Planet Comicon KC 2026 is over, so now it's time to reflect on how it went and how what we learned will shape the future of the Gobbo Lab project. Overall I would call the convention a success, though early on it did feel like we were about to experience a big swing and a miss. I will try to break down everything that happened, make as much sense of it as possible and from there hopefully get an idea of what to do next.

First, I think it makes sense to outline a bit what my overall goals are for the Gobbo Lab project. In the simplest way possible, I think it boils down to a few main points:

1. Create art and stories that are bespoke, handcrafted and thoughtful.

2. Have an audience for my art that goes beyond friends and family.

3. Maybe just maybe one day making a living as an artist, but never at the expense  of goal one.

Planet Comicon is appealing in service to goal number 2 because it provides a platform to put the Gobbo Lab project in front of others. The current version of this has been making art to sell in the crafter section of the convention. The difficulty lies in how you measure success in this environment, because simply tying it to the amount of product sold is not a reliable indicator.

As an engineer, I approach every problem I see in a very data driven way, drawing conclusions based on available information and evidence. I really transformed from being the kid with the worst project in art class, to putting together some (bias incoming...) pretty cool projects, when I learned to leverage my robot engineer brain and approach an artistic idea the same way I would an engineering problem. Finishing a piece for me is less a journey through style, form and medium and more a mechanical chaining of engineered processes to achieve the end goal.

This makes it difficult for my brain to analyze something like a convention performance because ultimately you just don’t have all the data you need to drive definite conclusions. How many people attended the convention? What percentage of them even saw your booth at all? How much disposable income did the average attendee have this year compared to last? The list of required data points could go on and on, which unfortunately for me means that I have to do my least favorite thing ever, start guessing based on an incomplete picture of information.

Sales wise, this was not our worst year at the convention, but we fell significantly short of last year as well, despite making what we thought were a number of improvements from the previous offering. Friday started out incredibly slow with a noticeable lack in attendance compared to the Friday of last year. We initially choked our lower sales up to that, until Saturday came and was busy as ever but we hadn’t made a single sale over two hours into the show. Finally things did start to pick up and across the second half of Saturday and into Sunday we reached a reasonable number somewhere between our best and worst year at the show.

Talking with our neighbors, it was clear that the general consensus was that sales were down across the board for most folks. Obviously wider economic trends can have an impact on this, and these kinds of things are difficult or impossible to predict when you only put stuff out for sale once a year like we do. This does however make you start to wonder if all the effort in making things for the convention is worth it, or if you are just taking a big gamble every year that what you poured thousands of hours of work into will actually land.

We try to have a good mix of bigger and smaller items available to mitigate some of this risk. It was clear this year that more expensive items were not going to sell. For example, people would see the fortune teller dice towers, stop mid aisle to point them out to their friends, come back multiple times to check them out etc. The difference was that while last year, every single machine eventually sold, this year we didn’t sell a single one. I would guess a big driver for this was that by the time someone spent the increased cost of a ticket for the show, bought expensive gas to get there, everything else being more expensive in their day to day etc. they just didn’t have the disposable income to drop over a hundred dollars on a novelty item. This makes perfect sense, but the question becomes if I lack the ability to predict when this will happen, is it worth the time investment in building these kinds of projects at all?

Fortunately smaller items did move much better for us, but there are both some wins and big disappointments in that category. I enjoy the nostalgia of capsule vending machines with goofy toys in them that I would see around restaurants and other public places as a kid. I wanted to play around with some of those things in the booth, to start seeing what it would look like to make a more interactive experience. We 3D printed our own capsule vending machine, and filled it with some miniature mimic figures we have a license to print and sell. This was widely successful as a low price point item that people really enjoyed playing with. The entire machine was very close to selling out by the end of the con, which is in theory a good thing. However, it doesn’t feel great to see this little filler item you put together vastly outperform similarly priced items entirely of your own creation.

The biggest disappointment for me was how poorly the Bonkyrs world building zine and related items sold. The diorama got a lot of positive attention from people, which we used to talk about the zine and why we made it and all that good stuff. People would get excited about this, flip through the zine and examine the diorama more closely. With all of the items being 7 dollars or less, I think we all thought this interest would translate to people buying the zine or a sticker but that just did not happen. Over the whole weekend we sold maybe 10 zines or so and not a single sticker.

There are still a lot of things we need to learn simply from a retail perspective. For example, all of a sudden we started selling a lot more of our cute goblin cola bottle openers when Jeanna turned one over and put a bottle cap inside one as an example. But there is one pattern that I think has been consistent across the years we have been at this convention. It is next to impossible to have your own original ideas out retail an established IP.

As a disclaimer, it is of course entirely possible that my own ideas just suck and people aren’t interested in them like I think they would be. However, a common trend I would observe is we would be getting very positive feedback on our Bonkyrs stuff, to then have that person walk away from our booth, go down the aisle a bit and immediately buy some other basic item engraved with a logo from a famous IP. I have nothing against that person specifically, people should spend their own money on whatever makes them happy. This is all simply leading to the question of how does Gobbo Lab fit into this kind of environment, or does it actually fit at all? How do we get people excited about our own stories and world building?

We know that we aren’t going to put up our own retail booth and out retail the kind of booth that has a bunch of blank pre-made items, purchased in bulk, that they slapped a pop culture logo onto. Of course its not like the goal is to be the booth driving the most sales, but we have to weigh the risk of investing all the time and effort of producing items for a con, knowing that we will generally be less successful than other types of vendors, versus choosing to spend our time elsewhere. Continuing to operate at the convention as we currently do requires a lot of work, comes with a moderate risk of failure, and feels like its making little progress towards the overall goals of the project. This kind of booth just isn’t what it takes to rope someone into our project.

So I guess it's time to call it quits on this convention and start thinking of a new strategy to start putting stuff out there.

But what if…

It wasn’t just a retail booth anymore? What if the whole thing was a live show first and a retail booth second? There was one key observation I have left out until now that ended up spawning this next idea. Peri and I really got into a groove with this hokey used car salesman act. People would be looking over the booth and we would play off each other bouncing ridiculous nonsense back and forth about how amazing our products are. (This dice cannon only rolls 20s, it's powered by new spring loaded technology only we have access to.) People genuinely engaged with this and we got a lot of good laughs.

We also knew people enjoyed the interactivity of the capsule vending machine. So what if instead of not doing a booth next year, we doubled down and purchased a second booth to build out an interactive goblin midway arcade experience. Our goblin speaks fortune teller, scaled up with a real animatronic dispensing fortunes, games of skill that win prizes, ourselves in full cosplay as goblin carnies. (Peri of course being the ring leader, because they are the most fabulous.) Instead of looking at yet another booth trying to sell you stuff, for this 12 feet of convention floor you are actually in Bonkyrs. Come one, come all, see the show, play the games and of course, exit through the gift shop.

This would mean our level of success is far less dependent on just sales metrics, and much more dependent on factors we can control. Did we put on a good show? Were we funny? Did we get people interested in the other projects we are working on, like our stop motion film? This method focuses us much more on goals one and two (the most important ones) while still leaving the door open for number 3 by at least giving us a way to pay for the booth and hopefully build a more lasting following.

This would certainly be a lot of work and we aren’t 100% certain this is the direction we will go. It comes with its own risks and challenges, chiefly that it has to be done secondarily to the primary project of the stop motion film. We especially can't show up with this big performance to say look at all the things we are doing, when actually the only thing we are doing is what you just saw.

 The time investment is scary because I know how much I tend to shoot for the moon and deal with the crash out later. But I am also more confident than ever in my ability to just build stuff, and what else am I going to do otherwise, sit around and watch fucking sports or something?