. Joined by his son Scott later that night the two of them manned the stall all of Friday and sales weren't bad and slightly up on the previous year's, showing how the Friday attendance is steadily growing each year.
Jemma and I arrived on Friday night and were ready for a busy day on Saturday.
Like all Cons, Saturday is the busiest day and at the London MCM usually so crowded that it takes forever to get anywhere once you're inside the hall. This year was no exception. It was crazy busy. This year however the organisers had opened up another hall and so it didn't feel as oppressive as it has done, which was nice.

The interesting thing, as the day flip-flopped from quiet periods to very busy ones, was that once again we were meeting a lot of new customers. Maybe it's because there is so much for people  to look at or maybe this is the first time that they have been to the Event I don't know but we sold a lot of WesterNoir sketch packs, which contain issues 1 to 4, and Tales of WesterNoir 1 along with a great sketch from Gary Crutchley. It was also very rewarding when returning customers picked up later issues of WesterNoir and Stephenson's Robot, which quite a few did.
All of the titles sold well really, with the anthologies doing best, which they tend to do at the MCM events. By the end of the day we'd had a good day for sales, pretty much the same as last year, which is a good sign.
We ended the day with fish and chips and a cool beer in Greenwich with Steve Tanner of Time Bomb comics, talking about the UK comics industry, kickstarters and events we'd been to. A nice evening chilling out.
On the Sunday, refreshed by the extra hour due to the clocks going back, I quickly dashed over to the Walking Dead area to see if I could interest some Walkers in our ZOMBIES anthology...

I'll just say that they were tough customers, more interesting in eating the book than reading it, and I seriously doubted that they had the cash to pay for it anyway.
I had time to chat to Mike Garley, picking up the latest copy of his great Kill Screen and my only other purchase which was of an intriguing book called Skies of Fire which reads as good as it looks. I try to limit my spending at Cons to as few books as I can but couldn't resist those two. Another highlight was chatting to comic legend Bob Layton, and getting my Iron Man Omnibus signed. He's a very likeable person and was clearly enjoying himself at the event.
Sunday was a little quieter but we still had a good number of interested people at the table, I did manage to sell a copy of ZOMBIES to a Walker in the end, so maybe my earlier trip to see them hadn't been a waste of time...

A very tiring event.
A very enjoyable event.
An event full of people who put as much effort into their Cosplays as we do into our comics.

An event that we'll definitely look to book a couple of tables at next year.