I watched a fan organized and moderated online comic convention all but obliterate San Diego Comic Con over the weekend.

That sentence simply doesn’t exist in any other year, but this is 2020, arguably the most unpredictable year in recent human history. So perhaps from that perspective, I shouldn’t be surprised.

To be clear, it’s a pleasant surprise. A VERY pleasant surprise.

Justice Con was fully intended to be a celebration of Zack Snyder’s Justice League finally getting the greenlight after two and a half years of the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut fan movement, and thanks to the unique situation we find ourselves in 2020 where Zoom calls and social media are the safest primary gathering modes, a two-day fan organized event with several panels was more than possible.

But seriously, how the hell did it beat out Comic-Con@Home, which was happening the same weekend? As always, it’s a matter of subjective opinion. Someone that is beyond stoked that The Boys is getting a third season on Amazon Prime, or is jacked up over the first two minutes of New Mutants that was released online, could easily tell you that Comic-Con@Home blew everything else away in their opinion.

The numbers don’t tell you that, though. Specifically the views for each panel on YouTube. When the New Mutants panel is the only one that reaches well past 100,000 views, while a smattering of others reach double digit thousand counts over a 4-day period, that tells you the juice wasn’t nearly as strong as we’ve seen it at Hall H in the past. Why should it be, though? It’s NOT Hall H, it’s not in person, and because of COVID-19, everything is on hold with the major studios, so there’s not much new for them to announce, especially if a number of them like DC Comics, are holding off until their own digital events to promote brand new information.

This created a perfect opportunity for Justice Con, especially since their guest list was very strong among the DC fandom. Ray Porter, who will voice Darkseid in ZSJL, Jay Oliva, Fabian Wagner, Ray Fisher, and both Zack and Deborah Snyder on separate panels just to name a few. Those names alone were enough to make big waves on the weekend, and they all did in some form.

What really made Justice Con stand out though apart from the guests it had were the little things and details that make conventions so alluring and appealing to fans. First, it was all live streamed, meaning you had genuinely unpredictable moments, fresh and new conversation, and the potential for some crazy things to happen that would excite the audience. This is precisely what happened with both Ray Fisher and Zack Snyder’s panels on the Saturday schedule. From Fisher’s very strong and demonstrative comments about his situation with Joss Whedon and Jon Berg, to Snyder crashing his panel for five minutes in the middle of it, to Snyder’s refreshingly unleashed comments about the Justice League situation itself, going so far as to actually call the theatrical version “Frankenstein’s Monster,” it was a day full of incredible moments that almost no one expected to happen going in.

That’s a world of difference from what Comic-Con@Home did, which was almost all pre-produced panels, edited and built weeks in advance, filled with static, corporate responses and very little in the way of new information or spontaneity whatsoever. There was no room for anything off the cuff or potentially exciting unless you were a fan of a panel simply to hear particular discussion, or to enjoy a pre-recorded zoom chat with a particular cast and crew. Not much in the way of incredible moments at all.

The thing is, that might not be entirely fair because the incredible moments we saw at Justice Con were really only possible because it was a fan event and not a corporately controlled and sponsored public relations junket. When studios are directly involved, they treat SDCC like a marketing tool for their brands, and everything is carefully planned, orchestrated and designed to build hype along a particular path that is safe for the general audience. This means the creatives involved are essentially under orders on what to say and how to say it, because they are there to promote things instead of simply being themselves and nothing else.

You take all of that corporate control and imposition away, and you get genuine human moments like the litany of F-bombs from Snyder about how he will never use Whedon’s footage for ZSJL, or just about all of Fisher’s panel. Those were conversations those creatives were having as fans with Nana and Cole(@TheNerdQueens) and Meg(@ya_girlmeg), in a low-pressure, friendlier environment where no one has to promote anything or is contractually obligated to be a marketing tool. That only happens at a fan organized event and would never happen elsewhere. When Snyder and most likely Fisher as well are both at DC FanDome in August, they will be very different, because they have to be. There, they are representing the DC brand at a corporately controlled DC event. Nothing is off the cuff or wholly down to earth for them in that situation.

So why didn’t Comic-Con@Home go live with their panels? Well, that could be as simple as scheduling issues with everyone involved since you’re talking about so many panels and studios over four days. It’s easier to pre-record and produce everything in advance for the day and call it good, which is what they did. Justice Con having a smaller lineup had the ability to go live, but when it’s fan organized, meaning all the equipment is personally owned and operated, that can heighten the stakes on how you do it. Incredibly, there were little to no technical glitches for the entire two days, and the Saturday panels were nearly flawless in operation. More than impressive given everyone’s locations across the entire planet.

Justice Con wasn’t just about the big spotlight panels though, it also had other introspective discussion panels as well that serve to round out conventions in general along the theme. Ink To The People, the T-shirt company that helps campaigns create shirts to sell for charity fundraising has been a major partner with the Snyder Cut movement and produced merchandise for Justice Con, all the proceeds of which go to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. So it made perfect sense for Todd Richheimer of Ink To The People and Ashly Alberto and Doreen Marshall, Ph.D. of AFSP to have their own panels, explaining their work and causes. It made sense for Clay Enos, a unit photographer for Zack Snyder’s work to have a panel with his wife Kristine Cabanban. You had artists from Snyder’s poster event with their own panel, and Sean O’Connell, the author of the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut book to be released in 2021 with his own panel, where he read a deleted chapter from the book itself and gave away three promised copies of it to fans in the chat window that asked questions.

Arguably the best of the non-spotlight panels though was “Diversity in Zack Snyder’s Films,” which featured Chris Wong-Swenson from Ping Pong Flix, Sheraz Farooqi from Comic Book Debate and journalist Jonita Davis, all leading a fantastic discussion about representation and the symbolism inherent in Snyder’s work with the DC characters and the DC pantheon itself. When you talk about going next level intellect with the medium and having a conversation about what it all means in the real world and how it represents all of our lives in a diversified sense, those are important conversations to have and the fact that Justice Con thought to have one with a diverse panel of intellects and writers is just another reason it won the weekend almost outright. It was a very balanced and well ordered event from start to finish and for a fan convention, covering all the bases a corporately controlled convention would look to cover, while hitting a few notes the sponsors just won’t ever hit because of marketing intent.

Seriously, it’s the model of what you would want for a fan event like this and an immense amount of credit should go to Nana, Cole and Meg for not only organizing and hosting the event, but moderating all of it over two days, which is herculean in itself. The attention that it grabbed with over 228,000 views and counting on Snyder’s panel alone, which of course featured the first official Black Suit Superman clip, and the debut of the “Associate Producer” shirt for ZSJL which will be made available to fans at DC FanDome, is a phenomenal achievement. #JusticeCon trended on Twitter with nearly 40,000 tweets on Saturday alone, and most of the big news buzz from the trades came from what happened at that event, not Comic-Con@Home. To put it simply, the fans outdid San Diego for a weekend and it was glorious.

Why is it glorious? Because we don’t get fan events like this very often due to cost, time and availability constraints. In a normal situation, fans couldn’t hope to afford all of those guests at once in a particular setting, let alone build some genuine human moments with them that get the rest of the fanbase charged for a variety of reasons. Justice Con was truly a unique opportunity for a one of a kind event, and while we can all hope that something like it can continue going forward, we should most certainly take time to acknowledge and fully appreciate that it happened this year, under the craziest of circumstances in the world, with all the passion and intent that we enjoy for our fandoms and creatives. This is truly what happens when a fandom comes together.