Geeky gathering: 2016 Phoenix Comicon welcomes record crowd
Jun 19, 2016, 6:07 AM | Updated: 10:11 am
PHOENIX — More than 100,000 people poured through the door’s of Phoenix Comicon, setting a new record for the event, organizers announced this week.
In a Facebook post, Convention Director Matt Solberg said 106,096 people attended Phoenix Comicon, a record for the event.
But if it seemed there were a lot more people swarming the Phoenix Convention Center than that, you wouldn’t be wrong: The attendance number does not include “Convention Center staff, personnel, security, police, or EMTs who are hired to support the show.”
The figure is also based on how many passes the event sold. In essence, it counts each unique, individual person who purchased a ticket and attended the event.
If the count were changed to simply how many people attended the four-day event — meaning attendees who attended multiple days were counted twice — the count would double to 216,219.
Solberg estimated that some of the largest Comicon events in the nation — such as the one held each summer in San Diego — welcome between 300,000 and 400,000 individual fans.
Of course, those fans typically don’t contend with record-setting heat.
During the weekend of Comicon, the Phoenix area broke four consecutive daily heat records, with the highest temperature — 115 degrees — coming on Saturday, which is typically the busiest day at Comicon.
