Chris DeMoulin

INTERVIEW BY GALAXY INTRO BY ETHAN BREHM You listen to Chris DeMoulin, the head honcho

of Los Angeles Comic Con, speak about this massive undertaking each year in Downtown LA and you can tell that there’s nobody better suited for his job. The CEO has been helping build up the convention since 2012, during the show’s second annual event, and each and every year he and his team have continued to evolve LACC while maintaining its roots. Chris has been working in the trade show industry for around 20 years, and event planning for even longer, and knows what it takes to run one of these colossal events smoothly, but also totally grasps what fans want out of the experience, because he’s a fan himself.

The mantra over at LA Comic Con is, “for fans, by fans,” and Chris lives by that mission whole-heartedly. Growing up a collector of comic books and a Star Trek devotee, Chris never dreamed that he’d one day inherit and help grow the biggest convention in the pop culture mecca of the world. LACC represents Los Angeles, and vice versa. ”We want to reflect the eclecticism of LA in the show, because LA is a sort of smash-up of every cultural influence in the world,” remarks the CEO of the importance of maintaining that homegrown identity. It’s what separates this convention from all the rest, fusing mainstream fandoms with the spirit and local culture of Los Angeles itself.

After a year without conventions across the globe, LA Comic Con is back and better than ever. Chris discusses their recent expansion to take over the entire Downtown Convention Center, which includes an additional hall specifically for anime and gaming. The show also features 800 vendors and exhibitors—their most ever—who are all thrilled to finally be able to sell in person again. But with COVID still being at large in our world, LACC has taken the proper precautions while still widening its scope to decrease crowd density as well.

Chris talks, almost poetically, about his love for conventions. They’re not only his career, but a fervent passion. “Trade shows are sorta magical, right?” he says, referring to the experience of taking an empty convention center and briefly turning it into a bustling metropolis packed with people of similar interests for only three days. It’s like a dream, and then you blink and it’s gone. Well, Los Angeles Comic Con is a city within a city; a fandom mecca in its own right.

But staying true to his credo, the CEO concerns himself less with attendance numbers than he does with what’s best for the fans: “I hope everyone who comes has a great experience, but whether it’s 100,000 or 160,000 people, it doesn’t matter. I just hope everyone who comes feels like they got to do what they wanted, has a smile on their face when they leave, and looks forward to coming back next year.”

SPOILER: How did LA Comic Con start? CHRIS DeMOULIN: The show was founded by a sister and two brothers back in 2010. For the second year in a row, they couldn’t get tickets to a certain comic convention that’s south of here [laughs]. So, in their frustration they thought, “Heck, we’ll just throw our own show!” They reached out to friends and have a lot of connections within the community. And their first show was in November of 2011, called Comikaze. I was fortunate enough to get introduced to them the following year because I was in the trade show business and their largest investor was an old friend of mine.

SPOILER: What made you get into the convention business?

interview interview

Chris DeMoulin:George Chinsee/(cover image): Chris DeMoulin:Footwear News

CHRIS DeMOULIN: I moved to LA almost 30 years ago to work for Disney, where I worked in their licensing group. And I got very involved in entertainment. But I had little kids, so after about 10 years of working at Disney, I decided to spend some more time with them. I never thought about the trade show business, but as a person who worked for Disney, I went to trade shows all the time. Trade shows are sorta magical, right? Because you take over this giant convention center, it’s a million square feet of space and it’s empty, and you essentially build a city so that all the people who care about something come together for three days. Sometimes you’re creating a marketplace, sometimes you’re creating an experience for fans. And they come and there’s this explosion of “wow.” And literally 24 hours later, it’s gone and it’s back to being an empty box.

I ran trade shows in the apparel industry, one called MAGIC, I ran the Licensing Expo. And when I met the founders for Comikaze, I thought, “This is great! I work with all the studios, but what the studios do eventually gets represented in stuff for the fans.” Comic Con is the final resting place for all that work. It was a great opportunity, not just to work with the studios on the business side, but also be able to bring the fans together and see the results of all that hard work.

SPOILER: The guests this year are amazing! Were some of them scheduled for 2020 or did you start from scratch for this year? CHRIS DeMOULIN: We’ve always been driven by the fact that this is a show for fans, by fans. And all of us who work on it are, ourselves, fans. And it’s a delightful responsibility to be able to think about who we would [want to see at the convention] as a fan. And we want to reflect the eclecticism of LA in the show, because LA is a sort of smash-up of every cultural influence in the world. So, we started building the talent base for the 2021 show when we were originally scheduled for September 2020. And now we’re finally getting to do the show. Zachary Levi

has been planning to be with us for two years. Frank Miller for a year and a half. Tom Kenny for a year. And some other people, like MingNa Wen, we just added in the last couple of months. So, it’s really been this sort of rolling process of trying to add new pieces to compliment who’s there. We try to cover all the bases of the fandoms because that’s what LA’s all about. And that was the impetus for us adding this whole extension into West Hall for anime and gaming and esports because that’s a big part of what’s growing in LA and in entertainment right now. The show should always reflect what the fans love at any given time. We’re also gonna have 800 vendors and exhibitors who haven’t been able to sell their stuff to fans in person in two years. That’s so exciting to us that they’re going to be able to see their fans again!

SPOILER: This year, LA Comic Con will feature a Nichelle Nichols Farewell event. What can we expect from that? CHRIS DeMOULIN: The folks who have done a number of these—they did James Doohan’s farewell a few years ago—they came to us and said that they had been hoping last year to do a farewell event for Nichelle. They had been working with her and her family, and Nichelle was 100% on board with what they were planning, but with COVID, they didn’t have a place to do it. And we said that we’re expanding to take over the whole Convention Center, because we wanted to do that anyway just to be able to space things out, and for people who aren’t entirely comfortable coming out in crowds yet—we figured if we were in a much bigger space, it would lower the crowd density. So, we said, “We’ll give you guys thirty-five or forty thousand square feet of space. Why don’t you just do it with us?”

Star Trek’s one of my fandoms. I’m a huge fan. We just thought it was a terrific opportunity to be part of a farewell for Nichelle and do it in a proper way. They have it really well thought out. They have 20 or 25 cast members from every single TV show that there’s been, and some movies. And they have some really cool props. So, we said, “We’re happy to give you a home for it. Just bring it here.”

I think “honor” is the right word. She’s had such an amazing career, and an impact on so many young women. For us to just be part of her last farewell, [it’s an honor]. And for her family and her team to really be part of planning it, that’s really important too.

SPOILER: I know Stan Lee is a big part of LA Comic Con’s lineage. What was his role before he passed [in 2018]? CHRIS DeMOULIN: Stan met the founders and actually came to the very first show. And he sensed that they were really creating a fancentric convention. It was actually a licensing agreement with him. We were involved with Stan and Stan’s company. And the show became “Stan Lee’s Comikaze Expo,” and then eventually “Stan Lee’s Comic Con.” And so we worked with Stan and his team. We would bring in a prop museum. We would figure out what panels Stan would want to join on the Main Stage and how much signing he wanted to do, and we would facilitate that, and would build the rest of the show around that.

For me, as a kid I grew up a huge comic collector in the suburbs of Rochester, New York. So, 50 years before I ever met him, I already worshipped the talent that he brought together and what he accomplished with those stories—such an important part of my life. And to come full circle years later and be able to work with him was such a magical, amazing thing. He was an unbelievable human being—incredibly caring and creative. He really was a force of nature. You met him and he did not disappoint.

For those couple of years that he was involved, we would bounce creative ideas off of him and he was always at the show all three days. He would call up his friends and ask them

to do things. One of the panels I’ll never forget, in 2013 or 2014, Todd McFarlane came to interview Stan on the Main Stage. And we’ve always put our Main Stage right in the middle of the show floor, because I don’t like that thing that happens at a lot of the other Cons, where in order to see the really cool stuff, you have to leave the convention and go wait in line for three hours. So, when the panel started and Todd and Stan started talking to each other, almost every single person in the Convention Center—it’s a big building, it’s 350,000 square feet— they all turned around and made their way towards the Main Stage. By the end, there were about 14,000 people watching them talk. And we have this picture from behind them on the stage: these two guys who are amazing creative forces interviewing each other, and then there’s thousands of fans in front of them listening and eating up every word. To me, that’s what the essence of LA Comic Con is all about, bringing creators together and then giving them the opportunity to talk about what they do in a way that the fans can experience firsthand.

SPOILER: What’s your favorite part of the convention? CHRIS DeMOULIN: One of my personal favorites is when we bring on voice casts from animated TV shows, because I have two kids— they’re 25 and 22 now—but when they were little, we spent hours and hours of wonderful time together watching animated shows. So, Tom Kenny’s a guest this year, and he came last time as well, and both my kids came because that’s SpongeBob. And we spent a lot of SpongeBob time together as a family [laughs]. Folks like him get a very warm reception. Regularly, we’ll have about six or eight thousand people at a panel where we have a reunion of a voice cast.

I’m also really thrilled that we have Sideshow Collectibles coming to our show for the very first time. They’re putting together a museumquality experience. And one of the things they’re going to have there is their life-size Grogu from The Mandalorian. And, of course, we have Giancarlo Esposito and MingNa Wen coming from the cast, so I’m hoping at some point we can get them over and have a photo op with Grogu.

And the other thing I’m really looking forward to is Gerard Way— I’m a big Umbrella Academy fan and he’s a brilliant creative—interviewing Frank Miller on the Main Stage. To me, that’s going to be the sort of next generation moment of that Todd McFarlane/Stan Lee interview.

As a fan, those are the three highlights that I’m looking forward to, but we also added this whole anime and gaming hall. So, we have a whole second Main Stage in the West Hall. And we’ve got over 40 voice actors coming in from some of the largest anime shows and video games out there—the whole casts are coming. In some instances, for the video games, we’re hoping to get some of the cast members into a pro-am competition where we load

the games on the Main Stage and they play against each other and do a little improv voice over of what’s going on on screen.

Also, a special thing Friday night, Laugh Factory is programming two hours of a comedy show on the Main Stage, so they’re going to bring in six or eight headliners and do a comedy show. I think it’ll be somewhat similar to what we did with Jack Black a couple years ago where he and Tenacious D took over the stage for an hour and a half and just entertained.

SPOILER: Any tips for attendees? CHRIS DeMOULIN: If you have younger kids, Sunday’s a great day to come because we’re doing a kids costume contest. On Sunday, kids 6 and under are free. They can get up on the stage and repurpose their Halloween costumes one more time [laughs].

If you’re a hardcore shopper or collector, Friday’s always a good shopping night because it doesn’t tend to be as crowded, and so you really have an opportunity to go around and see all the show exclusives. You can spend a little more quality time with the artists and talk with them about why they do what they do and their inspiration.

SPOILER: What is your wish for this year? CHRIS DeMOULIN: My wish for this year is that everyone comes and not only sees the things that they came to see, but they find something that reminds them of the shows that they loved as a kid that nobody else quite got. One of the things I love about this convention, and I think makes this convention different, is we try so hard to have such an eclectic mix of stuff. As a fan, we love the big stuff— we all love Avengers, we all love Star Wars—but we also have those little individual personal things that are so meaningful to us. And I hope people have the opportunity to have those moments as well. And that’s why we’ll have 120, 130 talent here, because we want people to have that opportunity to have that moment of discovery, that moment of wonder where something just resonates, something that was so important to them as a kid that they’ve carried it into adulthood.

About 30% of our attendees bring their kids, and I love that. I love that this is one generation sharing their love of these stories and these characters with the next generation. I’m not as focused about how many people come. I hope everyone who comes has a great experience, but whether it’s 100,000 or 160,000 people, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone who comes feels that joy of being together in a crowd of fellow fans again and feels good about the fact that we can finally get out and, with safety precautions, start to re-indulge in some of these wonderful activities with friends and like-minded folks out there. I just hope everyone who comes feels like they got to do what they wanted, has a smile on their face when they leave, and looks forward to coming back next year.

SPOILER: The website is also very easy to navigate. Was that something that you’ve worked hard on? CHRIS DeMOULIN: Yeah, I think we’ve really tried to learn a lot about making the website easier to use. One of my obsessions, having been a trade show person for ten years, running hundreds of shows with millions of people attending them, I think it’s super important that the organizer thinks through where all the possible bottlenecks are and solves for them before the first fan shows up. It’s just inexcusable to have to wait in line for an hour, hour and a half to get through something. I know there are going to be 20,000 people who wanna come in the first three hours on Saturday morning, so we need to develop the capacity to get those people in. We have 36 different entrances people can use, so they’ll be spread out. 15,000 of our tickets were mailed in advance this year, so they already have their badges, they don’t need to go through the third badge check. As

a fan, your time is precious. You’re paying good money to come here. And if you’re gonna be at the show for eight hours, you should be going around doing things you like for eight hours, not spending four or five of those hours in lines that don’t need to be there. We give as much attention to the logistics as we do to who the guests are that we should bring in.

SPOILER: If fans want to meet you during the weekend, where can they find you? CHRIS DeMOULIN: I’m everywhere. If anyone really wants to say hello, they can ask any of the security people. We have a lot of people with “Ask Me” shirts on. They’ll get on their walkie talkie and call me, and I’ll come over and say hi. Look, we do this because we’re fans. It’s really a true story that three siblings got frustrated that the convention they used to go to, they couldn’t get in anymore. And so, they wanted to create a convention that’s 100% fan-focused. And we keep that as our mantra—it’s at the center of everything we do. I always say, if there’s something you don’t like, tell me. If there’s something you love, tell your friends.

We have a new ticketing partner this year, called Tixr, so when people go to buy tickets, it’s through them. And Tixr has a rewards program. When you buy a ticket, you get a code. And if you give that code to your friend and they buy a ticket, then you get money back on your ticket. So, if you bring in 10 friends, your ticket will be free!

SPOILER: Where do you see the convention going in the future? CHRIS DeMOULIN: I think the convention should go where the fans want it to go. So this year, this expansion of talent and gaming and anime is an important expansion. Because we’re not walking away from anything we’ve been doing. All of the traditional Con stuff—the comics, the toys, the collectibles, the guests, the panels—we’re still doing all of that stuff, but we’re adding these other things because we’ve seen so much growth in fan interest in those areas. And the stories cross over. Avengers isn’t just a big movie, it’s a big video game. And you get terrific anime shows that become collectible lines and then they become video games. We’re going to really expand that [in the future] and we’re going to make an announcement at the show about continued expansion we’re going to do in that area. So, you’ll see LA Comic Con always trying to make sure that we represent the full spectrum of entertainment that really represents Los Angeles.

We’ll be throughout the entire Convention Center, and I can see us [in the future] having activities over at LA Live, really spreading out over that whole part of Downtown LA, and all of Downtown LA becoming a celebration of pop culture fandom on our weekend every year. There’s a lot of people in this city and a lot of fans of different things. I mean, we’re doing a crossover effort with the LA Kings this year. That’s the thing about LA: There’s all these different fandoms and we all live side by side, and we gotta find ways to celebrate together.