Heroes Convention 2022

Taking the Bigfoot Cartoon & Comic on Tour | Sasquatch Syndicate at HeroesCon Charlotte 2022

Let's be transparent right from the top — because the Sasquatch Syndicate has never been in the business of telling you what you want to hear when the truth is more interesting.

Heroes Convention 2022 was not our biggest crowd moment. It was not the triumphant, banner-waving, fans-lined-around-the-building debut of the Sasquatch Syndicate comic series that the most optimistic version of our pre-trip imagination had sketched out on the whiteboard. On the Chuck Geveshausen Completely Honest Convention Experience Scale, we're going to call it a five out of ten — decent, productive, educational, and worth every single bit of what we invested in it.

Just maybe not in the way we originally planned.

Here's what happened when a Pacific Northwest Bigfoot podcast and production team took their brand-new comic series to one of the oldest, most comics-serious conventions in America, staffed a booth that looked genuinely excellent, moved some merch, and discovered — completely unexpectedly — that the most valuable education of the weekend was going to come from the artists, writers, and storyboarders who were there for the craft and not the celebrity.

This is the story of a humbling weekend that became a launchpad. And those are almost always the best kind.

Heroes Convention: Forty Years of Comics First
Before we talk about what happened to us, it's worth understanding exactly what we walked into — because HeroesCon is not a general pop culture convention that happens to have a comics section. It is, as it has been since Shelton Drum founded it in Charlotte in 1982, a convention organized around comics almost to the exclusion of everything else.

No TV stars. No movie celebrities. No video game tournaments eating up real estate that could go to ink-on-paper storytellers. HeroesCon is comics, comics creators, comics artists, comics writers, comics retailers, and the fans who love them — pure and focused and completely unapologetic about what it is. After two years of COVID cancellations that left a noticeable gap in the community, the Fantastic 40th Anniversary show in June 2022 came back with energy and attendance to match: 50,000 persons attending, filling the Charlotte Convention Center with the specific electricity of people who are genuinely, deeply glad to be back in the same room together.

The guest list was built, as it always is at HeroesCon, almost entirely on creative reputation rather than Hollywood adjacency. Comic legends. Eisner Award winners. Inkers, writers, colorists, pencilers — the actual machinery of the art form, showing up in person and accessible to fans who wanted to talk craft rather than snap a selfie with someone from a streaming show.

This is the room we walked into with our Sasquatch Syndicate comic series, our merchandise, our booth, and our enthusiasm. And this is where the education began.

The Booth: Looked Great. We Did Okay.
The setup was solid. We're not going to understate that part — the Sasquatch Syndicate booth at HeroesCon 2022 was visually strong, well-organized, and represented the comic and the brand with the quality both deserved. The cartoon character lineup was on display, the comic series front and center, merchandise arranged in a way that invited engagement rather than just passive glancing.

The traffic was decent. The merch moved at a rate that justified the exercise. People stopped, looked, asked questions, picked things up, and — crucially — discovered for what was, for many of them, the first time that Bigfoot had a comic series. That moment of discovery — the slight double-take, the wait, this is actually a thing expression — was one we'd see repeatedly across the weekend and would come to understand as exactly the kind of reaction that plants seeds even when it doesn't immediately convert to a sale.

But let's be clear: the lines were not around the block. The crowd volume at our booth was not what we'd seen at AlienCon, where the audience came pre-loaded with enthusiasm for anything unexplained. HeroesCon attendees came for comics they already knew, creators they already followed, art styles they already loved. A Bigfoot investigation podcast with a new comic series was an unknown quantity in that room — and unknown quantities at a deeply comics-savvy convention require a different kind of conversation than the one we were practiced at having.

We were better at the mic than the Artist Alley. And HeroesCon was very much an Artist Alley kind of room. That gap between what we were and what the room wanted was not a failure. It was data. Very useful, very honest, very productive data delivered over three days by 50,000 people who knew exactly what they liked.

The Unexpected Education: When the Artists Started Talking
Here is where HeroesCon 2022 transformed from a decent-but-not-spectacular event into something genuinely invaluable.  The conversation we had not anticipated — the one that snuck up on us across the weekend and kept getting richer the more we leaned into it — was the conversation with the creative professionals. The storyboarders. The artists. The writers. The people who make comics for a living and were at HeroesCon because this is their world, their community, their annual gathering of peers.

When those people came to our booth — and they did, with the particular kind of curiosity that creative professionals bring to anything that is trying to do something they haven't seen before — the conversation was entirely different from anything we were used to having on a convention floor.

They were not asking about Bigfoot evidence. They were not sharing witness accounts. They were not debating the Patterson-Gimlin film.

They were looking at the character design and asking about the visual language choices. They were examining the storyboard structure and talking about pacing. They were thinking about the hero team dynamic and suggesting narrative frameworks we hadn't considered. They were engaging with the comic as a comic — as a piece of sequential art with its own internal logic, its own visual grammar, its own creative problems to solve.

And in doing so, they taught us things about our own project that we didn't know we needed to know.

The storyboarder who spent twenty minutes at the booth dissecting how the panel transitions worked — or didn't — and offering specific technical suggestions about how to carry momentum from one page to the next. The writer who asked about the character motivations behind the hero team and pushed back productively on the mythology structure in ways that made the whole concept stronger. The artist who looked at the character lineup, pointed at specific design elements, and said this works, this doesn't quite work yet, here's why with the direct honesty that only someone who has solved these problems themselves can offer.
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We came to HeroesCon with a comic. We left with a much better understanding of what our comic needed to become.  That is not a five-out-of-ten outcome dressed up as a ten. That is genuinely what happened. The crowd volume was middling. The creative education was exceptional. Both things are true simultaneously and neither cancels the other out.

About the Art, Not the Mic
This was the core lesson of HeroesCon 2022, and we want to say it plainly because it shaped everything we did with the comic afterward:

The Sasquatch Syndicate built its identity behind the microphone. The podcast, the interviews, the witness testimonies, the research conversations — all of it lives in the audio space, in the spoken word, in Chuck's ability to draw a story out of someone and let it breathe. That's the core product and it's a very good one.

But a comic is not a podcast. A comic is a visual medium with its own demands, its own craft requirements, its own community of practitioners who have spent careers thinking about how sequential art works. Walking into HeroesCon and expecting the comic to be received the same way a podcast appearance is received was like showing up to a jazz festival with a country album — not wrong, not bad, just requiring a translation layer that we hadn't fully built yet.

HeroesCon forced us to build that layer. It forced us to engage with the comic as a comic rather than as a podcast with pictures attached. And the creative professionals who wandered over and asked hard questions about the art did us an enormous favor by treating our project seriously enough to critique it honestly.

The mic is Chuck's home. The page is a different territory. HeroesCon 2022 was the weekend we learned to respect the difference.

Opening Doors: The Convention Circuit Expands
Here is where the five-out-of-ten weekend reveals its actual value on the ledger.

The conversations at HeroesCon — with convention staff, with fellow exhibitors, with the broader community of people who move through the comic convention circuit — opened doors that the Sasquatch Syndicate had not previously had access to. Other conventions became aware of us. Interest came from event organizers who had seen the concept and could see its potential even if the HeroesCon crowd hadn't fully warmed to it yet.

The comic itself, by existing and being present and being visible at one of the most respected conventions in the country, earned a kind of credibility that comes only from showing up in the right rooms and doing the work. Not a home run. Not a sellout crowd. But a legitimate at-bat at a very serious stadium, and a contact that kept the ball in play.
That is the long game of convention touring, and HeroesCon was an important early chapter in it. The Sasquatch Syndicate message — that there's a Bigfoot story to tell that works in comics, in animation, in a hero team format that brings new audiences to the research — had been planted in a community that knows how to evaluate those stories. Some of those seeds are still growing.

What Charlotte Gave Us
Charlotte itself was a fine host — a real city with real food and real character, the kind of place that the convention circuit sometimes overlooks because it isn't New York or San Diego but has its own particular energy that rewards the people who pay attention to it.

The Charlotte Convention Center handled 50,000 people returning to HeroesCon after two pandemic years with the organized efficiency of an event that has been doing this since 1982 and knew how to gear back up. The first anniversary show back after COVID always carries extra weight — the relief of being together again, the slightly raw enthusiasm of people who went without this thing they love for too long — and the Fantastic 40th had that quality in every corner of the floor.

Being part of that return, even from a booth that was finding its footing in unfamiliar territory, felt like the right thing to do. You show up. You participate. You contribute to the energy of the room even when the room's energy isn't entirely pointed at you. That's what the convention circuit requires and it's what we gave.

The Honest Scorecard
We promised honesty at the top and we're going to close with it.

Heroes Convention 2022 was not Sasquatch Syndicate's biggest hit. The crowd reception at the booth was solid but not spectacular — a five out of ten moment in a run that has included some genuine tens. The comic had not yet found its full comic convention voice, and HeroesCon's audience was sophisticated enough to notice that gap and not fill it with politeness.

What it was: the most productive creative education we received in a single weekend from people who knew what they were talking about. A market research exercise conducted by 50,000 comics experts who gave us honest signals about what the project needed. A foot in the door of a convention circuit that would go on to give the Sasquatch Syndicate opportunities the AlienCon world alone couldn't have provided. And a reminder that sometimes the most valuable weekend is the one where you learn the most rather than sell the most.

The cartoon got better because of HeroesCon.  The comic idea got sharper.
The next convention floor we walked onto, we knew things we hadn't known in Charlotte.

That's a win. It just took a minute to look like one.    We won't sugar coat it though we were a fish out of water in a big Sea.   We will rethink our strategy on this going forward.​

The story — on the page, behind the mic, and everywhere in between — continues.

By Chanelle Elaine Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.