Super Jersey Comic Expo on Friday announced it will hold its 2025 show at a new venue, The Dome at Adventure Crossing in Jackson, New Jersey, April 26 and 27, in news being announced first on ComicsXF.
The move comes after the 2023 show had to make some rough last-minute pivots that resulted in it refunding all its ticket revenue to keep it at its previous venue of three years, organizers say.
According to co-founder Paul Brown, six weeks before that Oct. 28 show, the Bell Works in Holmdel told show organizers it had leased out the space for Super Jersey to another client. This resulted in them morphing the ticketed Super Jersey into a free show spread out across the public atrium of Bell Works, a former Bell Labs building converted into indoor retail, dining, office space, meeting space, etc.
Unsurprisingly, that led to record attendance of more than 3,500, but it also led to no revenue.
“We fell on the sword, made the show free and lost all ticket revenue,” Brown told ComicsXF. “Fifteen dollars per ticket, we had about 3,500 attendees in one day. You do the math.”
CXF has reached out to Bell Works seeking comment.
After some time to decompress and, presumably, scream into a pillow for a day or two, the organizers — Brown, AJ Blair and Stan Kalucki — began to search for a new home.
“We had to adapt or die,” Brown said.
This wasn’t the first time Super Jersey had faced adversity. The show was originally supposed to debut March 21, 2020. Brown even went on WMQ&A — what is now known as The ComicsXF Interview Podcast — to promote it.
Take one guess what got in the way.
That first show was postponed three times before it finally happened Nov. 6, 2021. Since then, guests have included comics legends like Jim Steranko, Larry Hama, Mike DeCarlo, Rick Leonardi, Bob Budiansky and Carl Potts, along with numerous vendors, cosplayers, fans and Kevin Smith-adjacent New Jersey comics personality Ming Chen.
Super Jersey fills the void left by comic conventions that disappeared with the pandemic or had gone away before then: Asbury Park Comic Con, East Coast Comic Con in Secaucus, New Jersey Comic Expo in Edison, Atlantic City Boardwalk Con, etc. True, New York and Philadelphia are just a bridge away, but there’s something about being able to thumb through dollar bins, admire cosplayers and attend creator panels in your own backyard.
Still wanting to fill that void, the team examined other venues and settled on Adventure Crossing, a 60,000-square-foot indoor/outdoor sports complex that opened last year in Jackson, home of Six Flags Great Adventure and just about smack dab in the middle of the state.
“After months of talking, we felt the people at Adventure Crossing were just as eager to work with us as we were them,” Brown said.
Adventure Crossing is looking to build a convention center in addition to its current space, which Super Jersey would move to if everything works out, Brown said.
The move to Jackson includes an expansion to a two-day show and a return to spring, which was when the original show would have been if it weren’t for the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down the world.
“We aim to be a high-end, affordable comic convention experience that actually focuses on comics and comic properties,” Brown said.
For more information as it is announced, visit superjerseyexpo.com and sign up for its newsletter.
Dan Grote is the editor-in-chief of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts WMQ&A: The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Winston Wisdom.
