Heroes Con

This convention seems great if you sell comics. There are tons of attendees who come here explicitly to support both big and small comic artists, plus the panels are all catered toward that, which is fantastic.

I'm someone who normally sells at anime conventions, but my art consists of gaming, tabletop, comic, and overall "geeky" content. I traveled from out of state for the con and unfortunately it was not worth it. Artist Alley is situated on the outer edges of the room as far from the entrances as possible, in an L shape that partially borders the large centralized exhibitor section. Plus all of the Artist Alley tables are much smaller and look way shorter than the exhibitors' without any pipe and drape. While there are quite a few people here who like to support small artists, a majority of the traffic is in the exhibitor booths and only occasionally trickles to the outer edges where Artist Alley is. With as many Artist Alley tables as there are here, it really would have benefitted the artists to be put all in one section together, separate from the exhibitors. If we can't be in a different room from the exhibitors, at least have us all in one cohesive section instead of in a weird L shape. It really felt like an effort to push away small artists as much as possible.

Sunday has full hours which is different from other conventions I've attended; however sales were so poor overall that some artists packed up a day early. Personally I just barely broke even, but there were a significant number of artists who didn't even make back the table costs, let alone hotel/travel expenses. An Artist Alley table costed $348.56 with tax, definitely not worth it for the turnout and sales we got.

For those with cars, parking by the center costs $20-25 and the loading dock line is ridiculous, so I'd recommend finding meter parking nearby and wheeling merch in yourself to save time. The meters are two hours max parking and stop charging after 6 pm. For day long parking, there's options at half the cost only two blocks away.

TLDR; I think I would have really enjoyed this convention as an attendee since I love comics, but as a vendor in artist alley, I can only recommend it if you're local or you sell comics.

Not sure about the years pre-Covid, but heroes con 2022 artist alley was awful. Not sure most of the applicants OR the staff understand what an artist alley is supposed to be. If you’re anything other than a middle aged male comic book artist with the personality of a bucket of mud, don’t waste your money.

The artist alley was about 95% comic artists who were only trying to sell their extremely over priced signature to con-goers, and if you wanted to buy anything else, they immediately got pissy. And unless your table is right by the floor entrance, anyone looking for fan art or original art work is going to give up halfway through, because the room is massive. The fact that nearly every vendor was selling the exact same stuff (old comics and over priced anime and hero figures, of course) didn’t help. Honestly, probably not even worth it if you’re a local. The only good th big about this con is that the concessions were affordable. Otherwise, terrible.

A lot of sources for this convention had warned against it as a waste of money, but I didn't think it was as bad as they made it out to be. I DID cut table costs by splitting my table with a friend, and I made back the cost for travel, table, and prints. Although, I didn't make back the cost for the display. (That can be overlooked though I think because it was my first AA after several years so I needed to buy almost everything for my display. If you already have a full display on hand then you should have it easier.)

I managed to make about a third of my sales from commissions. Most of the people commissioning me had great references, or portfolios for the characters they wanted drawn. (Or the characters were popular enough to have easy to find references.) If you like taking commissions in con, it can be a great opportunity for that.
Our table was close to a wall on the outskirts of the room, and traffic came sporadically. But, it wasn't the worst thing because it gave us a chance to breathe and draw between bursts of sales.

I feel like the layout of the con needed a bit of work, but that was only because they had to fit so much in one room. The tables were also on the small side. It wouldn't be a problem if I was tabling on my own, but it got pretty crowded fitting two of us. Also they didn't have many accessible trash cans for those tabling. We had to take all our trash to the bathrooms.
I have Straight Talk as my phone provider, and my 4G was excellent the entire weekend in spite of the warnings about low signal, so we didn't have any problem making credit card sales.

All in all, I ended up feeling like a good experience for me. There were so many kind and interesting people to meet, and an amazing variety of restaurants and places to enjoy afterward! I haven't decided if I will try having a table here next year, but it is definitely a con I would try again when I'm more prepared!