Category: Conventions

Castle Point Anime Convention 2009

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If you are willing to experience them, there are benefits to every size of convention. Castle Point Anime Convention is a small college con in New Jersey at the Stevens Institute of Technology. It was a Sunday only event from 10AM to 7PM with a MC Frontalot concert after.  I was invited to participate in a panel by Evan from Ani-Gamers. It’s not that hard to get to from New York City so I was only too delighted to help out while having a Sunday activity at the same time.

I started my short trip with the NYC subway to the PATH Train. After that it was only a few blocks to the campus which was very convenient. There was a on and off drizzle the whole day so not having to brave the elements too long was greatly appreciated. The path I took to the college due to me remembering the map oddly threw me off a bit so it took me more time to find registration. I got my ticket then ran into Evan on my way to the Otaku History panel. Otaku History was run by Walter Amos and Rob Fenelon. It reminded me of what they said during their guest spot on Anime World Order but there is always something new to say. They went over how anime fandom started in America and how is has grown and changed. Most of the focus was on the earliest days since those are what most people don’t know about. They had some cool old American anime fanzines and I learned the origin of incredibly long and descriptive anime titles.

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Ongoing Investigations: Case #036

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I read books six and seven of Here is Greenwood. Always enjoyable series with just enough realism in the friendships to make the guys seems like people you know. Six is almost exclusively crazy antics while seven finally introduces us to a love interest for Hasukawa. Seven also has a chapter much like Here is Devilwood called Here is Edo. As you may have guessed, it stars everyone in a samurai drama. As always the author’s little comments throughout add as much comedy to the scenes as anything else. Looking forward to finishing this series up soon.  

So I went solo to two anime events around New York recently. Neither of them were enough for a whole report but they were interesting enough to talk about. I went to Spring Fest at Polytechnic. It was a small one day convention. I went to show some love for Subatomic Brainfreeze’s Most Dangerous Anime panel. It was mostly Dave playing Crystal Triangle and  showing some choice scenes from the train wreck that is Gundress. I had only heard of the horror that is Crystal Triangle from AWO but I finally got to see how awesomely horrible it actually was. The audience had a good time MST3King a movie that rightfully deserves it. The theatrical release of Gundress is famous for being released incomplete. It was amusing to see the slapdash job they did to get what was generally a horrible piece of cinema on the screen for the release date. I really liked their little tea room and enjoyed their “mystery flavor” blended tea. There was also a good deal of gaming going on but I would rather be humiliated at playing multi-player games at home rather than humiliated in front of an audience. I was interested in staying for the What The Hell, Game Industry? panel but I had to go to meet someone to see Watchmen. It was basically a large scale meeting of friends from the university than a full-fledged convention. While it was not worth traveling for any great distance, I would recommend it to anyone in the NYC area. Plus it’s a nice, free way to meet other anime fans.

Read book five of Monkey High! It continues to be a wonderful shojo romance that that doesn’t linger on random misunderstandings. I like the pace of the books keeping the moments quick. They have added the idea of a love triangle. However, since Haruna does not seem to be torn between the guys, rather another guy just happens to really like her, it isn’t actually a love triangle. Thank goodness. Monkey High! has done a good job of creating a sweet story about the relationship, not the chase. Looking forward to the last few volumes of this series.

The next day found me going to Anime Day at Kinokuniya. I have to say Kinokuniya events get really nice turn-outs. While this means it is another good place to meet people, it also means that most of the events are standing room only. I came in half way through so I missed out on getting a Soul Eater Key chain. While this breaks my heart I somehow found a way to trooper on. I noticed from Scott’s twitter that those two girls who cosplay Ranka and Sheryl were on the cosplay panel. I finally arrived at two and I mostly only popped in on all of the panels they were presenting. The mixture of having nowhere to sit and having cool things to look at in Kinokuniya  distracted me from the events themselves. After browsing around for a bit, Scott, his friend, and I went to lunch where I discussed why bringing poor Hayate Ayasaki and Nagi Sanzenin into Internet arguments stands against all that is good and holy.

Been keeping up with Rideback this season. After watching episode nine, I still stand behind it being the show to watch from the winter. I have really liked how the pace built over the episodes, slowly moving from school centered to politically centered. It was done in such away as to not jar you. As secrets, plots, and characters are revealed the depth of the world involved is becoming clear. The animation continues to impress as well as the coolness of ridebacks. Instilling in us that we all need one right now.

While at Kinokuniya I made some purchases that were worth mentioning. It seems my prayers to the gods of anime merchandise were obviously heard because they released an all Saber art book. It is pretty good. Not enough fighting Saber to make me happy but enough variety to make me want it in an instant. Of course we have to have a maid exploitation (or maidploitation as I like to call it) picture of Saber and the raciest shot we get was Saber in a tight school bathing suit. I always appreciate the lack of utterly depraved Saber pictures because I would like to show people the art books I own without deep shame. My favorite pictures are Saber on a motorcycle and Saber dressed as Rin. I also got a book of Kido Senshi Gundam-san manga. I will admit I partially got number 4 just because it has Sayla Mass on the cover but I don’t feel anyone can fault me for that. I am very amused by a Gundam comedy series using the Universal Century characters. I noted it was only characters from the original series. Does anyone know if there are plans to do the same thing with charters from Zeta or the UC Gundam OAVs? My favorite section had to be the misadventures of sexy but angry White Base nurse Sayla. Some one has to get to translating this series because it looks priceless. It has smoking Zaku’s and baby Garma. What more do you want. Oh and naked Char. See something for everyone. I also saw an awesome Gundam Heroines book at Book Off. It seemed to be all the Gundam series up to Gundam X. I had already spent enough at Kinokuniya that I decided to hope it was still there the next time I would swing by there. Does anyone own the book? Is it worth picking up?

Rideback is the only show I am keeping up with this season, so this is the pic of the week:


NYCC 2009 ICv2 Conference

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Having a few free vacation days I decided to check out the ICv2 conference on Thursday before the NYCC proper. Since I was going to NYCC as press, ICv2 was allowing those same people into their conference for free. Two major themes popped up again and again. One was obviously the economy and the other was how the internet is affecting comics.

Every panel touched on the economy and its ramifications on comics without fail. It was an unavoidable cloud over the whole conference. Everyone mentioned that while the entertainment business is often thought of as recession proof, it is anything but. No one was telling tales of apocalyptic visions but it seems like everyone was bracing for impact. The assumption is that best-selling titles will see little to no drawback but everything that is not A-list will be hit hard. Smaller publishers could be in trouble and small titles might start dropping like flies. Everyone also expects to see a lot less experimentation this year.

The other major theme was how was the Internet is going to affect the comic industry. Everyone agreed that it is was an excellent tool for promoting comic sales, getting out information, and developing comic communities. However, everyone also agreed that they need to develop a greater Internet presence. The major problem is still not having fully figured out how to use unique features of the Internet. No one has successfully created a way of selling comics for download and companies have yet to truly realize the potential of web exclusive content. If there was a universal portable book reader this would change quickly but so far the iPod of book-readers has not appeared yet.

I noticed two major things on the manga side of the equation. The first was the big news that everyone has been taking about. The manga bubble has clearly burst. Manga sales were down approximately 17% in 2008. Despite the fact that most companies kept insisting that the growth would only level out it has in fact gone down. I predict we are going to see a bunch of manga companies disappear in the next couple of years. Those who stay around are going to start to being more conservative about their licenses. Unless they are VIZ and have crazy amounts of Naruto money to back up their lesser titles. Another thing I noticed was an increasing amount of resentment for scanlations within the manga industry. This struck me because I feel the anime industry did the same exact thing. They started out seeing fan-subs as a necessary evil. People were using them to watch stuff for free but it gave the companies a good idea of what to license and was publicity for the commercial product. But as time went on and fan-subs improved, anime companies began to take an increasingly negative view of them. The same thing is starting to happen with fan-scans. While they are different industries and there are different factors that weigh into their markets, I am sure that we will see an increased number of people in the manga industry complaining and possibly going after fan-scans sites.

The highlight of ICv2 was Art Spiegelman’s keynote address. He is obviously a very knowledgeable man and his lecture of the history of comics was both fascinating and well researched. He starts with the earliest proto-comics and works his way to the present while hitting most of the major milestones including the popularity of newspaper comics, the Comics Code Authority, the rise of manga, all the way to web-comics and the Internet. He examined the unique nature of comics as an art style and means of expression with its own language. He was a little too insistent in a comic equivalent of the Auteur theory. He seemed to push the theory that all the great works are produced by individual artists over long periods of time. I think that is a narrow perspective. I can’t say I agreed with everything he said but it was a well informed opinion from an expert in the field. Heck, he even knew what yaoi was.

If anything was obvious from this conference it was that 2009 will be an important year for comics in general but manga specifically. A bad economy, an increase in pirated materials, and the challenges of adapting comics to new media are all important issues. I am sure that we will see the death or shrinking of several manga companies this year. I also see many B and C-list manga titles being dropped, put on slower release schedules, or put on hiatus. These are not really radical predictions. It is obvious that these things are going to occur just by looking at 2008. But every year has major challenges that have to be overcome. I am curious to see which companies are going to rise to the challenge and which are going to fall behind.