Denver Comic Con has to change name
Organizers of the nonprofit Denver Comic Con will change the name of their event to Denver Pop Culture Con before next year’s gathering, which returns to the Colorado Convention Center on May 31 to June 2, 2019.
The move comes amid a national legal battle for the “comic con” trademark on behalf of San Diego’s ComicCon International. That company, also a nonprofit, won a lawsuit against Salt Lake Comic Con late last year, according to the San Diego UnionTribune, netting San Diego’s ComicCon $20,000 in damages.
An August ruling also ordered Salt Lake Comic Con to pay San Diego ComicCon $4 million in legal fees for the case — a ruling that Salt Lake Comic Con has appealed.
However, the leaders of Denver’s Pop Culture Classroom, which produces and programs the Denver Comic Con, said they were considering a name change long before the current legal battles started.
“We have never received a ceaseanddesist letter from (San Diego ComicCon),” said Sam Fuqua, executive director of Pop Culture Classroom. “But it would be in the public record that they have challenged the supplemental trademark we were granted for Denver Comic Con a couple years ago.”
That challenge is on hold pending the outcome of San Diego ComicCon’s case against Salt Lake Comic Con.
“We’re moving forward with a name that better describes our event.”
Denver Comic Con, which held its seventh outing in June, drew more than 100,000 attendees to downtown Denver’s Colorado Convention Center on June 1517. The event featured hundreds of individual popculture panels, contests, ce lebrity guests, authors and — yes — comics and comic artists.
“We had more and higherprofile comic guests in 2018 than we had in past years, and we’re going to build on that in 2019 and beyond,” Fuqua said. “So we are absolutely committed to comicbook culture, and we’re not backing away from that at all. We just want our name to represent better all the things that happen here.”
Pop Culture Classroom is also using its convention’s namechange announcement to “soft announce” its latest expansion, Reno Pop Culture Con. The new event will take over RenoSparks Convention Center on Nov. 810, 2019, although plenty of particulars still have to be decided, Fuqua said.