MCM Belfast Comic Con.

This year's Belfast MCM was both our and the organiser's second event in Belfast.
We arrived with heavy bags on Friday, setting up that evening to save us from the normal Saturday morning convention rush, and pretty much everything went to plan. That's one of the good things about going somewhere you've been before, you know where everything is, how best to get there and you start to build a rapport with the event organisers.

We had set everything up in no time and then had the usual quick look around those other stalls that had also set up early. The first thing to strike us was that the Comic Village hadn't grown since last year, which was great for us as it meant less competition. The second was that,of the stalls already set up, very few were actually selling comics. Again great news for us, if it remained the case.

It was nice to wander back to the hotel with only hand luggage thrown over our backs, and even nicer that even these bags were free of comic books and therefore a lot lighter.
Saturday found us not suffering particularly from the Guinness we'd consumed the night before, and within minutes we were ready for action. The rain (which seems to be as typical of Belfast as it is of Manchester) wasn't putting people off as the queue we walked passed on the way into the venue was building nicely.

The Advance Ticket holders entered at it began to feel busy, and then the normal ticket holders surged in and it was really busy.

There were a lot more Cosplayers this year, and the atmosphere felt typical of the MCMs we've been to, everybody was there to have fun.
Saturday proved to be busy all day and we exceeded last year's Saturday total, which was great.

WesterNoir was out best selling title, with a number of readers taking up to offer to get a free Gary Crutchley sketch when purchasing all 5 issues. We had a number of customers return after last year's Con to buy more issues of the title, and I think being at the Con a second time gave them confidence that they'd be able to pick up future titles as we intend to return next year as well.

All titles sold pretty well though and by the end of the day a couple of them had sold out.
That's the problem when you can't drive to a Con. You have to make tough decisions on how many copies of each book you take, and no matter how carefully you plan one things is certain, you'll never get it right.
Sunday was much quieter however, which isn't usual for an MCM in our experience.
We still had some interesting and interested customers

but sales where much lower than Saturday's.
The highlight in terms of sales was the guy who rushed over to pick up issues 2 and 3 of WesterNoir, having picked up a copy of issue 1 on Saturday.
And then it was over.
Overall, we hadn't sold as many books as last year but we'd sold a good number and had a great time.
We will return.
The weekend didn;t end there though and at the airport we got chatting with Andrew Lee Potts (of Primeval fame). We talked TV, directing and comics. A thoroughly nice bloke who will be at the London MCM event promoting his new web series, Wireless, which he described to us as being 'like Knight Rider but where the car has been replaced by a very attractive woman'. I think I might need to check that out. If you'd like to do so too then you can find it at www.wirelessweb.london. 
A great weekend, looking forward to a repeat next year.