The Memorial Day weekend Space City Comic Con offers a valuable lesson on how not to run a Con.
The Con promised guests a special reunion of the Sons of Anarchy cast, including special VIP experiences for fans, but in the end, it didn't deliver, leaving fans and many of its guests angry and disappointed.
The Con sold hundreds of VIP tickets, with fans traveling from all over the country to get photos and autographs, as well as attend a reunion panel with the Sons of Anarchy cast. However, things started spinning out of control when the cast members — including Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman, Kim Coates, Mark Boone, Jr. and Tommy Flanagan — arrived in Houston for the event.
The cast arrived at the hotel with a credit card provided to them by the Con's promoter. However, when they went to check in, the hotel wouldn't accept the credit card and requested cash. The Sons of Anarchy guests took their checks from the convention to a bank to cash them, but the bank informed them that those checks were from a closed account. The promoter ended up calling the police on the actors after they showed up at his office to demand payment.
However, this wasn't the only issue with the convention. Because the cast didn't get paid, there was no Sons of Anarchy panel, as was promised. Fans who spent money on pre-purchased and VIP tickets didn't get the experiences for which they paid. Granted, the Sons of Anarchy cast still went and met fans and did photos and autographs, but because of the broken contract with the promoter, they couldn't accept pre-purchased tickets, so many fans ended up running to the convention's ATM machines just to have access to something for which they had already paid.
As if those events weren't bad enough, though, the snowball quickly grew bigger. Many Con volunteers bailed, citing not just the issue with the Sons of Anarchy cast, but also with the convention's poor organization and lack of communication. The staff that remained mostly proved unhelpful to fans because of those problems. One such volunteer was Shelley Montrose.
"This will be the last Saturday/Sunday that I volunteer at any Comic Convention," she wrote. "I was shouted at more in the six hours that I volunteered on Saturday than I was in the entire year last year. Friday was amazing and Saturday in my last two minutes there HPD had to intervene as a grown man came into my face and threatened to 'choke me to death, rape me, and burn me like on YouTube.'"
Reports now suggest that the Con promoter is now issuing some refunds to those who pre-purchased tickets.
