Oregon Ongoings: FAN EXPO Portland Review

by Caden Granger for the LBCC Commuter

    Big thanks to FAN EXPO for media badge access, as well as Jerry Milani for being fast and responsive to any questions we had.

    FAN EXPO is one of the largest comic con producers in the world, putting on shows in places such as Chicago, Dallas, Boston, Toronto, Orlando, and plenty more places, with over a million attendees total across their events. Taking place in the Oregon Convention Center, I attended the FAN EXPO Portland to see as much as I could across all sorts of genres of nerd media and pop culture, cosplay, fan panels and games, voice acting, comic writing, creative workshops, autographs and photos, storytimes and crafts, and plenty more in between in artist alleys and around the expo hall.

    Some of the main event panels at this show were “An Evening With The Hobbits: In Celebration of 25 Years” panel with Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, and Billy Boyd for the anniversary of The Lord of The Rings and tell behind-the-scenes stories, two Hazbin Hotel panels with Christian Borle, Krystina Alabado, and Joel Perez to talk about voicing their respecive characters and stories from behind the animated curtains, “God of War with Christopher Judge” to talk about the franchise, what it meant to embody Kratos and explore the character emotionally, and “Grand Theft Auto with Young Maylay, Steven Ogg, Shawn Fonteno, and Ned Luke.

    Getting to the convention center, badge pickup and bag checking went fast and smooth despite the large amount of people with enough space for everything, and the first thing I like to do is scout everything out and explore the rest of the expo hall, then plan what I’d like to do.

    The convention utilized a single hallway and it’s siderooms, as well as the main expo center, which was great because it made all the weirdly numbered and labelled panel rooms easy to find, and there was seating around the outside of these rooms for people to take breaks or wait for the panel they were interested in to open. You’d first walk by the info booth, past the panel rooms, walk by the cosplay red carpet, and arrive at one more help desk before entering the main expo hall. I didn’t really need these as I had the app downloaded, which was easy to navigate and gave me set reminders before things I was interested in were about to happen, helping me schedule my day.

    The expo hall was incredibly well organized, and helped traffic flow super well, providing open areas between each designated section. Comic artists and writers were lined along the outside of the walls, with the artist alley being neatly organized in rows on the inside, and I really liked this setup. It made comic artists easy to find by taking a single walk, and still gave plenty of room for the artist booths on the inside to have their own space, chat with potential customers, and advertise their wares. Larger booths were split off in their own area with plenty of things to see, like trading cards, lots full of comics, and larger prop booths.

    The expo also had smaller rooms to the sides, such as a quiet book nook with plenty of things to read, make friendship bracelets, and space to take a break (or trade trinkets with others if you showed back up later at the right time), and a small arcade area from the Portland Retro Gaming Expo to help promote their event coming later in the year. Besides these, there were the VIP and Ultimate lounge areas, which didn’t look to have much inside besides some tables and chairs, and usually had very few people inside, but I also don’t think I was allowed in there and didn’t want to get in trouble, so I didn’t explore.

    Autographs and photo ops also appeared to be well organized, with the photo ops being scheduled and put in their own curtained off area with line announcers, and autograph booths lining another set of walls around some corner bends, which helped keep a functional walkway but gave space for people to line up. At times, they were swamped and had big stagnant crowds (specifically when it was Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd, and Dominic Monaghan), but it was handled pretty well, and people were packed in enough to get by.

    The last area was the community area, placed right after the larger booths and outside the main stage for people to see. This area had things like the Portland Ghostbusters, a cosplay based charity donation group, PortLUG, an Oregon-based Lego group that helps foster creators, showing off plenty of cool custom builds and machines and advertising their next meetings, and Pacific Northwest Guild of Cosplayers, having a resting and repair area for cosplayers to stop, rest, and make any fixes or adjustments they needed to do, as well as providing a small meetup space.

    On the topic of the main stage, my experience at panels of all sizes was pretty great! The main stage was plenty big and usually had extra chairs, as well as room to stand in the back if you were late, giving nearly everyone an opportunity to watch the most popular panels (mostly Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit and Hazbin Hotel). Panels like the aforementioned Christopher Judge and GTA Meetup were in the hallway side rooms back outside of the expo hall, where I expected things to get a little messy, but the line organizers were on point and kept things fairly clear and neat despite the little bit of cramping from people going in and out of panels, the entrance and exit, and the expo hall.

    I wasn’t able to attend every panel I had set out to, but I was able to hit a good few of them, as well as attending the cosplay events to take photos and cheer people on. Starting with the cosplay area, the red carpet had a good DJ with welcoming and energetic hosts, and always had a small crowd around it to cheer people on, as well as a FAN EXPO staff member taking photos that cosplayers had the opportunity to get for themselves afterwards.

    The first scheduled panel I went to was “God of War with Christopher Judge”, and it was a very good panel. Time for the panel was occupied well, as Judge talked about getting the role of Kratos and being a father in real life compared to being a father as his character, and how his beliefs and the character's parenting beliefs have shaped each other, with the main takeaway being that real men lift each other up rather than push others down, which I think is important to say. There was also time for fan questions afterwards too, and everyone seemed to have a pleasant time interacting with him and asking what they wanted to in regards to what roles he’d like to play in the future, questions about his work on Stargate, and whatever else in between.

    The second panel I wanted to talk about was “Grand Theft Auto with Young Maylay, Steven Ogg, Shawn Fonteno, and Ned Luke”, where the actors talked about their roles and mostly took on fan questions, such as how they got into their roles, working with the team at Rockstar Games with the evolving motion capture tech, and whatever other nerdy questions about the game (like the endings they picked or favorite missions) people wanted to ask.

    I also wanted to go to some smaller fan panels and workshops, with the one I’ll talk about being the “TADC Intermission Time: Games with Caine & Bubble”. It was a cute little panel! It was really just playing some classroom-style games (Heads Up, Seven Up, Musical Chairs, 4 Corners) with a bunch of The Amazing Digital Circus cosplayers and fans, but it was a decently well-organized and good time! I did overhear there were some troubles with it, the panel was originally supposed to come earlier in the day, and they had to convince FAN EXPO to move the panel to a larger room instead of in the book nook, which was done really close to the original starting time, causing some confusion. Despite these small issues and not knowing all the details, things went well, but I do wish fan panels got some more attention in terms of organization, because I had heard similar stories of frustration from some other attendees.

    I’d still like to praise the scheduling time organization because there are a LOT of panels going on at the same time, with plenty more coming right after those, and it’s definitely not an easy job keeping people on track and rotating people in and out of rooms on time and trying to keep big panels from overlapping with each other.

    Overall, I had an amazing time at FAN EXPO Portland and felt very welcomed by the staff, attendees, and vendors. There’s so much to do and a lot more to see across all sorts of different nerdy or pop culture interests, and there’s definitely something for everyone, regardless of what you like, where you’re from, or who you are.

FAN EXPO Portland is returning in 2027 at the Oregon Convention Center from January 29th to the 31st, and you can find out more about it and sign up for news and updates at fanexpohq.com/fanexpoportland.