Seven years…
That’s how long it’d been since I last walked into the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois. The last time I made that drive, the show wasn’t even called Fan Expo. It was Wizard World Chicago. Different name, different ownership, different feeling entirely.
I want to be fair about that gap, because seven years is a real long time. People change. Companies change. Hell, I have a knee that clicks now.
But I walked out of Fan Expo Chicago 2026 with something stuck in my chest that I couldn’t shake the whole ride back up I-94, and I have been thinking on it ever since.
My weekend at Fan Expo felt more like a cash grab trade show, than a convention put on FOR the fans.
Let’s Start With The Guest List, Because It Was CRAZY
I’m not going to sit here and pretend the guest list wasn’t absurd, because it was.
William Shatner. Kurt Russell, in what the show promoted as his first-ever convention appearance. Danny Glover. Mel Gibson. The cast of The Boys. A Supernatural reunion. Road Dogg and Billy Gunn. Mr. T. Frank Miller doing exclusives. Ron Perlman. John Carpenter. Christopher Lloyd. The hobbits, back together for the 25th anniversary of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And an anime voice actor roster deep enough that you could throw a rock across the room and hit somebody who has been in a Shonen Jump adaptation.
That is not a guest list. That’s somebody at Fan Expo corporate looking at a budget and saying “what if we just booked EVERYBODY.”
I’ve been covering conventions with press credentials for a decade now. Motor City, San Diego, Dream Con, this one. I’ve seen some guest lists. Name for name, this was the strongest lineup I’ve seen assembled at a regional show in years.
So credit where it is due. Fan Expo cooked. They went and got the guys.
BUT…Here is my problem.
It Came At A Cost
A convention center is a building. Buildings have walls. Walls do not move because you booked Kurt Russell.
So when you add that many celebrity guests into a fixed footprint, the square footage has to come from somewhere. Follow that logic, and the entire weekend explains itself.
In the Wizard World era, there was an upstairs. A whole upstairs, dedicated to gaming and attractions and things you could actually do. There were offsite events. There was always some experience the weekend was built around, some reason to be in that building that didn’t involve standing in a line with your card out.
That upstairs is gone. What lives there now is more autograph space.
Gaming got relocated to a room. Not a hall, a ROOM, with a handful of free to play arcade cabinets in it.
I love an arcade cabinet. I will play a free Ms. Pac-Man with my whole chest. But you cannot look me in my face and call that a gaming section at a show that markets itself as a gaming event. That’s a break room. That’s what they put in the back of a Buffalo Wild Wings so the kids stay quiet while their dad slams a beer and screams at his favorite team.
No Peaks, No Valleys
The vendor hall is where it clicked for me.
There were no anchor vendors. No major publisher presence, no toy company setting up something you would take a picture in front of, nothing that functioned as a landmark. What you got instead was a lot of small vendors packed shoulder to shoulder, with a solid majority of them selling variations of the same product.
Anime print. Anime print. Bootleg tee. Anime print. Resin figure. Anime print. Guy selling knives, because there is ALWAYS a guy selling knives. Anime print.
I want to be careful here, because those small vendors are the lifeblood of a show like this and I’m not clowning anybody for showing up and grinding. That’s the hustle, and I respect it every time.
But when a floor has no peaks and no valleys, when every aisle offers you the same three things, people stop shopping and interacting and just kind of mindlessly wander. A room full of people wandering instead of stopping and interacting is a room where nobody is having fun.
Artist Alley took the worst of it
By a mile.
Artist Alley is supposed to be the soul of a comic convention. It is where you meet the person who actually drew the book. It’s where a fifteen year old with a sketchbook gets told by a working professional that the anatomy is off but the energy is right, and that kid goes home and draws for the next twenty years because of it. That is the origin story of half this industry.
They crushed it into a corner.
The aisles were tight enough that getting through them became a physical task. I’m not a small dude, so grade my perspective accordingly, but I watched people who have clearly been to a hundred of these get that specific look on their face. The one that says “I need to be outside for a minute.”
That’s not a layout problem. That’s a priority problem. Somebody sat in a room, looked at a floor plan, and decided Artist Alley was the line item with the most give in it.
They chose, and they chose wrong.
The parts that worked
The panels were solid, and I mean that sincerely.
Sam Raimi was hilarious. His panel started late, which is a convention tradition older than most of us, and he could have easily done the twenty minute cash and dash. He didn’t. He stayed, he gave real answers, and he was candid in a way you rarely get from someone who has been in the business long enough to know exactly which stories cause problems. He was there to talk to people, and the room felt it.
The Boys panel hit differently. That show wrapped for good back in May, with the series finale landing on the 20th, so this was one of the first times a lot of that cast had sat in front of fans on the other side of it. You could hear it in how they talked. There was a real heaviness in the room, that particular grief that comes with a thing you built for seven years just being over. They embraced it, and it landed.
And then the cosplay contest.
The cosplay contest was stellar. Best I have seen anywhere this year, and I’ve been to a few shows. The craftsmanship was on point, but what got me was the variety. People pulling from corners of fandom that almost never get represented. Builds that clearly ate up months. Fits that had the whole room hollering.
That’s the part that stings, honestly. The cosplayers showed up. The artists showed up. The fans showed up and paid somewhere between fifty and one hundred dollars a day just to walk through the door, before buying a single thing.
The community brought it. The show did not meet them halfway.
Looking At Things From A Wide Angle
Wizard World got acquired. Fan Expo HQ runs this show now, and Fan Expo HQ sits under Informa, a global events conglomerate. That’s not a comic book company. That’s a business that produces trade shows and conferences across dozens of industries, and pop culture is one line on a very long spreadsheet.
Once you understand that, the weekend snaps into focus.
Autographs and photo ops are the highest margin product at a convention. Guaranteed revenue, pre-sold, countable before the doors open. A gaming lounge is a cost. An offsite activation is a cost. Room to breathe in Artist Alley is a cost.
If happen to be optimizing a spreadsheet, you don’t build experiences. You build lines.
This is the 54th year of this show. It started in 1972. It has outlived owners, recessions, a pandemic, and the near total collapse of the comic retail market. And it lives in 2026 at a place where the best thing about it is a list of names you pay extra to stand in front of.
Final Call
Is Fan Expo Chicago worth the trip?
If you came for a specific person, absolutely. If Kurt Russell was on your bucket list, this was the weekend of your life, and the talent booking here is genuinely elite. I’m not taking that away from them.
But if you came for a CONVENTION, for a weekend where you wander and discover something and end up somewhere you never planned on being, that show does not exist here anymore. It got optimized out.
I drove down after seven years hoping to feel what I felt in 2019.
Instead, I felt the lingering sting of disappointment.
