ECC 2020

Emerald City Comicon - Cancelled Due to COVID-19

To our Sasquatch Syndicate family, our friends in Seattle, and everyone who was planning to find us at the Washington State Convention Center this year — we owe you an update, and we want to come to you directly.
Emerald City Comic Con 2020 has been cancelled.

We know. We feel it too.

This was not a decision anyone made lightly. ReedPop and the ECCC team did everything in their power to make 2020 work — first postponing from the original March 12–15 dates to a rescheduled August window, exploring every possible path to get nearly 100,000 fans, exhibitors, artists, and community members back into the Washington State Convention Center in some form. In the end, with COVID-19 cases rising in King County and Washington State still navigating the earliest and most uncertain phases of reopening, the call to cancel was not just the right one — it was the only one. We support it fully, and we have nothing but respect for the ECCC team and everything they tried to do to save this event for their community.

For us, the cancellation stings in a particular way. This was going to be our third year at Emerald City Comic Con, and we were coming in with more momentum and more clarity about what the Sasquatch Syndicate brings to a pop culture audience than at any point in our history on this circuit. The first year we learned the room — 95,000 people, our first taste of what it means to represent Bigfoot research inside one of the largest pop culture conventions in the Pacific Northwest, and the education that comes from being thrown into something that big without a roadmap. The second year we applied everything we had learned — a better booth, a sharper visual identity, a Bigfoot costume that stopped people in their tracks, and early sketch concepts for the Sasquatch Syndicate cartoon and comic direction that we put directly in front of a pop culture audience and let them respond to honestly. The feedback we got in that second year shaped the creative direction of the Syndicate in ways we are still building on.

The third year was supposed to be the one where all of that learning became something fully realized. We had our booth confirmed. We had our plans made. We were ready in a way that takes years of showing up to get to. And then March arrived.

We all know what March 2020 brought. The Sasquatch Syndicate is a Pacific Northwest organization. Seattle is our city in the deepest sense — the city whose forests and mountains and coastline form the backdrop of everything this research community is built around. Watching our hometown become one of the earliest and hardest-hit epicenters of a global pandemic, and watching Emerald City Comic Con — one of the great celebrations of Pacific Northwest creative culture — get pulled from the calendar first to summer and then to nowhere, was something that landed differently than a typical event cancellation. It felt personal. Because for us, it was.

The convention circuit has been one of the most vital threads of how the Sasquatch Syndicate connects with its community. AlienCon, the International Bigfoot Conference, Rose City, Emerald City — each event a different audience, a different energy, a different set of conversations that simply cannot happen any other way. There is no digital substitute for standing across a table from a fan who has been listening to the show for three years and finally gets to say what it meant to them in person. There is no podcast episode that replicates the moment someone picks up a Sasquatch figurine, turns it over in their hands, and asks their first real question about what the evidence actually shows. Those moments live on convention floors, and convention floors are closed.

What we want you to know — what we need you to know — is that the Sasquatch Syndicate has not gone quiet just because the world has. The research continues. The podcast continues. The creative development continues. The work of documenting and investigating the evidence that something extraordinary shares this planet with us does not require a convention hall. It requires commitment, and that is the one thing no pandemic can cancel.

We think about the fans who were planning to come to Seattle. The listeners who had their badges ready, their weekend mapped out, their excitement building for months around what was going to be our most polished ECCC appearance yet. That anticipation was real, and losing the chance to meet you this year is a genuine loss that we are not going to minimize by wrapping it in optimism we don't entirely feel right now.

So instead we will say simply: we are sorry. Not for circumstances outside anyone's control — no apology covers a pandemic — but for the disappointment of a moment that was building toward something and got interrupted before it arrived. We feel that interruption too. We were looking forward to Seattle as much as you were.

Emerald City Comic Con will return. When it does, we intend to be there. And when we walk back into that Washington State Convention Center — whenever the world decides it is safe to gather again in the way that events like this require — we will bring everything we have been building in the time between. Every lesson from three years on the convention circuit. Every piece of the cartoon and comic concept still in development. Every bit of the momentum that COVID-19 has paused but has not, and will not, extinguish.

To the ECCC team and ReedPop — thank you for fighting as hard as you did to make 2020 work, and for making the right call when fighting was no longer enough. The community you have built in Seattle is one of the great ones, and it will be waiting when the doors open again.

To our Sasquatch Syndicate community everywhere — stay safe. Stay curious. Keep asking the questions that don't have easy answers. The forests are still out there. The evidence is still accumulating. And we are still here, doing the work, waiting for the day we can bring it back to you in person.

We will see you on the other side of this.

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.