San Antonio, we just might have turned a corner toward the better yesterday.

I’ve seen comic book and pop culture events come and go through this city. Amongst them, we witness all of the hard work that Apple De La Fuente and Austin Rogers put into Alamo City Comic Con every year. Their show largely focuses upon celebrity culture, while the San Antonio Book Festival carries a very different model, somewhat evocative of the larger Texas Book Festival. Between these models lies a lush, wild frontier where science fiction/fantasy authors and well-branded, independent artists of the fantastic can thrive within their own event, if allied with the right partnership.

I think The San Antonio Public Library may have just blazed that very trail for this city, possibly for years to come, depending on how they play it from here. Yesterday, Saturday, March 3rd, the first San Antonio Pop Con happened at downtown’s Central Library, and San Antonio embraced it. The people came and they KEPT coming all day long. They bought books and sold out titles. They bought artwork and prints by the stack. They filled the gaming tables. They made their own wands and cosplayed their hearts out. This was not just a day-long event where people discovered and met some of the best authors and artists in the sf/f industry. It was not just a day of loud, energized, young, diverse people having fun. This was a day where San Antonio said the library is cool.

‘Cool’ is a precious, elusive thing, and you can’t calculate it. You can’t just put it on and take it off like a jacket. You can’t buy it. You either are, or you aren’t. And on Saturday, Pop Con branded SA’s Central Library as a temple of cool because entire families by the thousands came to meet talented writers, artists and craftspeople they can’t meet anywhere else in one place. They came to see DR. STRANGE co-screenwriter C. Robert Cargill talk film commentary while screening the blockbuster film. They came to see former Pixar artist Armand Baltazar talk about his epic illustrated novel TIMELESS, soon to be a major motion picture, produced by Ridley Scott. They got books signed by visionary authors like Stina Leicht, Xavier Garza, Robert Jackson Bennett, David Bowles, Christopher Brown and more. They bought prints and talked process with singular artists like Jason Limon, Freddy Lopez Jr., Allison Stanley, and Matt Frank. And yes, I’m grateful to every single San Antonian that swarmed my own table looking to score some Loteria Karma. 🙂

This was a rainy, drizzly, drippy Saturday with a lot of competition for San Antonio’s weekend attention, and the city lined up bigtime for an event where the authors and artists were the pop culture. That doesn’t happen without a dedicated staff led by two visionaries who dreamed this up — Rhonda Woolhouse and Daniel Garcia. It doesn’t happen without Haley Holmes, Marcie Hernandez and a never-say-die team of librarians who believed this could happen and *made* it happen. It doesn’t happen without volunteers hungry for this city to be something more. It doesn’t happen without people like Rhonda thinking through the details — such as commissioning her chef brother to make delicious beef and sweet potato empanadas and gourmet delicacies for the pros’ green room, delighting even the most jaded veterans. It doesn’t happen without people like Rene Guzman, Randy Beamer, David Martin Davies, Stephanie Guerra and other media boosting the signal.

Pop Con was the SAPL’s first attempt at an event like this, and it was a hit.

It made this city look like it can be world-class, providing experiences that no other SA event is currently built to do. Let’s see if SAPL decides to swing for a sequel in 2019.