With vaccines rolling out more widely in the United States and daily new COVID-19 cases getting progressively lower, San Diego Comic-Con has been scheduled as an in-person event for later this year. However, the organizers opted to do it on Thanksgiving weekend, and unless you live locally, attending would mean missing Thanksgiving itself.
Comic-Con Special Edition will take place at the San Diego Convention Center as a three-day event from November 26 through November 28. That means it starts the day after Thanksgiving, assuming the health situation allows for it.
“It is our hope that by Fall, conditions will permit larger public gatherings,” Comic-Con International said in a statement.
The organization also emphasized in the statement that despite online-only events replacing the in-person ones, it has experienced revenue loss that led to pay cuts for its employees. It’s hoping that can be turned around with Comic-Con Special Edition, but the decision to host it on Thanksgiving weekend almost certainly means a great deal of local San Diego workers at places like restaurants and hotels will also be forced to work over that weekend instead of spending time with their families.
Some other major 2021 conventions are still up in the air–at least publicly–such as E3. According to Los Angeles city documents, the in-person component has been canceled and replaced with digital events. Separate digital events from various game publishers replaced E3 in 2020, and the ESA told GameSpot that it was “transforming” E3 for 2021, in some form or another.
