Dan Farr: comic con crusader.

• Author: Felix, Devin
• Position: Around Utah

Dan Farr long suspected that Utah would be a great place for a comic con. He grew up in Salt Lake and knew that people here take their science fiction and fantasy very seriously. But even he couldn't foresee the powder keg of fandom he was about to ignite when he formed Dan Farr Productions and began assembling the state's first comic con. "I just thought, let's give it a shot," he says. "When we started, we anticipated 8,000 to 15,000 people, and if we were really optimistic we'd have 20,000 people show up."

By the time the Salt Palace doors closed on Sept. 7, roughly 75,000 people had attended, a fire marshal's order had temporarily forced organizers to stop letting more people into the building, and the inaugural Salt Lake Comic Con had shattered the record for the largest first-year convention of its kind.

Comic con fans had barely hung up their masks and caught their breath before Farr announced that he'd be putting on the Salt Lake Comic Con Fan Xperience--another convention just a few months in the future that would use double the floor space and feature an impressive lineup of celebrity guests.

It was a bold move, and a risky one. Many cities several times larger than Salt Lake don't have more than one comic con in a year, and many people were skeptical that there would be enough interest in a second convention. But Dan Farr isn't one to play it safe or let skepticism stand in his way. So why did he decide to put on another comic con event just seven months after the first one? "I could come up with a long, sophisticated market research business reason, but I'd be bluffing. The reality is it sounded fun and we didn't want to wait a year."

Farr's confidence was shown to be well founded in April, when FanX brought in more than 100,000 attendees...