As a banking center of the southeast, Charlotte, N.C., has been hit hard by the economic downturn. So several retailers said they were pleased that sales at the 2009 Heroes Con either held level or dipped only slightly from previous years.

“It’s no secret that Shelton Drumm runs one of the best shows in the country,” said Boom! Studios publisher Ross Richie. “Even in an economic downturn the fans came out and great fans they are. We had a great time and did very well. With Boom! Kids getting such a great reception, and Heroes Con known for being such a family-friendly show, it was a great match.”

Heroes organizer Dustin Harbin also estimated that attendance was roughly equal to previous years, though the convention was less crowded after moving to a larger space in the Charlotte Convention Center.

“Attendance is good,” Harbin said on the show’s final day. “It looks like we have as many or more than last year.”

Heroes Con also was in a sort of comics convention duel with Wizard World Philadelphia, held this year on the same weekend as Heroes Con. Despite the competition, Heroes brought in a full slate of top comics stars, including Jeff Smith, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Mark Waid and many others. Heroes Con even had a celebrity in attendance, as actor Scott Adsit, better known as Pete from 30 Rock, spent all weekend going to panels and filling a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-themed sketchbook.

“We had no trouble building the guest list,” Harbin said. Asked about Wizard World, he added, “We’re friendly with every convention in the country, with a couple of exceptions.”

There weren’t any big book releases at the show, though AdHouse Books’ Johnny Hiro and Remake fared well, and Top Shelf Production’s Far Arden continued strong sales from MoCCA.

Heroes served as the public unveiling of Wednesday Comics, essentially an enormous 16-page comics section on newsprint that DC will release in July. The experiment features a huge array of talent, including Neil Gaiman and Paul Pope.

Most of the news, however, came on the digital publishing front. Rantz Hoseley, the editor of Comic Book Tattoo, debuted a new digital comics distribution system, Longbox, on Sunday with a live launch at the show. Longbox offers a single place to download and store new comics, as opposed to the current system on iPhones and iPods of downloading a different app for each comic.

[Editor’s note: Van Jensen works for Top Shelf. Cheryl Harris contributed the following information.] Top Shelf Productions also announced that it has launched a new Amazon Kindle initiative. All five of Andy Runton’s Owly graphic novels are now available on the Kindle, with more Top Shelf books soon to be launched on the e-reader.

At a Saturday panel discussing how comics are now penetrating digital media platforms such as the iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle, panelists Van Jensen of Top Shelf, Runton, Hoseley and Jeff Webber, IDW’s director of ePublishing, stressed that this was still a very new territory with much development occurring both in getting publishers involved and in the form comics themselves will take in these platforms.

Runton, a former interface designer, noted that artists would need to become familiar with digital media because how a comic appears on a printed page is different from how it appears on devices such as the Kindle and the iPhone. For comics being developed directly for the digital market, there will be different rules in place for their design. However, all the panelists were hopeful that in the coming years, the experimentation going on now would lead to some standardization of implementation.

Webber pointed out that the Kindle had been designed to read text, not graphics, and Jensen and Runton explained that while the device is in its infancy, Top Shelf’s black and white books lend themselves well to reproduce on the Kindle’s 6-inch screen.

The panelists agreed that digital media was a way to grow the market for comics, with IDW’s success with Star Trek and Transformers comics on the iPhone as an example. Webber stated that, for these two lines, there were as many or more digital copies as print copies and using digital media could help stem piracy.

One audience member mentioned that he’d been asked about publishing his comics on the iPhone and wanted to know what to look for in the contract. The panelists urged creators to have a lawyer look at contracts and make sure there are limits for scope and time.

Another issue is that of exclusivity. Hoseley said ideally a creator would want a non-exclusivity contract so that he is not limited to one distributor, while Webber said exclusivity could offer some benefits.

A veiw of the crowd and floor at Heroes Con 09
Artist Mark Bagley reads a mock-up of DC's eagerly awaited WEDNESDAY COMICS.