Andrew Reneau
Comic-Con 2024 was held from Sept. 6-8 at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock, Arkansas. The three-day event attracted a cohort of attendees dressed as their favorite anime, TV show and movie characters, and a slew of vendors and celebrities.
The event saw light participation from Harding students.
Sophomore Jaden Lanham attended Comic-Con in 2022 when it was held online, and plans to attend in person when he can. He has collected comics for three years; his favorite place to shop is a comic store named the Movie Trading Company.
“They started selling these $1-5 comic books, depending on what type of comic book it is, and I would always go in there and buy as many as I possibly could until I was flat broke,” Lanham said.
Sophomore Ashton Brophy dressed up as a Ladybug from the TV show Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir.
“I have a running joke with friends in my youth group about the Miraculous Ladybug,” Brophy said. “It sounded fun.”
Comic-Con 2024 was Brophy’s first time to attend a Comic-Con event. She wanted to start cosplaying out of admiration after watching other people cosplay on Instagram. Brophy describes Comic-Con as a mixture of weird and fun.
“It’s weird, but everybody is just as weird as you are, so it’s fun,” Brophy said. “You get to be weird because everybody is being weird.”
Comic-Con is not restricted to college-aged attendees; a woman who referred to herself as “Professor Sprout,” a character from Harry Potter, said her family and friends habitually dressed up and attended together.
“It’s my daughter’s fault,” Sprout said. “She’s an adult now, but we’ve been doing this since she was 14 or 15. She built her own costumes, I helped her. I just started getting into it with her.”
The event also attracted vendors selling items such as comic books, swords and costumes. Nat Rodgers set up a stand promoting her shop Cuteness and Vexation. She said she combined her two loves of animals and snarky humor to create a brand of posters displaying animals saying vexing quips.
“I am a very geeky person at heart,” Rodgers said. “I actually started out doing fan works like fan art and fantasy and everything like that. I started doing the animals as kind of a one-off and they took over.
Rodgers said she prefers selling art at events rather than online because of the rise in AI-generated art.
“I don’t believe AI should be used to do the things that give us joy,” Rodgers said. “It also takes direct jobs from artists, from editors, from art directors. It cheapens the quality of art in general.”
