Epic guest list anchors annual Phoenix Fan Fusion convention

Ask Joe Boudrie what’s new at this year’s Phoenix Fan Fusion, and he immediately goes full-on fanboy. Not surprising, since he helped organize the annual pop-culture and comic con for almost two decades — and has been a die-hard comic book collector for even longer.

With the enthusiasm of a caffeinated hobbit, Boudrie launches into a rapid-fire rundown of the new delights awaiting the thousands of Arizona geeks who will invade the Phoenix Convention Center this weekend. More arcade games. WWE-style entrances for pro wrestling fans. An expanded tabletop gaming zone for those rolling for initiative. More than 1,500 hours of programming. And one of its most star-studded list of celebrity guests yet, featuring names like Marisa Tomei, Simon Pegg and “Star Wars” prequel actor Hayden Christensen.

“We haven’t had a guest list this epic in just about as long as I can remember,” Boudrie says.

In short, Phoenix Fan Fusion 2025 is a three-day Valhalla of geeky fun, cosplay and fandom that’s nerdier than ever.

One big change to this year’s Fan Fusion you won’t find in its colorful, 124-page programming guide: Boudrie is now overseeing the event as convention director. Last fall, Fan Fusion founder Matt Solberg left the role after 23 years helming the event dating back to its humble origins as Phoenix Cactus Comicon in 2002. (He’s still the owner of Square Egg Entertainment, the company that owns the con.)

No “Game of Thrones”-style coup was involved in the leadership change. Solberg stepped aside to focus on other aspects of the con and gave command to Boudrie, Fan Fusion’s vice president and longtime programming director.

“Matt reached out and asked if I’d be interested in taking on the challenge,” Boudrie says. “I told him, ‘I’ve never regretted saying yes to anything you’ve asked over the years and I’m not going to start.’”

Now Boudrie’s captaining the ship. And it’s set to warp. His continuing mission? To grow Fan Fusion at a time when more Arizona cons than ever are battling for local geeks’ attention and dollars, and maybe eventually bring it back to the peak popularity it enjoyed nearly a decade ago.

Fan Fusion 2025 this weekend, June 6 to 8, is the first step on that quest — and Valley geeks are already hyped for the event.

‘Phoenix’s hometown con’

It’s been a long, strange trek for Fan Fusion over the past 23 years. Launched by Solberg in 2002 as Phoenix Cactus Comicon — a one-day, one-room event at a Best Western in Ahwatukee with 32 vendor tables and 432 attendees — it bounced around the Valley while growing steadily.

By 2010, it made a superhero landing at the Phoenix Convention Center and morphed into a blockbuster pop culture convention and an annual juggernaut, drawing celebs, cosplayers and a legion of fans each year. Attendance doubled overnight, rocketing into the tens of thousands and increasing each year.

Matt Hinds, a longtime attendee and co-founder of the Blue Ribbon Army fan group, says the event became a cornerstone of Arizona geek culture.

“It became Phoenix’s hometown con where you could go in costume, geek out and walk up to celebrities like Peter Mayhew and go, ‘What’s up, Chewbacca?’” Hinds says. “It’s been the biggest event of the year.”

And Boudrie was there from day one. Tipped by a flier at a local comic shop, he attended with his son, Christopher Clark (so named for big-screen Superman/Clark Kent actor Christopher Reeve).

“It was a pretty small convention,” Boudrie recalls. “I remember picking up an X-Jet from the ‘X-Men’ cartoon series for him from one of the vendors.”

Still, it made an impression, and Boudrie — a comic book aficionado who estimates he has “6,000 or 7,000” titles in his personal collection — kept coming back. Four years later, he volunteered behind the scenes, becoming director of programming in 2006. Like Professor X running the X-Men, he led a sprawling crew that managed various programming tracks at the con, ranging from authors and celebrity guests to cosplay and gaming.

“I had hands-on experience with every aspect of (the con),” Boudrie says. Turns out it was also on-the-job training for becoming Fan Fusion’s convention director.

Highs and lows

Phoenix Comicon’s attendance soared like Iron Man in the mid-2010s, peaking at 106,096 in 2016. Though more than 80,000 people showed up in 2017, the numbers haven’t hit the record turnout since.

That same year, a series of unforeseen issues began plaguing the event. In 2017, local resident Matthew Sterling smuggled a cache of firearms into the convention center, aiming to kill Power Rangers actor Jason David Frank, a guest that year. Thanks to a police tip, Sterling was apprehended before a potential tragedy could unfold.

In response, Square Egg Entertainment, the event’s parent company, imposed stricter security, banning all cosplay weapons and props at the behest of Phoenix Convention Center officials. Con-goers faced long delays under 110-degree heat due to thorough screenings. (Square Egg has since relaxed its policies.)

Then, after San Diego Comic-Con began taking legal actions over the “comic-con” name against competing geek events nationwide, Square Egg preemptively rebranded their event as Phoenix Comic Fest in 2018, before it ultimately became Fan Fusion.

For some, it will always be Phoenix Comicon, even though its signage says otherwise.

“It’s called Fan Fusion now, but I still refer to it as Comicon,” Hinds says.
Fan Fusion’s biggest setback came in 2020, courtesy of the pandemic. Like many annual Arizona events, Square Egg was forced to pull the plug for multiple years. The con finally returned in 2022 and local geeks have been legion at the Phoenix Convention Center each year, though nowhere near record-breaking levels.

Boudrie says attendance hit around 48,000 people in 2023 and “just under 52,000” last year. That’s a solid turnout and well above other local cons, but still only half of 2016’s zenith.

Boudrie says record-breaking attendance is something he’d “love to see again someday,” but admits Fan Fusion will have to do much more growth and expansion.

The good news? There’s evidence of both in recent years, including at this weekend’s edition.

Anime, gaming and grappling

If there was a silver lining to the pandemic, it was giving geeks everywhere time to find new obsessions. Case in point: anime and both tabletop and video gaming.

Each pursuit has exploded in popularity. Anime blew up like Vegeta going Super Saiyan. Demand for the genre on digital platforms more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, per Parrot Analytics, a data research firm. Tabletop and video gaming saw a similar boom, with the latter hitting $27 billion in 2023 and projected to pass $49 billion by 2029.

“Since people were limited as to what they could get out and do, playing game with friends was something easy to do,” Boudrie says.

More people are rolling dice, painting minis and binge-watching anime than ever, and Fan Fusion’s embracing that momentum. (They’re not the only local geek event to do so, as the number of anime cons in Arizona has tripled in recent years and the annual Game On Expo has substantially increased in size.)

Anime programming and voice actor appearances at Fan Fusion have increased threefold since 2019. Boudrie says the tabletop gaming area and Arcade Oasis areas have already doubled in size since being introduced in 2022.

“Tabletop gaming culture has been exploding over the last few years, and we’ve wanted to lean into that,” Boudrie says. “With (GameTabletopia), we’re moving into a bigger hall (at Phoenix Convention
Center). We’ve got about a 45% to 50% growth in that area in the number of play tables and exhibitors. We also added another 46 video game cabinets (to Arcade Oasis) this year.”
Another fandom getting a bigger spotlight at Fan Fusion? Professional wrestling. The con is tag-teaming with local indie promotion Phoenix Championship Wrestling to create the Slam Fusion Arena inside a large Phoenix Convention Center ballroom. Matches will take place daily and congoers can stage their own over-the-top WWE-style entrances, complete with music.

Move over, Macho Man.

“The last couple of years, we’ve added live wrestling to the show,” Boudrie says. “I honestly was very surprised at how popular it has been, so we’ve put it into a bigger space this year.”

Boudrie says longtime Fan Fusion attendees shouldn’t expect any dramatic changes to the event under his leadership as convention director. “I’m not planning on it. I feel like the directions we’re going, the strategic moves we’ve made over the last couple of years have been strong,” Boudrie says. “Stuff like developing the tabletop gaming area, that’s resonating with fans. We’re seeing a lot of excitement. So we’re going with stuff like that. I’m not sure what new things might be on the horizon, but we’ll handle them as they come.”
Fan Fusion will remain firmly rooted in geek culture, he adds, even as it welcomes more pop-culture stars like Marisa Tomei, who has played May Parker, Spider-Man’s aunt, in five Marvel films since 2016.

“Everybody that’s involved with the show are geeks ourselves,” Boudrie says. “And we love it so much that it’s always going to be in our DNA.”

The numbers for Fan Fusion 2025 are looking good — weekend full event passes have sold out for the first time in recent memory.

“We’re doing well for this year and hopefully the folks will decide to come out,” Boudrie says. “It’s difficult to judge until we actually get into the show days what attendance is going to be like.”

Ultimately, he hopes Fan Fusion offers more than just panels and photo ops. “There are many people out there looking for something fun and a way to get together and kind of shut out all the craziness and chaos of the real world right now,” Boudrie says. “Just somewhere to be with their own community, be themselves and not have to worry about anything except having a good time.”

Phoenix Fan Fusion 2025. Friday to Sunday at Phoenix Convention Center, 100 N. Third Street. Daily admission is $44 to $65.