Photo: The author sporting a gruesome makeup job at the 2014 Zombie Walk courtesy of one of Dragon Con's many creative-economy talents.
Dragon Con returns to Atlanta this weekend. Also surely returning is the misreporting of Dragon Con as mostly a photo-op freak show for clickbaits and B-rolls. Fact is, Dragon Con is also one of the Southeast’s biggest celebrations of local small businesses and the creative economy.
Don’t get me wrong—Dragon Con is indeed a freak show, and thank the deity of your preferred fantasy mythos for that. In post-Freaknik ATL, Dragon Con is one of the city’s precious few expressions of authentic, original, unconstrained weirdness.
Indeed, the weirdness is so weird, the subcultures so subcultural, that the local media misreports that part, too. But I’m glad they do. AJC readers probably couldn’t cope with, say, Lucy Lawless learning what a furry party is. And it’s frankly none of anybody’s business that an impressively imperious dominatrix once asked me to secure dungeon furniture upon which to do unspeakable things to six willing victims in her Dragon Con hotel room.
Yep, I’m one of those who see the show from the freak side. I was a shambling undead in last year’s Zombie Walk, horrifying Peachtree Street passers-by with the appallingly realistic bullet hole in my forehead and my faceful of blood spatter. I grappled with a younger, better-fed version of Rick Grimes, who gamely hit me with a riot shield while protesting that a post-Romero zombie should not be alive after a headshot.
That movie-quality makeup was not my doing. It was applied by convention-hired professional artists. As one of them glued the latex bullet hole to my face, she told me how she moved to metro Atlanta from D.C. specifically to get work in our burgeoning film industry. You know, that business big enough to lure nine-digit tax breaks and give Tyler Perry a friggin’ Army fort.
Now, there is some business-oriented coverage of Dragon Con. But most stories treat it like a geeked-out insurance convention or a Star Wars-themed version of the RedState Gathering paying homage to a fictional, rather than the actual, Empire. You’ll read about total number of visitors and some suitably puffy “economic impact” figure that somebody dreams up, all wrapped in mainstream media’s odd air of dutiful awe mingled with vague condescension. You’ll hear threatening traffic reports and eventually see more parade photos than you can shake a lightsaber at.
But back inside the hotels, deep in the David Bowie-style labyrinth of over-air-conditioned corridors with beige walls and psychedelic carpet where few journalists dare to quest, the real business is being done.
At my first Dragon Con in 2013, a group of folks asked if I wanted to play a card game with them. The game was called Larceny and it was a lot of simple-but-clever fun. Its purveyors turned out to be the staff of a tiny company up in Norcross called Waning Gibbous Games. They went on to fund Larceny via Kickstarter and got it sold around the country, including on Amazon. That’s a nice little small-biz story—one of hundreds that were never told.
The convention’s many panel discussions, lectures and marketplaces aren’t just a chance to spot celebrities and gather souvenirs. They’re chances to meet and learn from successful entrepreneurs of the creative economy.
The examples are endless. At one Dragon Con, I spent a long while talking one-on-one with a top fantasy artist about the cutthroat business of painting monsters for Dungeons & Dragons. I got to hear Lord British, creator of the pioneering video game Ultima, deliver expert advice on artistic collaboration and product-marketing.
And, after a friend’s costume-ordering disaster, I learned a little something about the underworld of frauds and moneygrubbers who put the “con” in fantasy conventions like they do everyplace else.
I don’t go to Dragon Con for business, but there’s business when I go to Dragon Con—just like there’s business when you go to the BeltLine or L5P Halloween or the Atlanta Civil Rights Tour or a publicly funded stadium. It’s a convention for fans of alternative worlds, but also of the people who create those worlds; which is to say, for fans of inventors, hustlers, freelancers, alt-tycoons and unsung grunt-workers.
Reporting Dragon Con as a parade and a ticket-sales figure is akin to reporting metro Atlanta’s economy as the Coca-Cola museum and the annual flights at Hartsfield-Jackson. It’s five hotels packed with enough free creative-economy advice to fill a paper’s business section. But for most media, that truth is hidden in plain sight, because Dragon Con is all about the best kind of business—the kind that looks like fun.