A celebration of all things geek, hosted by the Geeks and Gamers club at Fresno State, brought 3,000 people to the comic convention, filling up the campus with hundreds of different anime, cartoon, super heros and villans.
FresCon was held in six different buildings throughout the campus over the course of two days. Nine rooms were open on Saturday and five rooms were open on Sunday dedicated solely to FresCon.
This event had crowds of people shuffling in and out of rooms dressed in their favorite comic book characters. Vendors were also selling comic books, action figures, clothing, hair bows, stuffed figures, buttons and more.
Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Krulder, FresCon Coordinator and a member of the Geeks and Gamers club, said the event last year had over 2,500 attendees and this year’s attendance has exceeded over 3,000.
“Our goal now, that the event is getting so big, is to start a separate student organization for the event,” Krulder said. “It helps out our club focus on its club events.”
This year was the second time the event was hosted and it received a lot of support.
“It’s been really nice to see the response from the school and the community,” Krulder said. “You take all this time planning an event and then you actually see people enjoying it, sometimes you forgot why you did it in the first place.”
The event also hosted a cosplay completion for adults and children with a panel of five judges. First place winner for the adult competition won $100, second place won $50 and third place won a t-shirt.
Taylor Kruger organizer and judge of the cosplay competition and a member of Geeks and Gamers club, said they had over 50 people sign up for the cosplay this year.
“It was exciting — so exciting,” Kruger said. “We excepted 500 people to show up last year and we had 2,500 and this year we had more than that.”
Tia Yang, a Fresno State student who dressed up as Catwoman was up Sunday morning at 5 a.m. getting her costume ready for the event.
“We went to Party City and I grabbed the first thing that I saw. It was very last minute,” Yang said. “So far I’m having fun, they did an amazing job.”
The only thing Yang wished that the club would have done was advertise the event more, other than that she said she planned to come again the following year as a different character.
Kruger said the event was for everyone.
“We are a very accepting community and that anyone can get involved there’s nothing to be scared of, just let your inner geek out and let your true self shine,” Kruger said.
The Fresno State Geek and Gamers club plan to have a separate student organization plan FresCon again around the same time next year.