Convention & Expo Events

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111

Anime NYC 2026

Aug 20 – Nov 22, 2026 From $175 Javits Center, New York, NY 10001

The East Coast doesn't have Anime Expo. It built Anime NYC — and for the community on the right side of the country, that distinction matters. Javits Center, November 20-22, 2026. Three days, one convention floor, and the crowd that traveled 400 miles to be in the same room as guests who shaped the shows they grew up on. Panels, artist alley, industry announcements, the con floor energy that only happens when this many people are this invested. The guest roster pulls from English and Japanese voice acting, manga artists, and industry figures who don't appear at US conventions often. Artist Alley is one of the larger ones on the East Coast circuit. The show floor runs exhibitors across the full range — merchandise, media, collectibles. Badges from $175. New York City is the venue around the venue — the community migrates through Midtown after hours. The East Coast convention that became its own thing.

Daily

10 Gathering

4h away

Reptile Super Show

Every day · Next Oct 3 $27+ Anaheim Convention Center, 800 W K…

Walk into a convention hall that has been taken over, wall to wall, by thousands of snakes, lizards, tortoises, tarantulas, geckos, and creatures you didn't know were legal to own, and you understand instantly why the reptile community calls this the mothership. Reptile Super Show, billed as the world's largest reptile expo, is a genuinely surreal, gloriously nerdy scene: hardcore breeders, wide-eyed kids, ball pythons in every color nature never intended, and enough feeder crickets to fill a nightmare. Saturday and Sunday, October 3 and 4, 2026, at the Anaheim Convention Center. Come to gawk, come to learn, come to accidentally fall in love with a bearded dragon. Bring the friend who's secretly always wanted a snake, and the one who'll scream. It is equal parts petting zoo, marketplace, and fever dream. Cold-blooded, and completely fascinating.

Daily

18 Gathering

5h away

ComplexCon 2026

Every day · Next Oct 3 $100+ Los Angeles Convention Center, 120…

For anyone who grew up treating a sneaker release like a holiday and a hoodie drop like a lottery, ComplexCon is the mothership: two days where streetwear, hip-hop, art, and hype culture collapse into one roaring convention floor of limited drops, exclusive collabs, surprise performances, and lines you will happily stand in. The tenth-anniversary edition lands in Long Beach with artistic direction from Playboi Carti and Hiroshi Fujiwara, which tells you exactly how seriously the culture takes it. October 3 and 4, 2026, at the Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center. Come with a plan for the drops you want and comfortable shoes, or just come to people-watch the best-dressed crowd in Southern California. This is where the streetwear world gathers in person, once a year, to see and be seen. If it's cool, it's here first.

Coming Soon

65 Gathering

6h away

Big Bear Lake Oktoberfest 2026

Today · Oct 3 – Oct 25 42900 Big Bear Blvd, Big Bear Lake…

At 6,752 feet, the mountain air turns crisp enough in October that a full beer hall in the forest starts to feel less like a party and more like the reason the season exists. Every October weekend, Big Bear throws its Oktoberfest at the Big Bear Convention Center, and the fall foliage and the elevation do the work that no lowland festival can fake. German beer on draft, brats, pretzels, sauerkraut, Bavarian desserts. Live oompah bands play through the day. Stein-holding contests, chicken-dance competitions, and a full dance floor run from early afternoon into the night, and there are no reservations to make - you show up, grab a stein, and join in. It runs Friday evenings, Saturdays, and Sundays across all four October weekends. One warning: mountain traffic on the 18 and 138 stacks up on Saturday afternoons, so arrive early or late. Big Bear Village and the surrounding forest hit peak fall color in October, which makes this an easy excuse to turn one afternoon into a full weekend in the mountains.

Weekly

26 Gathering

7h away

Big Bear Lake Oktoberfest 2026

Every Saturday · Next Oct 3 Big Bear Lake Convention Center, 4…

Up at 6,750 feet the beer comes with a mountain view and absolutely no chill whatsoever. Big Bear's Oktoberfest has been running for over fifty years, which means the whole thing operates like a well-oiled Bavarian machine: the log-sawing contests, the stein-holding endurance battles, oompah bands flown in from actual Germany, and a hall full of flatlanders discovering that yes, they will in fact do the chicken dance in front of three hundred strangers. It runs weekend after weekend all through the fall, so it becomes the excuse to finally make the mountain trip you keep putting off, alpine air and a giant soft pretzel and a designated driver who is being a very good sport about all of this. The lake sits right there for a cold, gold-lit walk between rounds when the beer hall finally gets too warm and loud. Bring a group and lederhosen you're not afraid to fully commit to. It fills the Convention Center in Big Bear Lake across nine weekends of autumn.

We Touch Grass: Los Angeles Anime Rave 2026

Coming Soon

91 Gathering

15h away

We Touch Grass: Los Angeles Anime Rave 2026

Today · Oct 3 – Oct 4 TBA Catch One, 4067 West Pico Boulevar…

Somewhere around the second hour, a room full of adults in cosplay screams the opening of a show they once cried at, and nobody is embarrassed, and that is the whole product. This is not a convention panel with a speaker in the corner. It is a full-tilt dance floor — breakdowns built off anime openings, EDM edits, bass drops, remixes, and a sea of glowsticks going up the second the right song lands. The crew has run this circuit across North America and Europe, and the San Diego night they threw sold out months ahead, which tells you what the door will look like here. Cosplay is strongly encouraged. Catch One has the rooms and the sound system to hold it. On Pico in Los Angeles, twenty-one and over, and tickets move fast. Send it to the friend who owns the wig and has never once had anywhere to wear it.

Trivia Night at Brewery X — Harbor Island

Weekly

14 Gathering

4 days away

Trivia Night at Brewery X — Harbor Island

Every Wednesday · Next Oct 7 Brewery X at Harbor Island, 1380 H…

Your team has a stupid name that made sense the very first Wednesday and now you're stuck with it, and honestly that's the whole point. There's a specific comfort in a standing weekly trivia night: the same booth, the same rivals two tables over, the same guy who somehow knows every state capital and absolutely nothing else useful. Brewery X out on Harbor Island runs theirs with real prizes and real trash talk, and the patio means you're arguing about one-hit-wonders with the bay glittering right there and a fresh pour in your hand. It's the low-key midweek ritual that quietly turns coworkers into actual friends and hands you a reason to leave the house on the least glamorous night of the week. You don't have to be smart to win, you have to be loyal and show up. Round up the same four people you always do. It happens every Wednesday evening on the water at Brewery X at Harbor Island.

Coming Soon

37 Gathering

🌎 Nation's Best 5 days away

New York Comic Con 2026 — New York, NY

In 5 days · Oct 8 – Oct 11 From $45 (1-day) Jacob K. Javits Convention Center,…

The Javits Center in October, a hundred thousand people in four days, every niche of pop culture in one building — and the streets of Hell's Kitchen turning into something you've never seen on a regular Tuesday. The Javits Center fills with a programmatic density that rewards strategic planning. Main stage panels feature talent from the year's biggest genre properties. The show floor covers hundreds of thousands of square feet of publishers, studios, collectibles vendors, and artist booths. Artist Alley at NYCC skews heavily toward comics — the original fanbase — alongside anime, gaming, and TV, giving it a different character than conventions that have shifted more entirely toward film and streaming. The autograph and photo op schedule is extensive; tickets for specific sessions go on sale in advance and sell out. New York Comic Con in 2026 is celebrating twenty years, and the Coney Island theme suggests organizers are going big on identity and atmosphere. The anniversary edition will likely bring programming and exclusives designed for the occasion. If you have been considering NYCC as a destination event, this is the year to go. The East Coast advantage: NYCC is adjacent to one of the world's great cities. The convention ends at 7pm and New York starts. Restaurants, bars, and attractions are all accessible from the Javits Center. Hotel inventory near the venue is limited; book early and consider Hudson Yards or Hell's Kitchen options within walking distance. Tickets go on sale in June with a Superfan Presale for Popverse members opening before general on-sale. Javits Center, New York City. October 8–11, 2026. New York Comic Con was founded in 2006 and reached 250,000 attendance within its first decade. The 20th anniversary edition in 2026 with the Coney Island theme signals that the organizers are treating this as a milestone year — expect expanded programming, anniversary exclusives, and a level of production that reflects two decades of iteration. If you have been waiting for the right year to make NYCC a destination trip, the 20th anniversary is the obvious choice.

Daily

29 Gathering

9 days away

LA Tech Week 2026 — Los Angeles

Every day · Next Oct 12 Various venues across Los Angeles,…

The demo works. The pitch deck is ugly but honest. Your inbox has been empty for three weeks and the silence is starting to feel personal. Somewhere in this city, someone needs exactly what you built, and neither of you knows the other exists yet. LA Tech Week runs October 12 through 18 across all of Los Angeles — Santa Monica to Downtown — with over a thousand events hosted by everyone from two-person garages to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and AWS. Pitch competitions. Hackathons. Founder dinners. Demo days. Enterprise showcases. The kind of networking that happens at 11 PM in the lobby of a hotel neither of you is staying at. Ten thousand people showed up last year. The ones who matter stayed after the panels ended. This is not a conference with a lanyard and a keynote you will quote on LinkedIn. It is a weeklong citywide collision of builders, and the architecture is deliberately decentralized — no main stage, no gatekeepers, just events competing to be the room worth finding. October 12 through 18, 2026. Events across greater Los Angeles from the Westside to DTLA. Individual event details and RSVP at tech-week.com.

RISE of the Jack O'Lanterns — Los Angeles

Coming Soon

39 Gathering

10 days away

RISE of the Jack O'Lanterns — Los Angeles

In 10 days · Oct 13 Los Angeles Convention Center, 120…

Somewhere between the pumpkin you carved as a kid and actual sculpture sits this thing, and it lands much closer to sculpture than you are ready for. More than five thousand hand-carved, illuminated pumpkins line a timed walking path — not triangle faces but full portraits, scenes and figures glowing in the dark, set to an ambient score. Nothing jumps out at you. No roaming monsters. It is Halloween for people who love the craft and the glow more than the fear: couples on a date, families with small kids, anyone who wants October to feel like wonder instead of adrenaline. Entry runs in fifteen-minute intervals so the path never bunches up. Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 S Figueroa St. October 13. It is gone in four nights, and it is the rare seasonal thing that is genuinely worth the drive.

Monthly

35 Gathering

11 days away

Nerd Nite San Diego — Monthly Science + Pop Culture Talk Night

Every 2nd Wednesday · Next Oct 14 $5 suggested donation The Holding Company, 1841 5th Ave,…

You have an obsession you have learned not to bring up at parties. Somewhere around the second sentence people's eyes start scanning the room for an exit, and you have gotten very good at cutting yourself off early. Everyone in this bar has that same reflex, and once a month they all agree to switch it off together. Three speakers get twenty minutes each. Science, pop culture, history, or whatever has been quietly eating the presenter's brain since the last one. Think of a TED talk, except it happens over drinks, the speaker is nervous in a way that makes you root for them, and the questions from the audience are genuinely better than anything you would hear at a conference — because the people asking came out on a weeknight specifically to hear about something they did not know existed. Bring the friend who apologizes for talking too much about the thing they love. Watch them stop apologizing.

SD Who Con 2026 — San Diego's Doctor Who Convention

Coming Soon

13 days away

SD Who Con 2026 — San Diego's Doctor Who Convention

In 13 days · Oct 16 Handlery Hotel, 950 Hotel Circle N…

Somewhere in your memory, a blue box is still spinning. You heard the sound once — that impossible grinding wheeze — and something in your chest shifted. You never fully came back from it. SD Who Con returns to San Diego for a weekend built by the people who understand what that sound means. This is not a corporate franchise activation. It is a volunteer-run gathering at the Handlery Hotel, October 16–18, where the hallways fill with cosplayers who sewed their own scarves, collectors who can date a Dalek by its bumps, and first-timers who just discovered that their obsession has a name and a room. Panels, vendors, an Artist and Author Alley, and guest appearances fill the programming. But the real draw is the recognition — sitting in a room where nobody needs the reference explained. Where someone can say 'reverse the polarity' and fifty people laugh without thinking. If you've ever paused a conversation to explain regeneration to someone who didn't ask, your people are already here. Badges available at sdwhocon.com.

Scream Diego 2026 — Halloween & Horror Convention

Coming Soon

97 Gathering

14 days away

Scream Diego 2026 — Halloween & Horror Convention

In 14 days · Oct 17 DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel San Die…

A horror panel tucked inside somebody else's general convention always feels like being let in through a side door. This is the other thing entirely — a whole weekend built by people who wanted to be in a horror room and stopped waiting for permission to have one. You can tell from the guest list. The names here come from the films themselves, not from adjacent franchises with a horror-shaped marketing angle, and that single detail tells you exactly who the weekend is for. The floor runs both days: vendors, artists, and an artist alley carrying original work, prop replicas, and merch that never surfaces at the mainstream shows. The people filling it pre-order the special editions, know the director's full filmography, and hold real opinions about the best practical effect of the last decade. Two days in October, in a Mission Valley hotel with real function rooms, in the one month the whole city is finally in the right season for it. If you take horror seriously, you already know who you are texting about this.

GameAcon Coachella Valley Gaming Convention

Coming Soon

34 Gathering

14 days away

GameAcon Coachella Valley Gaming Convention

In 14 days · Oct 17 – Oct 18 $29/day or $39 weekend 72840 CA-111, The Shops at Palm De…

If you live out past the pass, every convention you have ever loved cost you a long drive each way and a hotel room you could not really justify. You went anyway. You have been going anyway for years. This is the one that came to you instead. Two days of tabletop, console, and video games with the infrastructure to take all three seriously — real tournament setups instead of a folding table in a corner, a dealer's room running from retro consoles to current card games, and panels about how games actually get made. The energy is specific to a convention that belongs to the people who built it rather than one that toured through and left. Mid-October in the desert is the good window: warm without punishing, cool once the sun drops, and reachable from anywhere in the Valley. Send it to the friend who has been driving you over the pass for a decade. Tell them it is their turn to ride.

Coming Soon

15 days away

AniMarketplace

Oct 18, 2026 Free AniMarketplace, 244 San Pedro St, …

The artist alley is the part you actually remember. Not the panels, not the autograph line - the folding table where someone your age was selling a print of a character you thought only you cared about, and you stood there too long, and they said the show's name back to you like a password. Conventions have gotten expensive enough that a lot of people have quietly stopped going. This is that same feeling without the badge: an outdoor artist alley and vendor market in Little Tokyo, free to walk into, with performances and cosplay and a swap-meet corner where people clear out the figures and doujinshi they have outgrown. Free attendance changes who shows up - you get the teenagers and the people who have been in this since the VHS-fansub era standing at the same table. One real detail: vendor spaces run seventy-five dollars, first come, which is why the mix of sellers is different every year instead of the same corporate booths. Sunday, October 18, noon to eight, 244 San Pedro St, Los Angeles.

Coming Soon

22 days away

Bear Ghost – Tiny Hitman Tour 2026

Oct 25, 2026 Lodge Room, 104 N Avenue 56, Los A…

Theatrical rock made by people who are obviously having a wonderful time is deeply unfashionable and completely undefeatable in a live room. This Arizona band writes songs with narrative arcs, key changes that should not work, and a horn part when a horn part is funny — the sort of thing that finds its audience through video games, animation communities, and the general internet rather than through radio. Their crowd is young, extremely online, and knows the words to material that never charted anywhere. Expect the room to handle whole sections unprompted. Sunday evening in an upstairs Masonic hall in Highland Park, wood floors, no seats. Music at 7:00 PM at 104 N Avenue 56. Fandoms built in Discord servers and comment sections are the ones most likely to turn a normal concert into something closer to a convention, and that is the atmosphere here.

Coming Soon

69 Gathering

26 days away

Lucha VaVoom — Halloween 2026

Oct 29 – Oct 30, 2026 The Mayan, 1038 S Hill St, Los Ang…

Once a year the luchadores put Halloween masks on over their regular masks, and that one act of stacking costume on costume tells you everything about the night you have walked into. This is the maximalist end of the calendar. The wrestlers go themed. The burlesque performers pull out their biggest numbers. Eduardo Leal presides over the chaos from the mic. And the crowd, which treats the holiday as a competition, turns up in full Day of the Dead makeup, in superhero suits, in luchador masks bought that afternoon specifically for this. A thousand people in an art deco theater at capacity, watching Mexican wrestling tradition collide with LA counterculture. It is either the strangest evening of your year or the best one. The Mayan on South Hill Street downtown, 21 and over. It sells out weeks ahead, so the email list is how people actually get in. Go with the person in your life who commits far too hard to a costume. They have been waiting for this room their whole life.

Coming Soon

26 days away

Maria Jose + Moenia

Oct 29, 2026 YouTube Theater, 1011 Stadium Dr, …

Mexican synth-pop is one of the great under-documented scenes of the last thirty years, and Moenia are the reason a whole cohort of people in this city associate analog pads and reverb with their own adolescence rather than with Berlin. Pair them with Maria Jose, who came out of a pop group and rebuilt herself into the person Mexican audiences go to for the big emotional ones, and you get a bill that is half dance floor and half karaoke. The crossover is the interesting part: the Moenia crowd and the synth-and-city-pop crowd in Los Angeles are closer than either group realises, and a night like this is where they discover it. A Thursday is the right night for this - it is a going-out record rather than a sit-down one. Moenia have been at this since the early nineties and still perform with hardware rather than laptops, which is audible in how loose the sequencing gets. Performance at eight on the 29th of October.

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