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Nov 6 – Nov 8, 2026
TBA
Pasadena Convention Center, Pasade…
The thing nobody says out loud about the giant conventions is that you go for the artists and then spend the whole weekend failing to reach them. Six people deep at every table, a crowd that carries you past what you came to see, a morning of your life spent in a badge line.
This is the other version. The vendor hall is the argument: importers with inventory that never appears on domestic sites, small publishers stocking titles nobody else carries, figure dealers holding real stock, and artists who skip the bigger shows entirely. The cosplay skews toward builders — people who spent months on a prop and want a room where you can actually stop and look at it. Friday evening hours let the weekend breathe instead of compressing.
Three days at the Pasadena convention center, free parking, weekend passes cheap by convention standards.
Send this to the friend who came back from Anime Expo saying they saw nothing.
Coming Soon
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Mar 13 – Mar 14, 2027
Pasadena Convention Center, 300 E …
The panels are the reason to go, which is not a sentence anyone gets to say honestly about most conventions. Blame the geography. This corner of the city sits within a few miles of Caltech, JPL, and the studios, which produces a fan base that reads closely, argues in specifics, and will not let a guest coast through a Q and A. The questions are better here. Everybody notices it eventually.
The rest is the good stuff done properly: voice actor panels and signings, a cosplay competition judged on actual craftsmanship, an artist alley of independent creators selling original work, a vendor hall, and a game room running open play all weekend.
Old Town is the other half of the argument — you walk out for real dinner instead of eating a pretzel over a trash can, and the Gold Line puts you a few blocks off.
Bring the friend who takes the craftsmanship judging personally. They will find their people inside of an hour.
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Sep 18 – Sep 20, 2026
Pasadena Convention Center, 300 E …
Somewhere in your phone is a screenshot of an artist whose books close the hour they open, whose waitlist runs past next year, and who you have never once been in a room with. For three days they are standing at a booth with an open notebook, taking consultations.
Several hundred of them come in from across the country. Flash and custom, traditional and neo-traditional, realism, Japanese, and work that refuses a category outright. The floor rewards the slow walk, because the artist you have not discovered yet is two aisles over, mid-piece, happy to talk about what they are chasing right now. Even if you are not getting tattooed, sitting in on the competition judging hands you the vocabulary for what separates technically clean from genuinely rare.
Pasadena Convention Center, three days in September.
If you have been sitting on a piece for years, this is the weekend it stops being a screenshot.
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Sep 5 – Sep 6, 2026
10.0
Pasadena Convention Center, 300 E …
Somewhere on this floor is the sealed product you have been hunting, and three tables over sits a vintage sports card graded PSA 8 from 1985. Same room, same afternoon, no relationship to each other whatsoever. That is what 770 tables buys you: enough scale that serendipity stops being luck and becomes the actual reason to go. Pokémon, Magic, sports cards, comics, and collectibles across two full days at the convention center, with professional grading services set up right on the floor and real trades happening at the tables instead of in a parking lot afterward. The tell that this is a community event and not a vendor event is Saturday Trade Night, free to enter, built entirely for the people who come back after dinner to finish negotiations they started at noon. No celebrity booths. No influencer stage. Just the show serious collectors quietly tell each other about, which is precisely why the inventory turns up. Bring the binder you never let anybody touch.
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Jun 20 – Jun 21, 2026
Paid - $25-$45
Pasadena Convention Center, 300 E …
Somewhere in your house is an object nobody else in your family understands the price of. A resin figure. A vinyl piece in a colorway that existed for one weekend. You have explained it before and you stopped bothering.
This is the room where you do not have to explain it. Three hundred-plus exhibitors, all independent artists selling one-of-a-kind resin figures, limited-run vinyl, art prints, custom sneakers, and objects sitting somewhere between sculpture and collectible. No mass-market toy companies. The culture is small-batch and artist-direct and expensive for reasons everyone here can articulate.
Exclusive colorways of formats you already collect. Signature pieces from artists you follow. And the secondary-market buyers hunting grails, who you recognize instantly because they move differently.
Pasadena Convention Center, 300 E Green St. Lines form early for exclusive drops and day-one badges sell out.
This is the same crowd that camps for drops. Plan accordingly.
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Jun 6 – Jun 7, 2026
Pasadena Convention Center, 300 E …
The cartridge is in a bin. The person selling it doesn't know what you paid for it, and doesn't care — they're looking for something too.
That moment of physical contact with hardware from your childhood, at a table run by someone who shares the same obsession, is what the SoCal Gaming Expo is built on. Pasadena Convention Center, June 6-7, 2026: free-play arcade, 200-plus vendor tables, competitive gaming, and the specific joy of a room where everything is for sale and everyone is looking.
Retro gaming at its core, which undersells it — this is the show for people who never stopped. The free-play arcade runs throughout both days: you don't have to buy anything to justify the ticket. But the vendor floor is the reason most people come back. NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, Game Boy, arcade cabinets — the full range.
Free-play stations running throughout. Competitive tournaments on both days. General admission.
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Jun 6 – Jun 7, 2026
Pasadena Convention Center, 300 E …
The console that defined your childhood is in a bin here. The person selling it has been looking for yours.
SoCal Retro Gaming Expo brings two days of competitive play, free-play stations, and a vendor floor to the Pasadena Convention Center — the annual show for people who still think the best game of their life was on hardware that no longer ships. NES, Sega Genesis, SNES, N64, Dreamcast — the full range, from the people who kept theirs.
The free-play arcade runs throughout both days. The vendor floor is where the serious trading happens — bring a want list and bring cash. Competitive tournaments run across multiple platforms. Speedrunning exhibitions and high-score challenges for the community that measures progress in frames.
The retro gaming show that doesn't apologize for the nostalgia. Pasadena Convention Center. The show is family-friendly on both days. The free-play arcade is the best reason to bring someone who doesn't collect yet.
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One day only. Which is the constraint that makes this one work, because you cannot pace yourself across a weekend, so the whole floor moves at the speed of somebody who knows exactly which table they have to reach first.
Cosplay competitions where the costume that wins is usually the one with an engineering problem solved inside it. Panels with creators who are still standing in the hallway afterward, taking the questions nobody asked them on stage. Booths where the real find is three boxes deep and priced by someone who was in a hurry. Comics, anime, gaming, and film all sharing one hall, which means the conversations cross over in ways the enormous conventions have gotten too big to allow anymore.
Pasadena Convention Center, a single day of it, badges through the event site. Send it to the friend who talks about their childhood collection the way people talk about someone they lost touch with.
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You have a longbox in a closet you have not opened in years, and you still know exactly which issue is sitting on top of it. That part of you is what this floor was built for.
The move is to skip the celebrity line and go straight to the artist tables, where somebody is inking a commission in front of you and will talk about it while they work. Rare back issues surface here that never make it onto a shop wall. Cosplayers who spent months on a build stop and let a kid inspect the armor seams. Panels and workshops run all weekend, and the people running them are the ones who actually make the thing.
Pasadena Convention Center, comics through sci-fi and fantasy and anime, the whole weekend.
Bring the friend who says they grew out of this. Watch how quickly that turns out not to be true.
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Jun 8 – Jun 9, 2024
Pasadena Convention Center, Pasade…
SoCal Gaming Expo is a celebration of gaming culture in Southern California. The expo features a wide range of gaming-related activities including video game tournaments, tabletop gaming, cosplay contests, panels with industry guests, and exhibitor booths showcasing the latest games and merchandise. Whether you're a casual gamer or a hardcore enthusiast, SoCal Gaming Expo offers something for everyone to enjoy and experience the thrill of gaming.
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Aug 23 – Aug 25, 2024
Pasadena Convention Center, Pasade…
Power Morphicon is a convention dedicated to the Power Rangers franchise, featuring cast members, panels, screenings, and merchandise. The event celebrates the legacy of the iconic superhero series.
While you are lookingDifferent scene, same night out.
Monthly
166 Gathering
3 days away
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Every 2nd Sunday· Next Oct 11
From $15
Rose Bowl Stadium, 1001 Rose Bowl …
Nobody leaves with the thing they came for. You go looking for a lamp and come home with deadstock denim, a stack of vinyl, and an object that has no category but is clearly yours. That is what twenty-five hundred vendors on a stadium lot do to a person. Stylists, collectors and vintage hunters have been circling the second Sunday of the month since 1967, and the mix reads like everything Los Angeles has ever absorbed — Japanese streetwear beside 1970s Americana, mid-century furniture next to handmade jewelry, band tees, housewares, art prints. The quality ceiling runs higher than most dedicated vintage markets, because at that vendor count the best of it rises to the top. Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, second Sunday of every month, general admission from 9am and early birds in at 7:30 for first pass. Go with the person who will hold your spot while you double back for the thing you talked yourself out of.
Coming Soon
16 days away
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Random play dance is the most exposing thing a person can agree to do sober. A song you did not choose starts, the circle opens, and either your body remembers the choreography or it does not, in front of strangers, with no warning and nowhere to stand. People drive an hour for this. They drive an hour for it in costume. That is what is happening in a Pomona conference center in late October — two rounds of it, a best-dressed contest stacked on top, and along one wall the other half of the reason anyone came: the swap tables, where the card you have four of gets traded to the person who has been hunting it since spring and has the one you need. Nobody involved thinks this is a small thing. Free admission, first round at 12:30 and the second at 4, at the Sheraton Fairplex on West McKinley. Go with the friend who will get in the circle, or go with the one who will film you. You will want both, eventually.
Coming Soon
18 Gathering
37 days away
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You turn a ceramic mug over and find a thumbprint fired into the bottom, where somebody held it before the kiln — and it occurs to you that you have spent your whole adult life buying objects with no history in them.
Two hundred artisans, every one of them juried in: potters, jewelers, printmakers, woodworkers, textile artists, all selling work they made with their hands at prices a normal person can actually pay. This is not the craft market where every booth sells the same wholesale candle. Admission is free on purpose, because the model is artists selling directly to you rather than a ticketed experience selling access to artists. Live music. Food trucks. And the specific quality of light Pasadena gets on a September afternoon.
Central Park on South Raymond Ave in Old Pasadena, free to walk in.
Go with the friend who keeps saying they will start making pottery. They will leave with supplies. You will leave with something somebody else already finished.
Coming Soon
65 days away
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Small press comics are made by people who mostly lose money doing it, which is exactly why the work is interesting, and why a room full of them feels different from a convention floor. No celebrity photo ops here, no film studios, no queue for a Funko exclusive — just long tables of risograph zines, hand-bound books, and cartoonists sitting behind their own work explaining it to whoever stops. Los Angeles has an unusually deep bench of independent cartoonists because the animation industry pays some of them to live here, and this is the weekend they show what they make when nobody is art-directing. Admission is deliberately low-barrier and the crowd skews toward art students, working illustrators, and people who will spend forty dollars on something printed in an edition of sixty. December 12 and 13, 2026, at the Homenetmen Ararat North Campus on Dolores Street in Glassell Park. It runs annually, and the same cartoonists turn up year over year, which is how you watch a scene grow in real time.
Coming Soon
🌎 Nation's Best
147 days away
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Comic conventions mostly stopped being about comics some time in the last twenty years, which is a reasonable business decision and a real loss. The Seattle one is the largest that never quite let go. Artist alley here is not an afterthought tucked behind the celebrity photo ops — it is enormous, central, and full of people who make the actual books, which is why working comics professionals treat this as the show they look forward to rather than the one they are contractually obliged to attend.
What it feels like is a very large city being unusually generous for four days in March. The Seattle Convention Center sits right in the middle of downtown, so the convention spills into the surrounding blocks in a way that walled-off complexes never allow — bars fill with people in costume, restaurants run specials, the whole neighborhood participates. Inside, the programming leans hard into craft: how pages get made, how a script becomes art, panels where writers talk about work rather than about announcements. The crowd is noticeably more mixed in age than most conventions, and considerably more likely to be carrying a stack of books they are getting signed.
Is it worth it? If you read comics — actually read them, not just watch the adaptations — this is the best large convention in the country for you, and the artist alley alone justifies the trip. If you are chasing exclusive collectibles or a specific film cast, the bigger coastal shows do that better. What Seattle does better than anyone is put you in a room with the people who make the thing you love, at a scale where you can actually talk to them.
What to know: March in Seattle is grey and wet and nobody minds. Buy artist alley prints early on Thursday or Friday because the good ones sell out. Bring a portfolio bag if you are collecting anything on paper. The convention center's layout has two buildings now; check which one your panel is in before you walk. And the small-press section, which most attendees walk straight past, is consistently where the next few years of comics are sitting on folding tables.
It is here because a convention that still centers the artists is genuinely rare, and because knowing there is one place where that is still true tells you something worth knowing about the form. Emerald City Comic Con 2027 runs March 4–7, 2027 at the Seattle Convention Center.
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Monthly· Next Oct 13
Various venues, Los Angeles, CA
Somewhere in this city tonight there is a back room where the pinball never stopped — machines everyone assumed died with the arcades, lined up, lit up, and played for blood by people who know each ruleset cold. You thought it was nostalgia. They kept it a sport.
Once a month the league runs a real tournament: matchplay, a new opponent and a random machine every round, points stacking across the night. It is IFPA-sanctioned, but that is not why the regulars come. A good table is the most honest machine there is. It does not care who you are, only whether you can read the ball.
Here is what outsiders never expect: this crowd wants you to get good. Show up knowing only how to keep a ball alive and someone ranked will lean over between rounds and show you where the safe nudge is, when to let it drain on purpose.
Venues rotate. Check the league's Facebook group and the IFPA calendar for this month's location. All-ages at most stops, 21+ at the bars.
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