HawaiiCon 2018 was a great comic book convention. And I’m not just saying that because I didn’t have to pay for it.

I hadn’t actually made plans to go to HawaiiCon in the first place.  I had already gone to two anime conventions this year — Anime Expo (big, famous, crowded and exciting) and AniFest in Torrance (small, personal and local). Both were excellent in their own ways.

This trip wasn’t planned as a convention trip at all. We knew that we wanted to take a vacation to the Big Island during my mother’s birthday in September. Our plan was to take it easy, relax and enjoy some good island cuisine.  We had been to the Big Island before, so we knew our way around. We had little interest in the touristy stuff.

With this goal in mind, we made our hotel, car rental and airline reservations in spring.

It wasn’t until just before the trip that we found out that there would be a convention at our hotel.  This was mostly our own fault — we hadn’t bothered to check for special events before we made our reservation.

(In fact, there were TWO conventions during our vacation — HawaiiCon and an unrelated steel guitar festival.  But the steel guitar event was surprisingly small and quiet.)

HawaiiCon was a small convention. It was a fundraiser for local education programs, so there were quite a few educational panels and workshops. But the convention also had a cosplay contest, dealers room, special guests and all the other stuff you would expect a typical comic con to have.

EDIT: This has been marked private for a couple of years (from 2018 to 2021!), so I’ll mark it public.  I don’t think I had much more else to say about the convention.