McCormick Place is sooooo big….one feels like a tiny ant crawling over a marble floor as you trudge from massive hall to massive hall. We turned on our GPS yesterday and logged more than 2 miles in no time. Today’s distance was probably more like 5 or 6 miles as we took it easy.

C2E2 is definitely in a crucial year. The first two years underperformed, but advance ticket sales are way up this year, so maybe this will be the time that the show draws the massive crowds that everyone thinks are possible. Saturday is going to be the big day.

You can see the titles for all the shows in this link. The list doesn’t appear to be complete quite yet, as there are no panels listed for DC, but it does look like a lively show.

C2E2 kicks off in a few short weeks, from April 13-15. The Beat will be there!

We’ll have our full report in tomorrow’s PW Comics Week, but for now, a few notes:

The show was much improved from last year’s; rough attendance is about 34,000, according to Lance Fensterman, definitely up from last year.

This was a fun, well run show without a lot of bells and whistles. There wasn’t any one thing that made it stand out, but it was definitely a good show with all the elements that achieved “con.” The crowd was young and energetic and seemed to be having the time they expected out of a comic-con, (a supposition backed up by happy tweets).

Tweet Although The Beat had a sensible evening spent filing stories and getting some sleep, many of the folks gathered in Chicago took advantage of the St. Patrick’s Day holiday and had themselves a good old time last night. There are a lot of dark glasses and questions over what actually happened today. Despite the [...]

Tweet Day 0 at the second edition of C2E2 found retailers confabbing, and early arrivals checking out the new location for the show. Following last year’s inaugural show in the Lakeside hall set on the banks of Lake Michigan, the convention has moved to a more modern hall that’s laid out on a more human [...]

Over at MediumAtLarge.net, the official ReedPop blog, pictures of comics invading the Valhallan halls of McCormick Place in Chicago are already circulating. There’s lots of news and notes about the show on recent blog posts, but for the socially inclined, there’s news of a special C2E2 brew!