Mad Event Management, which runs Long Beach Comic Con and Long Beach Comic Expo, is launching a New Jersey show, New Jersey Comic Expo, November 21-22. We caught up with Martha Donato, President of Mad Event Management, to ask her about the new show.   

What’s the venue?
The venue is the New Jersey Convention and Exposition Center in Edison, NJ. That’s centrally located in the middle of the state, easy to get to from Manhattan, right across the river from Staten Island.

What kind of audience are you trying to appeal to?
We’re trying to appeal to the hardcore comic fan, and then the general audience who are just interested in the genre.  That’s cosplay, those who are interested in comics, anime, science fiction; the Star Wars movie is coming out two weeks later.

What kind of guests are you going to have?
We have a really nice guest list, we’re really proud of that. We’ve got Chris Claremont; Garth Ennis and he’s got his Preacher AMC show coming up soon; Mark Bagley (Spider-Man); Shane Davis; Ethan Van Sciver (Green Lantern); we’ve got Greg Land  making his first Northeast appearance. That’s a big one for us, really excited about it. And then some local, New York people: Frank Tieri, Jim Calafiore, Dennis Calero. It’s going to be a really good comics show.

Are you doing anything on the media side?
We’ve got Drea de Matteo, we call her Jersey royalty, she being from The Sopranos, and then she did a nice run on Sons of Anarchy. (She was Adriana in The Sopranos.) And we have Rob Bruce, he’s on AMC’s Comic Book Men. And Tommy Walker, he’s on Daredevil, the Netflix show, so he’ll be there. 

And for cosplay we have Destiny Nickelsen, and Vegas Powergirl coming out. We’re still working on that, but we’ll have a nice cosplay representation as well.

How big is the venue? What kind of attendance are you looking for?
The venue is 150,000 square feet. It’s a nice sized venue. Nothing like NYCC, but they started small, too. We’re hoping for 7,000 to 10,000 people.

How big is the Long Beach show now?
The Long Beach show has grown very nicely. This last show this last month was a big increase in attendance year over year.   

To what?
I don’t usually give out attendance numbers, trying to avoid that. It’s like a rat race, you can’t win that.