Nick Marino is a podcaster, musician, cartoonist, and writer living in Long Beach, CA. He’s the managing editor of AudioShocker and co-hosts A Podcast with Kaylie and Nick, Everything Blows, Sequential Underground, and more.

If you hate reading and just wanna look at the pictures, then I’ll sum it up for you with one quick sentence: The 2013 Long Beach Comic & Horror Con was good! Okay, now you’re free to skim the rest of this blog post and peruse the photos.

But if you actually care about why it was good, I’ll be glad to tell you!

First off, I was greeted by a program book with a cover by my buddy V Ken Marion (who joined us a couple of weeks ago to talk about All New Soulfire #1). I’m not gonna lie — having that personal connection really kicked things off right.

Though I’ve been living in Long Beach for almost a year now, I haven’t established a link with the local comics community. Part of that’s because I’m sorta sick of the comic shop scene right now. Part of that is because I’m a bit burned out on the notion of a comics scene in general after spending over a decade embroiled in a love-hate relationship with Pittsburgh’s community of fans and creators.

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So I’ve been living a largely scene-free life down here in the coastal city that’s sort of like Los Angeles’s shorter and scrappier (and potentially hairier and more tatted up)cousin. As press, I did attend the Long Beach Comic Expo in the spring — which is a smaller and supposedly more indie-focused show — but otherwise my link between Long Beach and comics has been nil.

But ya know what? The Long Beach Comic & Horror Con felt pretty indie too! Artist Alley was an egalitarian mix of known and unknown. It smashed all kinds of artists together, with seemingly no preferential placement that pushed lesser-knowns to the back of the con floor like plenty of other shows love to do.  

And it’s that particular quality which starkly distinguishes LBCHC from Anaheim’s WonderCon, which I attended for the first time last spring. While that show had a lot of similarities to LBCHC, one thing it did differently was make the greener creators look shunned by placing them at the extreme edge of the show.  

Here in Long Beach, however, everybody was jammed together into a comfortably snug lower level hall with an intelligent layout that made the artists look like the real stars of the show.

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