My Experience At Planet Comicon KC

Last weekend I took the 3.5 hour trip (4+ with kids in the car) to Kansas City from St. Louis to check out Planet Comicon. As I wrote in my post last week about cracking my first slab for the event, I went with a few goals in mind.

#1 – I wanted to get some signatures. For the most part, I don’t do conventions. And when I do I rarely get signatures. That’s because I’m not really a signature collector. I think they’re fun but mainly if I am planning on eventually selling something. But I wanted to go through the process of getting signatures so when people ask me about it, I have experience to base advice or details off of.

#2 – I wanted to get those signatures on comics and witnessed by a CGC representative and then graded. The reason for this is the same as #1. I wanted to do it so I can say I did it.

#3 – I wanted to have a good time with my friends. Because… that’s the whole point of these.

I was only able to attend on Saturday, March 9th, so those were my only goals. Anymore and I’d be setting myself up for failure.

So how’d I do? And how was Planet Comicon KC? Let’s talk about it.

My Day At Planet Comicon 2024

9:45 A.M. I had press passes for myself and my friend who helps with the site from time to time. We picked up our passes 15 minutes before the convention doors opened to the public.

10:00 A.M. After going through the convention floor map for a few minutes we walked in with thousands of people cheering as the doors opened.

My first impressions? That place is MASSIVE. I’m not sure if it’s in the same location every year – I’d imagine it is though – but this year it was in Bartle Hall inside of the Kansas City Convention Center. A single enormous room with hundreds and hundreds of booths.

Like any good convention, there was a combination of interest groups showing off their cosplay setups and displays, booths selling comics, original art, cosplay accessories, t-shirts, etc. I won’t go into all of the details because if you’ve been to a big comicon type event, you know that’s all pretty standard. However, I was happy to see a lot of comic shops actually selling comics. The last event I went to was light on the comic front.

My point is this, the venue was good. Well organized and full of the stuff you’d expect to see at a comic/nerd culture event. My buddy Jon at Altered State Comics put together a little video of us entering the convention floor if you want to check it out.

And here are some pics from me. I wish I had taken more but there was a lot happening all at once.

10:45 A.M. Ready to get some signatures! I headed over to the One Stop Comic Shop booth who were the CGC Signature Series Witness Facilitators for the event to get a witness for an Ian Mcdiarmid (Emperor Palpatine) comic signature.

For those that don’t know, to get a signed comic graded by CGC you have to have an official witness watch the person sign your comic to make sure it actually happened. Then they take the comic and send it off to CGC themselves to get graded. This way CGC knows the signature isn’t forged.

Since CGC doesn’t get a booth at every event, they partner with different comic retailers and groups – vet them – and make them official witness facilitators. For this event that group was One Stop Comic Shop.

After going to their booth to get a witness, they told me that they would only go with VIPs since the wait the day before for non VIP members was 3 hours the day before. So we decided to run over to the line immediately to get a spot and then as we got closer to the end of the line – we would run over to the One Stop Comic Shop booth to get a witness so they didn’t have to wait the entire time.

10:50 A.M. In line for Ian Mcdiarmid.

11:30 A.M. I had my friend save my spot and I ran to go get my witness since I felt we were getting pretty close.

12:00 P.M. Ian had to take a break to do photo ops with the VIPs for an hour or so and we were told to come back at 1:05 PM for his next round of signatures. They handed me a post-it note with my place in line (#29) and we walked away with our heads down.

12:15 P.M. The good news is that it gave me time to head over to get Nika Futterman’s signature. She is the voice actress who played Asajj Ventress in the Clone Wars and who will reprise her role of Asajj Ventress in season 3 of The Bad Batch.

Side Note: Nika Futterman also told me to expect more of Asajj in the future. And that her appearance in The Bad Batch is just an appetizer for what’s to come. Based on the comments to my tweet about it, she said to a lot of people. More on that in a different post.

The good news is that the witness who was with me in the Ian Mcdiarmid line was still with me. So he just walked on over to Nika’s MUCH more manageable line to witness the signatures.

There I met Nika. Paid her $40 per signature, talked to her for a bit, wished her well, headed off with my new best friend CGC witness to send the books off for grading.

Here’s how that works:

• The witness takes the comic from you and you walk through the convention floor to their booth.
• You then log into your CGC account on tablets at the booth and create a submission order. There’s an option to select the facilitator and event. It’s $35-$40 dollars per book to submit to CGC.
• After you pay for your order inside your CGC account, One Stop Comic Shop fills out a paper receipt for you and collects their fees. It’s $20 total. $10 for the witness and $10 for sending it to CGC for you.
• Then you wave goodbye to each other and move on.

12:45 P.M. I spent 30 minutes walking around digging through long boxes, bookshelves, etc. with my friends.

1:05 P.M. I headed back to the One Stop Comic Shop booth and got another witness.

1:15 P.M. Back in Ian Mcdiarmid’s line. Here’s where it was frustrating. There was another wave of probably 40 VIPs now in front of us. The Planet Comicon staff did their best to mix in some “general admission” guests.

3:00 P.M. I did it! I got the signature.

3:10 P.M. From there I went back to the One Stop Comic Shop booth, repeated the process of getting my books submitted, and finally was able to walk around again.

3:30 P.M. I stayed for another 30 minutes or so and then headed out to get some food and meet back up with my wife and kids who were having their own day at the Zoo.

Final Thoughts

The convention?
Great. 100% worth going to. Lots of vendors. Tons of people. Solid buzz in the room all day. It seemed to be well enough organized. No real complaints there.

Getting signatures witnessed?
Not for me. It took up nearly my entire day to get signatures from Ian Mcdiarmid and Nika Futterman. The most fun I had at the event was when I first walked in and in between waiting in line. But that was only a small part of my day.

I waited in line or anticipated waiting in line for all but 1-2 hours of my time at the event. But apparently, that’s just the way it is. This is no knock on the event staff, the celebrities, or the facilitators.

Just know that if you want to get signatures that it will be the main thing you do. You have to really WANT to do it but since I was doing it all just for the experience… it was a grind.

But as someone who has more fun people watching, looking at merch, talking to people at vendor booths, and buying stupid things I don’t need

I also wanted to say a huge THANK YOU to Planet Comicon KC for having me out for the event. It was great to spend some time in Kansas City and, while I didn’t love getting signatures, I’m very glad I went and it was a well run event.

For light and life!

Grand Admiral Frik