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I hadn’t heard of Universal FanCon until a couple days ago.

As I understand it, the plan was to create a Kickstarter-funded diversity-focused convention in Baltimore, billed as the “First multi-fandom Con dedicated to inclusion, highlighting Women, LGBTQ, the Disabled and Persons of Color.” The Kickstarter raised over $50,000 in early 2017, and the con was scheduled to happen next week.

But two days ago, the people in charge announced that the con had been postponed to a later, unspecified, date, apparently due to financial issues.

The con’s home page now provides some info, including an FAQ. Reading between the lines, it sounds to me like what happened was that they planned for a convention with 10,000 attendees, and paid for a big space and a bunch of marketing, and put in some of their own money, but it eventually became clear that they weren’t going to get enough attendees. But I’m not certain of that.

Unfortunately, the info page/FAQ isn’t very forthcoming about various things. A Bleeding Cool article quotes tweets pointing out some of the things that remain unclear.

Lots of people spent a lot of money on this that they won’t be able to get back. There’s now an online “virtual artist alley” to showcase some of the artists who had planned to have tables at the con, if you want to support their work.

There are also various plans for people who can’t get refunds on their travel and hotel plans and who are thus still planning to go to Baltimore next weekend; see the Bleeding Cool article for some notes on that, and here’s Nerds of Color’s page about their hope to set something up.

Also, Phillycon is providing free Friday tickets and discounted Sunday tickets for Universal FanCon ticketholders.