Learn how to budget a Comic Con in this fourth post in a series about Comic Cons.

As a Library Media Specialist, we are all too familiar with budgets (or lack of). We are constantly budgeting funds, time, space, and resources. The same remains true, and is just as crucial, when planning a Comic Con.

Budgeting Comic Con Space

When hosting a Comic Con, space is a need.

A Comic Con can’t be held in just one place. The scope of the event requires multiple rooms, like any conference we attend as adults. Like any conference, it needs to be spread out. Stations needs to be placed in rooms that will best meet their needs.

Each school is unique, and how my team and I set up the flow of our Comic Con may not be easily applicable to your building. Below, are our space considerations:

• The fields for outdoor games like quidditch, superhero academy, Jedi training camp, and character camp. If you intend to have outdoor events, have a backup plan. They gymnasium and PreK classrooms are our backup plans.
• We use the cafeteria for BreakoutEDU or robot races. These activities are easy to breakdown and set up. This makes it easy to stop and provide lunch for over 500 students.
• We use the music room for yoga. The openness of the room makes it easy to comfortably fit 20+ kids who need to be spaced out.
• We use the art room for the makerspace activities. The tables in the art room conducive to having out four different buckets of building materials.
• We use the lower library for reading and the upper library for writing.
• The Spanish room works out to be great for giant games. The tables can easily be moved for all of the floor activities.
• We have intervention rooms that are perfect for the science activities. The tables in these rooms are science lab tables and match the purpose.
• We use our breakout spaces and hallways for photo booths.
• We used just a couple of classrooms for the PreK stations and two of the other stations for the older students.

Even if you don’t have the same rooms or furniture as we do, it will work.

The important things is that each space meets the needs of the activities you planned. Each indoor space will need to accommodate one classroom of up to 25 kids (or the number you have).

From our experience, don’t double up classes. There just isn’t enough space and it causes confusion and chaos.

The only time we break this rule is when stations are outside or in the cafe.

We consider the outside to be an area with three different stations for the grade to cycle through.

The cafeteria is large enough to house an entire grade level. This is one reason why its perfect for housing a breakout or robot races.

Budgeting Comic Con Time

Which brings us to how to plan out the stations. The exact schedule that we used may not work for you. You may have a different number of classes in each grade. You may have a different grade level band in your school.

What I can suggest is that you have 1 station for each class to be in at a time.

Trust me. Our first year, we doubled up classes. It was a headache.

Having one station for each class makes the movement easier.

We also suggest that classes move through stations in some sort of order.

We did this two ways. One is that they move through the building from the third to second to first floor, along the hallways and stairwells to decrease congestion.

This also keeps the transition time down to a minimum.

The other way we did this is that we have clusters of stations in the same area. The third floor has giant games, photo booth, and science.

We have three classes per grade. We create three station clusters. Each grade moves through one station cluster at a time.

Clustering also helps with transitioning between stations and station clusters.

We schedule grades for 45 minutes a cluster or 15 minutes a station. We build in travel time when they move from one station cluster to the next.

Below, is the overview schedule, showing that each grade moved from wing to wing, or cluster areas. second floor to first floor, etc.

Budget Comic Con Resources

Comic Con resources are materials and staff. I have a few recommendations.

• Print and copy only what you need. When choosing to have printable stations, wait to photocopy until after the activities firmly decide upon. We were a little overzealous our first year and had a lot of extras to recycle.
• Recycle materials. If you have coloring stations, use your junky markers and crayons. Anything that you are not too concerned about losing, breaking, or not being able to use again. With an entire school using the materials for one day, they will just be shot at the end of the day.
• Use what you have on hand. If you plan to have stations where the students will build characters, use whatever materials you already have –> LEGOs, playdoh, paper, etc.
• Use your staff sparingly. This is supposed to be a fun day. Try not to make the activities too complicated for them to run. If you can have multiple staff members at a station, do it. It makes the day that much more enjoyable for them. If you can leave some stations unstaffed to provide more adult support in others, do it. Stations like photo booths and reading really don’t need to be staffed.

Also make sure staff get a planning and lunch period!

Budgeting Comic Cons: About Funding

You can make your Comic Con as low or high budget as you want and need. To be honest, you can spend $0 and have a truly spectacular event! If you use the resource suggestions above, you do not have to spend any money!

If you do spend money on the Comic Con, follow these suggestions:

• Purchase items that can be reused over the years and for different events. It made sense for us to buy a basketball hoop because we can use it for assemblies and other incentive events.
• Purchase items that cannot be donated, borrowed, or made. For us, it made sense to purchase giant checkers and tic tac toe sets. It was too time consuming to make them. We lucked out by finding them for cheap at Walgreens.
• You want your students to be able to bring items home. You may spend money on comics, glow stick bracelets, playdoh, or stickers.

Here are some additional ideas, that we have used, to get necessary items.

• We bring in our own children’s things from home. I bring in my son’s tunnels, and cardboard bricks (for the Iron Man Leap).
• Ask for donations. Send home a notice to parents requesting donations. This is a great way to get bubbles, glow sticks, shaving cream (secret messages), playdoh, and cups.
• Reach out to local comic book shops for items they’d like to unload or are willing to sell for cheap. A great idea we got from our Comic Con experts was to contact them before May 5 (a huge comic book sale day) to arrange something after that day to help unload inventory and/or help you get comics perfect for the ages you teach.
• Reach out to the PTO. Sometimes the PTO is more than happy to donate funds, time, or help get the word out about items you need. They may even be able to get an author or artist in for the day.
• See how the before and after care program may like to help. They frequently have a volunteer mission and look for alternative activities for the students. They made all of our photo booths and props!
• If you have a family resource center or outreach in your building, they may have funds they’d like to spend. Some of their money comes from Title I funds and they are more than happy to support your event. They bought us some Hulk Hands, Corn hole, self scoring basketball set.
• Host a fundraiser. We use a portion of the book fair sales to buy miscellaneous items. Recently, in a Facebook group, some folks said they fundraise by selling lollipops, scrunchies, and other hot ticket items they can get on the cheap!
• Reach out to the community. You may be able to find a local artist or author who would like to come in for free to share their skills. You may have parents who would be willing to share their science or math expertise!

Just do not feel like you have to spend money to host a Comic Con. If you do decide to spend money, the good news is that some of the items you will be able to reuse the following years. For example, we use the bubble machine every year.

One Last Thing

One thing I did not mention about budgeting for your Comic Con, is making sure that you budget time to plan, organize, set up, and take down. I will talk about that a bit more in the next post!