Staff Writer: Kate Shawlls
Every year on Labor Day weekend, the streets of downtown Atlanta fill with nerds of all kinds for the fan-run multimedia pop culture convention known as Dragon Con.
Hosted across four giant connecting hotels, Dragon Con feels more like a city takeover than just a convention. This year there were 75,000 attendees and more than $320,000 raised for Hope Atlanta, a nonprofit helping the homeless. 2026 is an especially important year, as it marks the 40th anniversary of the convention.
Dragon Con always has a slew of impressive guests from the worlds of comics, film, video games, literature, animation, and more. Major guests this year included the voice casts of video game Hades 2, indie animated series The Amazing Digital Circus, and Disney+ animated series X-Men ‘97, authors like Sherrilyn Kenyon and other well-known names like Hazbin Hotel creator Vivienne Medrano.
The biggest guest of all by a landslide, though, was Matt Dinniman, author of Dungeon Crawler Carl, an RPG-inspired series of sci-fi/fantasy novels about Coast Guard veteran Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s show cat Princess Donut trying to survive a dangerous dungeon after aliens have taken over the Earth.
Dragon Con was a lot more like Crawler Con this year— I saw cosplayers wearing either Carl’s signature heart boxers or Donut’s purple sunglasses and tiara nearly everywhere I looked. Dinniman appeared at a panel or signing every day of the con, and any of the signings that required tickets were sold out before the con began.
This shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, as the Crawler fan photoshoot the day before was so big they literally couldn’t fit everyone into the courtyard where the shoot was being hosted. Not that they couldn’t fit people onto the stairs where photos are taken, or that they couldn’t fit everyone in the picture— they literally could not fit everyone into the enclosed courtyard. A line of Crawler fans backed into the hotel, and photos had to be taken by grouping cosplayers of specific characters, as a photo of the entire group was impossible. Estimates online of the number of people at the shoot are in the thousands.
Dragon Con, as always, had a lot to enjoy, from the parade to ribbon trading to the art show to the cosplay contest. That’s not to say the con didn’t have its problems, though. Temperatures that weekend were sweltering and peaked at 97 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday. This is dangerously high for a con that often requires waiting outside to get inside air-conditioned buildings.
Dragon Con has an extremely strong partying and drinking culture. I’ve heard it lovingly called “Nerdi Gras” for the sheer amount of debauchery that takes place within those host hotels. Music is always playing and drinks are served everywhere.
Thursday badge pickup was disastrous, as the system went down for half an hour and led to hours-long lines out in the aforementioned Atlanta heat. Whether or not Dragon Con will implement changes to combat these issues remains to be seen.
It should be mentioned that Dragon Con is fan-run and relies on volunteers rather than industry support. This is wonderful for the community and authenticity of the con but can lead to issues regarding management and the actual running of the convention.
There’s no place like Dragon Con, and even though I broke my troll horns and had to be given bootleg E-6000 glue by a Haymitch Abernathy cosplayer out by the Hilton Steps, and even though my entire body hurts and my knees are bruised and I have acne from all the sweating and body paint, there’s no place I’d rather be on Labor Day weekend.