Beyond the Weekend: The Geordie Fans Who Keep the Convention Spirit Alive All Year

There is a particular feeling that arrives around 5pm on the Sunday of a convention. The hall starts emptying, the tape comes off the floor, and a few thousand people drift towards the Metro with a tote bag full of prints and a phone full of photos. Then Monday happens, the costume goes back in the wardrobe, and the whole thing sits quietly until next year.

Except, that is, for a stubborn and rather brilliant corner of the North East where that does not happen. Across Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland and up into Northumberland, there is a growing crowd of cosplayers, collectors, zine makers and charity organisers who treat the convention as a starting line rather than a day out. Their projects run all year round, and they are a big part of why the local scene feels less like a queue and more like a neighbourhood.

The zine that began on a dealers table

Rachael, a graphic designer from Heaton, printed forty copies of her first zine to sell at a con a couple of years back. She genuinely expected to sell eight, maybe ten, and bin the rest.

Instead she came home with an empty box and a waiting list. 'People were asking about issue two before I'd got the Metro back to town,' she says. 'That was the moment it stopped being a hobby project and started being a thing.'

'Panel Bleed' is now a quarterly, roughly two hundred copies a run, with contributors from Durham, North Shields, Whitley Bay and a couple of regulars down in Middlesbrough. It reviews comics, runs interviews with small-press artists and gives first-time writers a page to themselves. It pays for itself, and anything left over goes into free copies for people who have never bought a zine before.

Submissions for the next issue close in the spring, and the call-out is deliberately loose: reviews, artwork, opinion pieces, anything with a bit of personality. You do not need a portfolio. You need an idea and the willingness to be edited.

Hot glue, foam and a church hall in Byker

Two streets back from Shields Road, a small group runs a cosplay repair workshop on the first Saturday of every month. Tables out, glue guns on, a slightly alarming number of extension leads. There is a repair station for foam and Worbla, a sewing corner, a wig table and a 3D printer that someone's brother donated after a house move.

Materials cost about three quid, the hall is step-free, and there is a strict rule posted on the door: you do not have to be good at this, you just have to turn up.

'We get parents building cardboard armour for a nine-year-old, we get people doing their first ever build, and we get lads who've been sewing for fifteen years and want somewhere to sit,' says one of the volunteers. 'Nobody is judged. That is the entire point.'

The budget side matters as much as the craft. Charity shop rails along Shields Road and in Gateshead get scoured for coats and boots, and there is a running list of which shops are best for buckles, ribbon and anything that can pass as leather. A lot of the builds on display at the convention start life as a £4 jacket and a lot of optimism.

Accessibility runs through all of it. The group has spent the last couple of years pushing for quieter spaces, a slower photo line and clearer information about step-free routes and accessible toilets. It is quiet, unglamorous work, and it has made a real difference to people who otherwise would not have made it through the doors at all.

The charity tables with a waiting list

Less visible, but just as busy, are the collectors and cosplay groups who raise money for local causes. A signed-print raffle in aid of a food bank in Benwell. A Mandalorian clan that turns up to hospital charity days and school fetes in full kit, in all weathers. A group of comic collectors who run a monthly swap meet where the entry fee goes straight to the RVI children's ward.

None of it is glamorous. There are risk assessments, fundraising permissions, insurance questions and a lot of emails to venues. But the sums add up: a few hundred quid here, a few hundred there, and every penny stays local.

The practical advice from people who have done it is straightforward. Start small, partner with a cause you actually know something about, be honest about where the money goes, and speak to convention organisers early if you want to collect on-site. Nobody minds a bucket shake. They do mind finding out about it on the Friday.

Why the off-season is the whole point

The thing that comes through in every conversation is hospitality. Cups of tea. Lifts home. Someone lending a rivet gun at 9pm because a shoulder pad has fallen apart three days before the show. Fandom, in this part of the world, has always been a bit like that: warm, direct, mildly chaotic, and deeply unimpressed by anyone who takes themselves too seriously.

That is also what makes the convention work. A hall full of stalls is easy to book. A hall full of people who already know each other, who will point a nervous first-timer towards the right queue and tell them their build looks class, is much harder to manufacture. It is built in church halls and living rooms and group chats across the region, twelve months a year.

Four ways to get involved before the 2026 show

1. Write something. Zines and small-press anthologies across the region are permanently short of contributors. Reviews, illustrations, ranting about a cancelled series nobody else remembers. Send it in.
2. Come to a repair workshop. Turn up with a broken prop or nothing at all. Nobody will make you introduce yourself to the room.
3. Volunteer. Stewarding, accessibility support, queue management, bag drops. It is the fastest way to see the con from the other side, and most volunteers come back the following year.
4. Start the meetup you want to go to. Book a room, pick a Tuesday, put it in a group chat. That is genuinely how most of these started.

See you in the queue

The convention itself is the loud bit. It is the weekend where everybody's year of glue, ink, sewing and mild panic gets shown off to a hall full of people who properly get it. But the thing worth celebrating is what happens between shows: the workshops, the zines, the raffles, the group chats that never quite go quiet.

If you have been circling the scene for a while and never quite jumped in, consider this your nudge. Bring your half-finished build. Bring your badly spelled first draft. Somebody in a church hall in Byker will put the kettle on.