Shanghai Just Held Its Second Comic Con — So How Did Figurines Become the Biggest Draw?

The organizers inherited some of New York Comic Con's pedigree, but there is still plenty they meant to do and couldn't.

XM Studios came to Shanghai Comic Con (SHCC) for the first time this year. The Singapore-based figurine maker had one of the largest booths at the show. It filled the space with more than 30 figurines at 1:4 scale, grouped in threes on platforms set at chest height, so fans could study every detail without stooping or craning their necks.

Most of the figurines at the 2016 Shanghai Comic Con were superheroes from Marvel or DC Comics. Superman, Batman, Iron Man, Captain America — just about every name you could think of was there. Fans were unexpectedly eager, too: they queued up at the checkout counters until the line sealed off the aisle along one side of the booth.

DAMTOYS, near the hall entrance and not far from XM Studios, was another figurine seller. Its flagship product, Gul'dan from Warcraft, faced the entrance head-on and caught nearly everyone's eye. In another direction, IA Trendy Toy Elements was also selling figurines, mostly from the Transformers line and Iron Man, with a few other superheroes mixed in.

In fact, on the first floor of the Shanghai Comic Con hall, five booths in a row on the left belonged to figurine makers, and two or three on the right sold figurines as their main product.

Figurines were the biggest selling point of this year's Shanghai Comic Con.

But a comic con is never as simple as a figurine bazaar. Seasoned attendees know that variety is what pulls people in. An endless stream of new things is what excites fans; next to that, figurines are merely merchandise to be consumed. At most they show how far the figurine business has come.

Dahua, who came to Shanghai Comic Con for the first time this year, told QDaily that "the first floor felt a bit empty." When most of a hall is taken up by the same kind of figurines, it is hard to feel you are at a rich, varied show.

Some fans also had questions about the celebrity guests. At a session near the end of the con where the organizers took questions from fans, one young woman asked them why this year's guests — Amy Acker of Person of Interest, Billy Boyd of The Lord of the Rings, Nathan Fillion of Firefly, and Robert Knepper of Prison Break — seemed less starry than last year's film and TV lineup.

Ge U, a young woman dressed as Deadpool in a maid outfit, paid 400 yuan for a ticket to be photographed with Amy Acker. She had a few complaints about how it went. As she saw it, the organizers had not managed the celebrity signing before hers well, which left her waiting several hours for her turn to get Amy Acker's autograph.

The gaming area added this year was not much livelier. On one side, a few dozen people scattered around to watch the King of Fighters tournament; on the other, at the indie-game showcase, several demo booths had emptied out by the second morning. Coconut Island Games brought four indie titles to the show, and Duoduo, who ran the booth, would say only that demo traffic "basically met expectations."

Reed Exhibitions, which organizes Shanghai Comic Con, has run New York Comic Con since 2006. That show is now the largest comic con in the world, drawing more than 170,000 visitors a year. Measuring a second-year Shanghai Comic Con against a New York Comic Con with a decade behind it is hardly fair, but the comparison does show that Shanghai's version has not yet come into its own.

In the United States, the main attraction at New York Comic Con and San Diego Comic-Con is still film and television. The newest and hottest movies and shows all turn up. This year's New York Comic Con had The Walking Dead, Westworld, and Stranger Things. Last year's San Diego Comic-Con gathered Star Wars, Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad, and Deadpool.

These events are also a stage for independent comic artists and designers. A Shanghai Comic Con staff member told QDaily that New York Comic Con gives them an entire hall, and that several thousand independent artists and designers apply to exhibit each year. Games are another headline act — Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Ubisoft, and Capcom all build booths at New York Comic Con.

None of that showed up in Shanghai.

The organizers admit that some of the problems are their own doing. On the long wait Ge U ran into for Amy Acker's autograph, Chen Qian, the project manager for Shanghai Comic Con, said: "We expected Amy to be popular, but not this popular. If every fan lingers another second or two, that's enough to cause problems."

Chen Qian was sorry about the games as well: the esports portion "can't really be called a success." A wall the organizers had built this year to tell the history of a few classic games faced a corner of the hall and drew little notice, which he called "a bit of a shame."

On other questions he sounded more resigned. Asked why there were so few independent toy designers, and why most of the toys on show were superhero figurines, he told QDaily that without a heavy push behind the intellectual property it is hard to create demand for the related products: "In the licensing business, toys are the biggest and most profitable category."

Jason Freeny was one of the independent toy designers who did come. The 46-year-old American is known for his "anatomy" toys — the images that circulate online of Hello Kitty, Mickey Mouse, and Lego minifigures rendered half in normal form and half as skeleton are his work.

Over the two days of the con, Jason Freeny spent hours at a table about the size of a school desk, signing. Traffic was decent. Celine, who helped run the stand, said that she and a colleague, one selling and one taking payment, could barely keep up.

Freeny still has his own view of the place. "The creative part that designer toys show off is the most exciting part of a comic con — at least that's true for New York Comic Con," he told QDaily. "If you walk into that section, you can barely move, there are so many people. As a comic con, I don't think Shanghai is there yet."

Toys are not the only category with this problem; the artist alley on the second floor has it too. At New York Comic Con several thousand independent artists compete for a spot. In Shanghai, a con staff member said, many of the booths were given away for nothing. A shortage of creativity looks like a major problem for Shanghai Comic Con.

But this is not something Reed Exhibitions can fix by itself. Jason Freeny thinks it has to do with local taste: people here have not yet formed the habit of buying work by independent designers.

Shituzi, whose webcomic A Dog went viral last year, takes a similar view. He lived in the United States and attended three New York Comic Cons, from 2011 to 2013, running his own booth: "Americans have a stronger habit of spending — you can price a poster at 50 dollars. That's just not realistic in China, so by comparison the manufacturers sell more."

"Over the past decade or so I've seen plenty of independent designer toy brands… but very few have stuck it out," Chen Qian said. "It may be that Chinese consumers' spending power and spending habits still haven't reached the point where those brands can reach a large audience."

Behind the missing habit lies a weak Chinese animation and comics market.

Up to a point, this may be a matter of creativity. Without good content there is little reason for consumers to pay. But that is probably not the main reason: a fair amount of solid work has already appeared on Weibo and on the various animation and comics platforms. As Jason Freeny put it, "China doesn't lack creativity, it just needs to be drawn out."

Drawing it out means building a complete system inside the animation and comics business — a chain that runs from creation to distribution to marketing. Marvel's superheroes did not catch on in China through Marvel's comic artists alone; Disney's marketing and development deserve much of the credit.

Seen that way, however many independent designers and comic artists turn up at Shanghai Comic Con, the number is set by the state of China's animation and comics market. The industry is unhealthy, creativity gets held down, and so the artists Shanghai Comic Con can bring in are few.

Turn it around, though, and Shanghai Comic Con may be an opening for those designers and artists — the people who come to a con are already the biggest spenders in China's animation and comics business.

Maotang Taigu Studio is an eight-person animation studio that has built cartoon characters around a shiba inu and a cat. It has released no animation or comics, and has just over 4,000 followers on Weibo.

The studio rented a small booth at Shanghai Comic Con to sell merchandise. Both days they stayed busy, with a steady stream of people paying for phone cases, T-shirts, postcards, figurines, and other products. They got a great deal out of the show — and for exactly that reason, our interview with the studio's head could not be finished.

What they gained went beyond the attention of ordinary shoppers. In the little time we had, the head of Maotang Taigu Studio told QDaily that a design director from Disney had handed them a business card and said there might be a chance to work together later on. Since Disney has begun producing its own animation in China, bringing in Maotang Taigu Studio for some outsourced work is not out of the question.

Images from: Maotang Taigu Studio's Weibo

That is a little unexpected, because Shanghai Comic Con looks like an event built entirely for fans — the celebrity signings and photo ops, the figurine and toy sales, the cosplay contest all say so.

And when an event meant purely for fans starts producing something that looks more like a business-to-business deal, as with Maotang Taigu Studio and Disney, it suggests that China's weak animation and comics industry is showing a different kind of life.

ART+ is a company that does early world-building design for animation. It sent staff around the booths to talk with the designers and comic artists exhibiting there, and Maotang Taigu Studio was one of the studios it had in mind.

It also took a booth of its own on the first floor, showing mainly the world-building it did for Jiuzhou《九州》— the look of Kuafu, weapons for the Feather Clan and the Heluo, the drinking vessels used in Jiuzhou, and so on — in the hope of winning ART+ more attention and recognition.

The strategy paid off. Mr. Zhang, who heads ART+'s publicity department, told QDaily that beyond ordinary fans, people looking to acquire IP licenses sought him out, and investors raised the possibility of putting money in.

Even some film and television visual-effects companies approached Chen Qian asking to exhibit, because they saw opportunities at the con. Ma Bo is publicity manager at Shengyue International, which has done effects for films including Mojin: The Lost Legend and The Monkey King 2. At this Shanghai Comic Con the company showed lifelike animal models — a tiger, a wolf, a horse.

Ma Bo said they came hoping for more contact with the animation and comics business. Her example: Shengyue International's effects work also covers costumes, makeup, and props, so it could make some cosplay costumes. She added that several theme-park companies had found them at the con, and there might be a chance to work together in the future.

Chen Qian did not find any of this surprising: "Shanghai Comic Con is a business-to-consumer event, but we don't rule out plenty of business opportunities coming out of the platform."

Another staff member on the organizing side argues that brokering deals between businesses is part of what a comic con is for. San Diego Comic-Con, the ancestor of them all, began as a place for comic artists and fans to meet, and many new ideas were born there. You could say comic cons are where a lot of comics come from.

Chen Qian also pointed out that Shanghai Comic Con is only in its second year and is still being nurtured — not yet at the point where it can sell professional-tier tickets to people in the industry.

From that angle, what Shanghai Comic Con most needs to do is improve the experience for ordinary fans. Reed Exhibitions knows this perfectly well. On the afternoon of the last day it held a gripe session, at which the three people who plan the con turned up to hear fans out and answer them.

One fan asked why there were so few Japanese guests. Chen Qian's answer: in China plenty of new anime seasons may air, but the manga itself often cannot be bought. "When the commercial interests line up that badly, it becomes very hard to invite the artists."

To get around the problem, they aimed more of their invitations at artists established enough to attend in a personal capacity — Yoichi Takahashi, who draws Captain Tsubasa, for instance. That created a new problem: because Takahashi came as a private individual, Tsubasa Ozora, the classic character, could not appear anywhere on the booth. That was a letdown too.

Reed Exhibitions has room to improve on its own account. So far there are too few well-known brands at Shanghai Comic Con; companies that ought to have been there — Disney, Warner Bros., DreamWorks, U17, Tencent Animation & Comics — were all absent.

QDaily learned from one licensor that it did not set up a booth of its own because Shanghai Comic Con is still small and does not carry enough weight. Over two days the con drew just over 14,000 visitors. ChinaJoy, a four-day games expo, drew more than 320,000 in 2016.

Still, Shanghai Comic Con has only been in China for two years, and the team behind it comes out of New York Comic Con, so there is no need to worry that they don't know what a good comic con looks like. What they need is time to grow. And they need to wait — for China's weak animation and comics industry to mature.

(Unless otherwise noted, all images in this article come from the organizer or were taken on-site by QDaily.)