Phoenix Comicon : An Interview With The Organizers

FEZ : The volunteers and everyone have been really great with us. I don’t want to take anything away from the volunteers because I think they’ve done an amazing job and they’ve made us feel very welcome but I think there have been a couple of times where the volunteers looked at us and thought “I don’t really know what to do with these guys”.

Jillian : We were just talking about this last night at dinner and we would really like to do some things with the volunteer program because there is a big difference between running a convention with 7,000 attendees and running what is happening here right now, from a volunteer perspective. You have to change it to a business structure. We’ve been working on individual departments through the years and getting things smoothed out and set up the way they need to be and I think volunteers will be a really big focus this year so that everyone knows what’s going on.

 

The lines were long but were moving very quickly.

 

FEZ : So you said you were projected to have about 30,000 attendees this year?

Jillian : The original projection was 23,000. It got upgraded to somewhere between 25 to 28,000 but we don’t know the actual number yet.

FEZ : Yesterday, you said, was about 14,500?

Jillian : I know we sold 15,000 tickets on Thursday night and Friday combined. Those were at the door. We’d already sold 9,000 pre-order tickets through will-call so we already have 24,000 before today started.

FEZ : And the lines down here are-

Jillian : We had to open another hall to handle the lines.

FEZ : Wow…30,000 shouldn’t be a stretch.

[ED : To be clear here, there’s a bit of a jump between the attendee count and the end of the conversation. During that time we talked about numbers and kicked around some ideas. I could post it but it’s so jumbled and there’s so much flying around between us and them that it wouldn’t really make much sense]

FEZ : Well, Jillian, we thank you for your time. You’ve been very gracious and patient with us. We’ll let you get back to work now.

Jillian : Thanks, guys!