Taking place in the heart of downtown San Francisco at Moscone West Center, Fan Expo SF made its debut on Black Friday, November 25th, 2022. Moscone Center has hosted other entertainment shows that have long since departed, such as WonderCon and the PlayStation Experience. Fan Expo is a welcomed return to celebrating pop culture entertainment in San Francisco.

While primarily a comic convention, Fan Expo SF offers programming and guests from a wide spectrum of different fandoms. The exhibit hall on the first floor hosted a variety of vendors selling products such as toys, anime figurines, trading cards, cosplay props, and comic books. While decently sized with over 100 vendors, the limited number of vendors selling the same products made it difficult to bargain hunt and compare prices. There was also an assortment of independent merchants that sold self-made products ranging from fan art posters, shoes, clothes, and everything else in between that would usually be found in the artist alley.

The artist alley made up about half of the remaining space in the exhibit hall and featured a sizable number of comic book artists and cover illustrators. Fans could get autographs, purchase books and artwork. While Jim Lee, probably best known for his work with Marvel in the early 90s on X-Men and more recently as the Chief Creative Officer of DC Comics, had his own booth in the artist alley, his autograph session was on the second floor due to the huge number of fans that wanted to meet him.

The second floor was composed primarily of panel rooms but also contained cosplay guest booths, a video game play area sponsored by Sac Gamers Expo, a board game library hosted by Dogpatch Games, and various community fan groups. Some of these areas were tucked away in a corner hallway, making them fairly easy to miss.

While the panel programming seemed sparse, I noticed a lack of industry-related panels. In fact, there seemed to be a general lack of an industry presence‌. Missing were the sprawling banners overhead, or statues and photo-op set pieces from video games or tv shows. There was a lot of unused space on each floor. For an event that includes anime, I would have expected to see some presence from either Viz Media, one of the largest English manga publishers, or Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, who are both headquartered in San Francisco. To be fair, there were posters that advertised free Wi-Fi courtesy of video game company Gravity who makes Ragnarok Origin.

The third floor was the most crowded and housed the autograph area. Fans could meet their favorite celebrities and voice actors, get autographs, and take photos with them typically for a fee separate from admissions. This area also featured several English anime and video game voice actors. This may seem a little odd to some, as getting autographs from most voice actors at anime events is typically included with admissions. Do note, these fees mostly go directly to the guests themselves.