Relive Convention & Expo Events

219 convention & expo events the community showed up for — relive the night, then catch the next one.

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Tampa Bay Comic Con 2026 — Tampa, FL

Sep 4 – Sep 6, 2026 Tampa Convention Center, 333 S Fra…

The Southeast built this weekend to answer a specific ache — the annual pang of SDCC envy from the wrong side of the country. Over Labor Day weekend, 75,000 people fill the Tampa Convention Center for every comic and pop culture genre under one roof - and for the East Coast outside New York, this is the one. The floor is enormous and overwhelming in the best possible way. The guest list runs three tiers: Hollywood actors from properties people grew up on, comic industry legends, and independent creators who set up Artist Alley as their primary annual market. The celebrity photo ops and autograph queues are well-organized, which is not always true at conventions this size. And the cosplay is extraordinary - TBCC has built a reputation as one of the top cosplay destinations in the Southeast, and the Saturday costume contest is a legitimate event in its own right. This is for the fan who wants the full convention experience - celebrity access, comic industry presence, Artist Alley depth, panel programming - without flying to San Diego or navigating New York. If you are in Florida, the Southeast, or anywhere on the East Coast outside the city, TBCC is the answer, and the Labor Day timing makes it a natural end-of-summer anchor. A few things worth knowing before you go: single-day tickets exist, but weekend passes sell at a real discount and most one-day buyers wish they had bought three. The Convention Center sits on the Tampa Riverwalk - an easy ride from downtown hotels, difficult to park near, worth planning around. Saturday is the fullest day; Sunday is noticeably more relaxed with shorter autograph queues. Bring cash for Artist Alley, since the independent creators who make the floor special tend to run cash-only or Square setups. What TBCC ultimately proves is that the Southeast has a fan community rivaling any market in the country. A convention at 75,000 attendees should require a city like New York or Los Angeles, and it happens in Tampa every year. That is not a small thing. It is the proof that the culture is everywhere, not just concentrated on the coasts.

Hidden Leaf After Dark — Anime San Diego Official After-Party

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Hidden Leaf After Dark — Anime San Diego Official After-Party

Sep 5, 2026 San Diego Convention Center, 111 W…

The convention floor closes. The lights come up. You're standing in a hallway holding a prop sword and a bag of prints, and every cell in your body is saying: not yet. Hidden Leaf After Dark is the official Anime San Diego after-party — the room where the energy that built all day doesn't have to stop. Five DJs take the Convention Center stage after the panels end, spinning anime anthems remixed for a crowd that already knows every word. The cosplays stay on. The dance floor fills with people who spent the day in artist alley and are now discovering each other's moves. Shonen Riot produces this alongside Anime San Diego, so the handoff is seamless — same community, different mode. You don't need a convention badge to attend. The only thing you need is the specific feeling that the day wasn't enough. Friday, September 5, 2026. Doors 8:30 PM. San Diego Convention Center. 18+. Tickets $29.51.

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Clash of Clans — Clash for the Stache at Seaport San Diego

Sep 5, 2026 $7-15 Seaport Headquarters, 789 W Harbor…

Somewhere inside you lives a Barbarian who has been wronged, and a mustache that has to be recovered. That impulse — the one that makes a grown adult want to storm a puzzle room with three friends and physically reclaim what is theirs — is the thing this was built for. Teams work through high-energy physical challenges to help the Barbarian take his mustache back from the Goblin King. It is not a passive activation you walk past and photograph. You are in the village, you are running the heist, and his honor is genuinely in your hands, which sounds ridiculous right up until the timer starts. It runs daily on the waterfront through the summer with extended hours during convention week, and inside you get themed food, merch, giveaways, and photo moments engineered for the friend who screenshots everything. Whether you have played for a decade or you just want to steal a mustache from a goblin, the room does not care about your credentials. It only cares whether you can solve it.

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Lowrider Super Show Los Angeles 2026

Sep 5, 2026 Varies Los Angeles Convention Center, 120…

Ask the man standing next to the car who started the build and you will get an uncle, a garage, and a decade. That is what outsiders miss walking this floor: every candy panel, every airbrushed hood, every set of wire wheels is a household's worth of patience handed down through a neighborhood. Hundreds of them come here to be seen, indoors, so weather never gets a vote. It is not a static show either. The hoppers bounce on a schedule, the systems hit hard enough to feel in your sternum, and the culture is switched on from open to close. Custom trucks, motorcycles, bicycles built to the same obsessive standard. Trophies handed out all day for everything from paint to hydraulics. Downtown at the convention center, a full day, parking in the structures on Pico and Figueroa. Come early. The floor is deep, and the best conversations happen standing next to the cars.

Lowrider Magazine Car Show 2026 — Los Angeles Convention Center

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Lowrider Magazine Car Show 2026 — Los Angeles Convention Center

Sep 5, 2026 Los Angeles Convention Center, 120…

Hydraulics are not a modification. They are a sentence. Every bounce says the same thing: I built this with my hands, it moves when I tell it to, and nothing on a dealership floor is ever getting close. This one closes out the year's tour, which means the builds arriving downtown have been chased all season. Candy paint that took six months to lay down. Interiors stitched by somebody's uncle who learned it from somebody's grandfather. Chrome polished until it reflects an entire aesthetic philosophy back at the room. The competition is real and the trophies matter, but the feeling on the floor is closer to a homecoming, a whole culture showing up in one building to look at itself. The convention center on Figueroa, a full day in September. If you have ever wondered what it looks like when craftsmanship becomes identity, the answer is here in metalflake, and it will talk to you if you ask.

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Sneaker Expo Orange County 2026

Sep 1, 2026 Anaheim Convention Center, 800 W K…

Six in the morning. The drop goes live. Your fingers move faster than your brain and the page reloads to SOLD OUT — and that hollow drop in your chest is the exact feeling an entire culture got built on top of. The culture has a room, and this is it. The pair you have been hunting for three years is sitting on a folding table ten feet away, and the guy behind it knows precisely what he has. Deadstock, vintage, customs, and the heat that never survives a resale listing because somebody wanted to hold it in their hands first. Every table is a negotiation. Every collector in the aisles is scanning for the one thing nobody else has clocked yet. Two days at the Anaheim Convention Center, doors late morning through evening, buy online before you go. Go with the friend who talks you out of things. Then watch them buy first, and try to be gracious about it.

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LAcon V / Worldcon 2026

Aug 27 – Aug 31, 2026 From $125 Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim…

The conversation that starts at a panel and is still going two hours later in a hotel lobby - between a first-timer and someone who has come every year since the 1970s - is the part of Worldcon nobody photographs, and it is the reason people build their August around it. If science fiction has genuinely shaped how you think, this is the room where the people who built the genre gather to decide what it becomes next. This is the 84th World Science Fiction Convention, founded in 1939, and it is where the Hugo Awards - the genre's highest honor - are presented. Five days of programming dense enough to require a spreadsheet: panels with authors whose books shaped how you see the world, an Art Show of original science fiction and fantasy illustration available for purchase, a Film Festival, and the Masquerade, one of the world's most ambitious costume competitions, where attendees spend months building a creation for a single stage walk. But the truest texture lives in the hallways, and the community here is multigenerational in a way almost no other genre event is. Every attending member votes on the Hugo ballot, which gives you a reason to read widely before you even arrive. If you have opinions about where the genre is going and want to be in the room where those conversations happen, this is that room - not a pop-culture spectacle but a literary gathering with the scale to match. This is worth every dollar for the reader for whom the genre is a frame for understanding the world, not casual entertainment. A few practical notes. First-time attendees qualify for a $200 membership rate instead of the standard $250 adult price - register explicitly as a first-timer at lacon.org to save fifty dollars. The Hugo ceremony is a formal evening event; bring something nicer than a convention T-shirt. Programming is community-generated: attendees propose and vote on panels, so the schedule reflects genuine fan priorities rather than a corporate team. Book the Hilton Anaheim or Anaheim Marriott to stay in the convention hotels and maximize hallway time. The Art Show sells original work, so budget separately for it. Worldcon returns to Los Angeles for the first time since 2006, at a moment when science fiction's reach - through streaming, gaming, and AI - has never been broader while the literary community that seeded all of it has never been more visible. The writers in those panel rooms are the ones shaping how space travel, artificial intelligence, and social change will feel to readers a generation from now. That conversation happens August 27-31 at the Anaheim Convention Center.

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LeucadiART Walk 2026 — Encinitas

Aug 30, 2026 Highway 101, Leucadia, Encinitas, …

There is a stretch of the 101 in Leucadia where the salt air hangs heavier and the storefronts still look like somebody lives upstairs. Once a year the sidewalks vanish under more than a hundred artists. Not a convention hall. Not a velvet rope. Booths set up between the surf shop and the taco stand where you have ordered the same thing since high school. Painters, sculptors, ceramicists, jewelers, and a few people who defy the category entirely, lining Coast Highway from one end of the neighborhood to the other while live music drifts between them and kids run ahead of parents already mentally hanging something over the couch. This is the art your neighbor made in the garage, next to the photographer who quit advertising to shoot waves. Free, all day, roughly 8,000 people over the course of it. Leucadia has always resisted polish. This is the annual evidence that the resistance is holding.

Party Plus Ultra — Anime Rave at Mission Inn, Riverside

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Party Plus Ultra — Anime Rave at Mission Inn, Riverside

Aug 29, 2026 Mission Inn Hotel, 3649 Mission In…

You've been watching the same show for six months. You've read every theory thread. You've sent the opening theme to three people who didn't ask for it. And now you need to be in a room where everyone else did the same thing. Party Plus Ultra is Shonen Riot's standalone anime rave — not a convention afterparty this time, but the main event. The Mission Inn in Riverside becomes the venue: five DJs (Chuck None, Kahn Artest, Hiero, Kudo, and Ohyea) spinning anime anthems and club remixes under the arches of one of California's most absurdly beautiful hotels. Cosplay welcome. Anime-themed drinks. Photo ops. And a dance floor full of people who can identify an opening by the first three notes. Shonen Riot runs the conventions behind Anime San Diego, Anime Riverside, Anime Pasadena, and Anime Las Vegas. This is the team that already knows how to pack a room with people who share a very specific frequency. Party Plus Ultra is that frequency, amplified, without the panel schedule. 18+. Doors 7 PM. Mission Inn Hotel, 3649 Mission Inn Ave, Riverside, CA 92501. Tickets at partyplusultra.com.

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K-PLAY! FEST Orange County 2026

Aug 22 – Aug 24, 2026 40.00 800 W Katella Ave, Anaheim, CA 928…

One pass opens two doors, and most people do not realize it until they are already inside — the K-pop floor and the anime convention are running in the same building on the same days, and your wristband works in both. So the day splits strangely and wonderfully: a dance competition, then an artist alley, then a K-beauty booth, then somebody's cosplay contest, then back across the hall for a K-drama screening. Touring acts play the main stage both days. There are merch drops, signed-album lines, fan photo areas, and Q&As where somebody always asks the question the whole room was too nervous to ask. General admission covers the festival floor; the concert stage is its own ticket. It takes over the Anaheim Convention Center on Katella, walkable from the transit center, with Disneyland close enough to stretch the whole thing into a weekend. Send it to the friend who has been saving an outfit for exactly this and has nowhere to wear it.

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Anime NYC 2026 - New York, NY

Aug 20 – Aug 23, 2026 Jacob K. Javits Convention Center,…

The Javits Center in August. Four days, 150,000 attendees — the largest anime convention on the East Coast. It started in 2017 as a regional alternative to AX and became something much larger. The Javits Center in August feels like a contained version of the anime internet made physical. Cosplay is everywhere and serious -- the craftsmanship people bring to their costumes is a form of artistic expression that deserves its own category. The exhibition hall has major publishers like Crunchyroll, Yen Press, and Nakama Press launching titles; creator meet-and-greets and autograph lotteries for guests like Yuji Kaku of Jujutsu Kaisen fill up in hours. Over 150 hours of programming runs simultaneously across panels, screenings, and Q-and-A sessions with creators. The New York City setting amplifies everything -- the crowd has NYC energy, the restaurants outside are excellent, and the convention benefits from the cultural infrastructure of the country's most connected city. Anime NYC is worth it for anyone serious about anime or manga culture. For East Coast fans who have not made the trip to Anime Expo in Los Angeles, this is the domestic pilgrimage -- the place where the industry treats you as a primary audience rather than a secondary market. For fans of specific titles, the autograph lotteries for major creators are reasons unto themselves. The 2026 edition adds a Family Zone presented by Scholastic and a Kids Sunday ticket for ages 6 to 12 -- signaling the generational shift already underway. This is not for people who want a casual festival atmosphere. It is for people who know their fandoms, track release schedules, and understand why certain announcements matter. Badge prices increase after May 31 -- purchase now if you are going. Bring a refillable water bottle; drinks inside run $4 and up with free fill stations throughout the Javits. Skip the Javits Starbucks and use the Hudson Yards location a short walk away. Walk Artist Alley and the Exhibition Hall completely once without buying -- collect business cards, compare prices, note everything -- then return to purchase. Autograph lotteries for top guests fill fast; register the moment they open. Bathrooms near the Expo Floor and Artist Alley get congested by midday; plan accordingly. Anime NYC's rise to East Coast dominance reflects something real: anime is no longer a niche import. It is one of the primary storytelling languages of a generation that grew up watching Naruto, reading One Piece, and building identities around the worlds attached to those stories. Anime NYC is where that generation convenes, where Japanese creators recognize their American audience in person, and where the next phase of the culture gets seeded. The Family Zone added in 2026 signals what is already happening: this is a mainstream cultural institution that happens to be run by and for people who care deeply about the craft. Badges at animenyc.com.

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Anime Impulse Orange County 2026

Aug 22 – Aug 23, 2026 Anaheim Convention Center, 800 W K…

An importer unrolls something that circulates at exactly these shows and nowhere else, and two tables down an artist is selling work she made specifically for this weekend. Neither thing exists on Amazon. That is the whole reason to come. It runs less like a convention than a market: merch, fan art, imported goods, tiny runs that are gone by afternoon, spread across two full days in a hall large enough to let it breathe. The move is to split it. Saturday for the rush, Sunday for the second pass, when the lines shorten and an artist has time to tell you what a piece actually is. Sunday is where people find the thing still framed on their wall years later. Anaheim Convention Center on West Katella Avenue, a straight run off the 5 or the 57, admission through animeimpulse.com. Bring the friend whose wall is running out of room.

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Collectors Expo Orange County 2026

Aug 22 – Aug 23, 2026 Anaheim Convention Center, 800 Wes…

You know the type. Keeps a separate folder for the cards they will never sell, can tell you what a binder smells like, texts one specific friend the second a set drops. For years that person has driven to a different little shop for every game they love — Pokemon one weekend, One Piece the next, Lorcana somewhere across town. This is the weekend all of it lands in the same building. Pokemon, One Piece, Riftbound, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Lorcana and Magic share one convention floor: vendors deep enough to turn up the card you have been hunting for years, tables to trade and play, and the rare overlap where competitive grinders and vintage collectors finally walk the same aisles. Part flea market, part reunion, part the dig you have been putting off. Anaheim Convention Center, 800 West Katella Avenue. If you already know what a good pull feels like in your chest, nobody has to talk you into this one.

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IchibanCon San Diego 2026

Aug 22 – Aug 23, 2026 Sheraton Mission Valley, 1433 Cami…

Some conventions are so big they stop being a gathering and start being an airport. This is the opposite kind on purpose — a con at the scale where you can actually reach the artist alley, where the panels have real conversation instead of a mic line a hundred deep, and where the cosplay competition happens in a room whose audience actually knows the characters you're dressed as. The hotel setting is the whole design. You move through connected ballrooms and corridors instead of a convention center the size of a small town, the density is right, and the signing lines are short enough that the guests exist as people you can actually talk to. The vendor hall still covers everything from imported figures to local fan art — it just does it at a human scale. Doing the small local convention well is harder than it looks, and this one has quietly built a reputation for it. Sheraton Mission Valley, 1433 Camino Del Rio S — August 22–23. San Diego's at its best outside in August, and inside it's the specific warmth of a community that chose to be in one room together. Badge options and the guest list at IchibanCon's site as the date nears.

National Book Festival 2026 — Washington, DC

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National Book Festival 2026 — Washington, DC

Aug 22, 2026 Walter E. Washington Convention Ce…

You came for one author and you left carrying a reading list that will take you through winter. Nobody warned you about that — the way a book festival rearranges your plans for the next six months without asking. The National Book Festival is the Library of Congress's annual gift to the country: a single day where the institution that holds 175 million items opens its arms and says, come talk to the people who write the things you cannot stop thinking about. The 26th edition takes over the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in DC on August 22, 2026 — free, all day, from 9am to 8pm. The festival features conversations, readings, and signings across multiple stages organized by genre. Fiction, poetry, history, children's and young adult, graphic novels, science — every section runs simultaneously, which means you will spend the day making impossible choices between panels and loving every minute of it. This is the largest book festival in the United States, typically drawing more than 100,000 attendees to spend a full day surrounded by language. What the regulars know: the signing lines form fast after each session ends. If there is an author you need to meet, position yourself near their stage exit fifteen minutes before the panel wraps. The children's section is not just for children — some of the best storytelling of the day happens there. And the Library of Congress pavilion is where you find the rare items from the collection that never make it online. The Poetry and Prose stage often has the shortest line and the most devastating readings. The convention center layout rewards planning — download the map early and mark your must-sees, because the venue is large enough that moving between stages takes real time. Comfortable shoes are not optional. Tickets are free but required — register early, they go. Livestreaming is available for those who cannot make the trip, but the real thing is in the room where someone reads the first paragraph of a book you did not know existed and you feel your posture change. August 22, 2026. Walter E. Washington Convention Center, 801 Mt Vernon Pl NW, Washington, DC 20001. Doors at 8:30am.

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D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event

Aug 14 – Aug 16, 2026 Anaheim Convention Center, 800 W K…

Every couple of years one room decides what the next two years of your imagination are going to look like, and the people who care most find out together, in person, before the internet gets its hands on it. Friday is film and television. Saturday is the parks, the resorts, the cruise ships. Sunday is the Legends ceremony, where the company honors the people who actually built the thing, and it is reliably the day that wrecks the adults in the room. In between: Marvel reveals, Star Wars announcements, next-generation park concepts, animation premieres, and the surprises deliberately held back for this audience and no other. The convention center sits within walking distance of the park itself, and for the full week the streets around it fill with fan meetups and pop-ups nobody officially organized. General admission gets you the main hall; higher tiers add reserved seats and merch that will not exist again. Text the friend whose entire personality is a theme park. You already know which one.

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KCON LA 2026

Aug 15 – Aug 16, 2026 From $136 Crypto.com Arena, 1111 S Figueroa …

You've spent years experiencing this through a screen — the fancams, the comebacks, the fanchants you learned alone in your room. For one weekend in August, all of it becomes physical, and you're standing in a room with twenty thousand people who feel exactly what you feel. That's the moment KCON exists to create: the second parasocial turns into a crowd. It's the largest K-pop festival in America, and Los Angeles is where it belongs — the convention floor at the LACC runs for hundreds of thousands of square feet of Korean beauty activations, dance challenges, K-drama screening rooms, and some of the most organized fan communities you'll ever encounter, while the evening concerts at Crypto.com Arena are full arena productions, light sticks and coordinated fanchants that would feel at home in Seoul. The crowd is multigenerational and multicultural, and the transformation is real: people arrive as skeptics dragged along by their kids and leave fans; people arrive alone and leave with a community that outlasts the weekend. August 14–16 at Crypto.com Arena and the LA Convention Center. Tickets are stratified — convention floor, concert, or combined — so buy early, and get to the LACC in the morning on Day 1 before the brand experiences hit capacity. Wear shoes you can cover miles in, bring a portable charger for the fanchants, and book a hotel near the convention center, not the arena — clearing out after the show can take 45 minutes. Tickets on Ticketmaster.

LFG CON 2026 — Los Angeles Tabletop Gaming Convention

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LFG CON 2026 — Los Angeles Tabletop Gaming Convention

Aug 13 – Aug 16, 2026 See lfg-con.com for badge options 2500 Hollywood Way, Burbank, CA 91…

The quiet magic of an open gaming convention is that nobody is running anything for you. You walk in, you find a table, and you play what you want with whoever wants to play it. Four days of exactly that. Board games, tabletop RPGs, miniatures, trading card games, and everything in the gaps between them. Community-run, built for people who already know what they want to play before they arrive. The game library stays open throughout — check something out, find a table, go. Organized tournaments run alongside the open gaming rather than replacing it. The RPG schedule carries multi-session campaigns across all four days, with pre-registration for the longer formats. This is not a show floor with demos and a line for a five-minute taste of something. It is a room full of tables where the gaming is the entire point. Marriott Burbank, 2500 Hollywood Way, Burbank. August 13-16, 2026. No spectators. Just games.

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