Interview with program director Cliff Caporale

Now going into his fifth year as the program director of two large comic conventions, Ottawa Comiccon and Montreal Comiccon, Cliff Caporale is a man who sincerely loves what he does. Recently, we had a chance to talk to Cliff about his love of pop culture, a behind the scenes look at the convention life and his early years as a budding rock star.

So growing up, I can’t imagine that program director was high on your list of career choices. What was it you wanted to do growing up and then later on while in school?

Well, when I was a kid I was really into drawing. At the start, I didn’t want to be a comic artist or anything, I just really liked drawing and wanted to do something in that field. I did get into creative arts for college but I realized I didn’t have the drive that others had in that field. I was decent but I was seeing some of the other students work, which was just amazing, and I was like oh my god, I’m nowhere near that good. Maybe I could have been better but I didn’t get the necessary encouragement in the arts growing up. You’d occasionally have my mom making compliments or something like that but they are post World War Two European kids, so basically they were working in fields and shops when they were ten or twelve years old. So for them, the idea of oh, this is what I want to do, was not something they encouraged. My dad would say, stop doing child things, and looking back as a parent now I understand where he was coming from, I didn’t agree with it, but I understand where he was coming from.

The other side of the coin was I was very artsy, I loved the arts and performing, I used to be in several bands from when I was fifteen years old and singing, from different kinds of singing like hip hop to metal to ballads, even Spanish music, stereotypical sounding Spanish stuff, my mom’s Spanish, so growing up that’s the direction I was more or less hoping to take and I did partially take, I did some paintings, sold some to friends, acquaintances, things like that. Music I did for quite a bit, the only successful band released one album, we toured around the Montreal area, Quebec and around Mexico City, which has the population size of Canada so it’s like hey look, I don’t have to tour very far to get to an audience. The great thing about Mexico, the band was a metal band, late 90’s, early 2000’s and with that band we mostly sang in Spanish and we were in the top ten on the metal station in Mexico, that was on a demo album before our album got released. We were pretty happy and things were going well but you know, as many projects that involve lots of people, conflict arises and the band gets torn apart but it was a good time while it lasted, it was a lot of fun.

You’re a comic book fan. What is it about comics that have allowed them to be successful for so long?

I feel like it’s a unique storytelling medium, the stories are amazing, you can tell a lot of great stories and it does really well in say sci-fi and horror going over the top because basically you can use your imagination as an artist. At the same time, sure it’s the storytelling but it’s the art as well. A lot times you look at these beautiful drawings and you can appreciate them for what they are and all the people that collaborated to do it. Also, I think the ongoing tales, I know a lot of people complain about it, especially now with the movies they’re complaining about it, but I think a lot of people do enjoy that fact that there’s a history there. Like Spider-man started in the sixties and he was a teenager and he was growing up, now in the comic he’s got his business, he’s making inventions and if you keep up and follow his life he’s a real interesting guy, lead a real interesting life and it’s nice to have a big, connected world with everything else, I think that works really well too for the connected worlds that they present, that the Fantastic Four do hang out with Spider-man and that Spider-man does occasionally go off and scold Wolverine for behaving the way he does. It’s a fun thing, I remember as a kid going, this guy’s in this? Then you go and buy every iteration and then for me as a young guy collecting comics, I think the chase was fun, the collecting was fun, finding the missing issues because right now with the internet you can find missing pieces of a story through Wikipedia and other sources but back in the late eighties, early nineties, I was buying more back issues then, completing collections and I think part of the fun was, you know, trying to find certain issues and you know, getting it at a reasonable price because a fifteen year old does not have a lot to spend and actually, I have less now. I just love comics, it’s where I fall back on in my comfort, like I’ll read a couple of comics before falling asleep, books too but I find I always fall back to comics.

Dealing with the talent at conventions is one thing but what is it like dealing with fans at conventions, where so many people expect so many different things?

Well, a lot of these folks are my brethren, I’m virtually one of them so I totally understand their perspective. Dealing with them at conventions is pleasant for me, I like troubleshooting issues and wanting to make people happy they’ve come here and have a good experience because I’ve been to other events that shall remain nameless and I’ve been on the end of not having a very good experience so I don’t want people to feel that. I know it’s inevitable because for Montreal for example we’re dealing with fifty thousand people so I can’t control how they’re going to feel but I can try as much as possible. It’s one of those things I think I bring as a voice in the team and they respect me because I’m going to speak for the clients, the fans, because they go Cliff, what do you think they’re going to react if we do this, because sometimes you have to do cost cutting measures, things like that and I say you know what, if you do that you’re just going to piss people off and then you have to measure how much it’s going to piss people off and because it’s something I adore at conventions, meeting talent and stuff like that, it’s even more pleasurable for me to do it for that crowd.

Now, the other side of the coin for that is the online version or social media. I would say in the last two or three years I’ve seen a very interesting change in attitudes. It used to be a lot of support and advice and now I see a lot of faceless comments and insults and other things with nothing to back it up. I’m ready to take criticism, about the event or anything like that but it’s just sometimes people take it to another level and that I can’t tolerate, especially if we’re talking about people that make derogatory comments to us or guests or things like that and then we shut it down right away. It’s sad to say we’re seeing more and more of this in social media, I’m glad to hear there are some new sites closing down comments pages because it was getting out of hand and it was supposed to be a tool that you use to speak to the community but I’m seeing a lot of division, a lot of anger and that part is a lot harder to deal with. Face to face is so much better to deal with because you meet me and yelling and venting is energy you transfer, you can feel and I can help you deal with. Insulting someone on line makes you feel good, like hey, I told him and you walk away and you don’t see any of the follow up, you don’t see how the person is reacting to that negative comment but if you tell me to my face that you suck, your event sucks then you’re going to see my reaction, you’re going to feel how I feel, you’re going to sense it and maybe you’re not going to feel so good about making that comment.

I’ve also noticed that there seems to be a lot more conventions popping up, some in places that seem very small and with little place to grow. Is there a danger of the convention circuit kind of imploding on itself with just too many cons and not enough interest?

Yes there is, especially in Canada. It’s always good for promoting things we like, for instance comics, sci-fi, TV shows, movies and stuff like that but you’re starting to see more people interested in the buck. I mean, we’re trying to make a living here, and I think it could help a little bit if it’s well done but I’m seeing so many are trying to do the same thing. In the States there’s one big convention, I’m not going to name names, but there’s one big convention that does a lot of cities and I see their main goal as being to suck as much money from the attendees as possible and none of it goes to anybody else except the guests, and other guests might suffer too because of that. From what I see, from the online communities that I participate in, the vendors or others that participate in those conventions don’t necessarily profit from that. So you have a lot of great cons in Canada, I would say we are very lucky in the big ones that we have and I think for the most part, the organizers of the big Canadian cons are concerned, if the vendors are going to make money, is artist alley going to make money because the comic vendors that go from show to show, that’s their livelihood, so a bad show could break them. Same thing for artists, who use it to see their fans for the first time but this is income for them that they need to generate because making art is pleasant and amazing but in our society, not a lot of people place a whole lot of value on it. The conventions are where you’re going to find those people and find their cliental so I think Canadian cons in general are approaching it in the right way, that they have everybody’s interests at heart.

As program director, can you walk us through some of the steps in terms of planning a convention?

Sure. Well, my title is program director but we only have seven people that work full time on the events, so we wear a lot of different hats. For example, we don’t have an expert in social media and I have the most experience so I try to do as much as possible to fortify that until we can afford a part time position for social media. Since my main role is program director though, the first step is to co-ordinate with everyone to make sure we have dates we all can agree on for the following year, which believe it or not can be a really big argument, back and forth, and I’ll give you Ottawa as an example. For four years in a row, we were landing on Mother’s Day weekend, as we need four days straight, one for setup and then three for the con itself, and it’s not very common to be able to get a convention center for four straight days. So we co-ordinate with the convention center to try and agree on dates and four years in a row we had to take Mother’s Day weekend, for a few reasons. One is the days in May just simply don’t line up. Another is free comic book day is in May and we never want to book our show on the same day because that’s their biggest day, if you own a physical comic book store, that’s your biggest attendance day of the year, not necessarily sales but it’s the day the most people will come to your store, get your store name out there, invite artists to your store so we’re never going to have the con on free comic book day. I know a lot of people were offended when we had it on Mother’s Day, trust me my wife and my mom make me hear about it, but this year we were able to take the 13th to 15th but even then, there was still a lot of back and forth because we didn’t want to shock the audience with brand new dates.

But the biggest one was Montreal, a year and a half of back and forth decision making for moving our show from September to July. That was a big undertaking because we had reached fifty thousand in 2014 but we weren’t using the whole building so we had some people traffic issues and situations that we didn’t want to see happen so we knew we needed the whole building, or as much of it as possible. However, if we stayed in September we would actually have to shrink, we would have lost room, and the Saturday of our event it was the second time we had major lines at our event, people waiting for hours to get in. We didn’t sell tickets till 1 pm because we wanted to make sure everybody who had a ticket was serviced and was able to go in and out freely. We don’t want situations where fans are locked out of the event, if they bought a ticket, you should be able to go in and out. So that was our big problem, moving our dates to something more available. We had dates in November and February and its like no way, we’re in Canada here and it’s not just the convention center we’re talking about. We have to book between fifty and seventy flights for guests and it’s already hard to get the guests here to begin with, we can’t play around with dates where weather is going to be a factor. So we had July as an option, where we could have the full building and that’s where we went to and it was a very big risk because we could have lost a lot of people and we did however, we gained a lot of people too so we basically ended up with the same amount but with thirty percent more space and the fans had a better experience. There were no complaints about crowding, no complaints about those sort of things. We looked at all the things we had done wrong the previous year and tried to address them as much as possible and while we will never be perfect, when fans, vendors, guests, volunteers speak, we listen. So dates, space and guests, activities, those are the big things we need to address every year.

Speaking of guests, what has your experience been in terms of bringing talent to your shows?   

Well, first of all we need to talk to the agents early on, try and get some good talent, let them know the dates and negotiations can take a very long time. Their availability is the biggest thing because they’re primary thing that they are doing is creating, TV shows, movies, comics, that’s they’re main job. Actors going to a convention, that’s not their job. It’s something they do on the side, some of them for charity, some of them for themselves so it’s not an easy thing to nail a guest down for a convention. Also, some of them just don’t want to, they might be afraid of crowds, they’re not sure what goes on at conventions, I’ve met some guests who signed up, did it and you can tell that they’re a little claustrophobic with the people there. They’re appreciative, but at the same time it is not something they are necessarily comfortable with and maybe will never be. Wil Wheaton is a person that I think deals with it very well. He’s got a lot of social anxiety issues and he tries to put himself in situations where he feels less anxiety. It’s funny too, because some guests have clauses in their contracts that state you can’t announce them until thirty days before the con, sixty days before so once you have the guests booked you have to schedule them very carefully.

So what are your plans for the future? Are you happy where you are right now or is there something you have your eye on moving forward?

I love programming, I think that came about when I was in a band, I was the one who was booking the shows, setting up the events, entertaining people. That kind of continued into this, I love to make sure people are entertained so I like that aspect. Right now I’m taking care of partnerships in the conventions, especially Montreal, we have a lot of big partners, video game companies and I enjoy interacting with them, people who do things or create products that I love. One of my goals in the short term is to try and get the comic companies to come but it’s a very difficult thing to do, to convince them, for financial reasons and travelling to untested markets. It’s funny, in the case of Ottawa, a lot of people told us it was going to fail because they say people in Ottawa don’t like to go out, they stay in. It’s partly true, there is a certain stereotype in our nation’s capital, however people were ready. When we launched Ottawa Comiccon in 2012, twenty thousand people showed up in two days in our first year. So that blew our mind, we didn’t even have that many guests, I think eight or nine guests so it wasn’t a huge convention we were planning but a lot more people showed up. Its things like that that make me love my job so I’m staying where I am. I love comiccon, I love working there, I love the environment, even though it can be quite tasking at times, especially closer to the event when you’re working sixty to seventy hours a week. I really don’t see myself doing anything else right now and when a convention is over I don’t think about doing anything else but what can I do to make the next one even better.

I want to thank Cliff for taking the time to speak with us

www.montrealcomicconcom

www.ottawacomiccon.com