Emerald City Comic Con and Sakura Con
I went to Emerald City Comic Con on March 13-14, and Sakura Con on April 2-4, and completely failed to make any mention of it in this LJ. Sorry for the fail, but I'm remedying that right now.
Be warned that there are lots of pictures to load under these cuts.
ECCC was the first comic convention I've gone to, and as far as I can tell, the main difference between a comic con and an anime con is the amount of spandex per costume.
The rest of these were taken of the stage at the Masquerade contest on Saturday, after which all of the Batman characters were brought onstage for a photoshoot. (Apologies for photos including parts of people's heads, but there was a very small, crowded area for picture-taking.)
The children's section was brought onstage as well, but they quickly and inexplicably started dancing and couldn't be convinced to hold still long enough for photos to be taken.
And, finally, everyone who'd entered in the contest crammed together onstage for a photoshoot that was impossible to fit into one picture - or at least, it was impossible with my camera's crappy flash.
ECCC was much, much smaller than Sakura Con in terms of attendance; they're held at the same location, but large parts of the convention center were closed down for ECCC that were packed at Sakura Con. I spent my time at various panels at ECCC, and the one that stands out in my memory is easily the Spotlight on Stan Lee. Aside from being basically a comic god, Stan Lee is hilarious, and I'd happily listen to him talk about pretty much anything. The panel was in a question-and-answer format, so topics ranged from the origins of Spiderman to working on The Big Bang Theory.
I missed a lot of the big events, mostly due to my own apathy. I skipped the premier of the Trigun movie, because it was being shown in Japanese without subtitles, so I didn't really see the point. I skipped all of the concerts, too, because meh. Friday was the AMV Contest, which wasn't terribly impressive this year. There were a few videos that stood out to me, like Only Bob, which has some really impressive effects. Yag Si Thgil was one of the better comedy AMVs; it was cute and well-put together, even though that song has been used more than Linkin Park's "In the End" (and I'm not going to tell you how long it took me to figure out that title). Inky Bloaters was cute, and GoHancock and Vlad G. Pohnert's Gurrenlander (which I can't find a link for) were well-worth watching, but on the whole I was underwhelmed.
Friday was also the first day of the Anime Art Basics panel, a series of three panels that extended from Friday to Sunday. I'm afraid I'm too much of a dumbass to remember the name of the artist who ran the panel, and I can't find her name anywhere on the Sakura Con website, so you'll just have to wonder. The panel covered penciling on Friday, inking on Saturday, and coloring on Sunday, with the panelist demonstrating via laptop-and-projector. It was most definitely a basic introduction to drawing anime, so there was a lot of material I already knew, but since it was run by question-and-answer, I did learn plenty besides. And anyway, the panelist was very funny and enjoyed making fun of Twilight, so I approve. My only complaint: on Saturday, when the panelist made the call for the last question in the panel, a young woman asked for an explanation of how to draw feet - a complicated but legitimate question, which the panelist rushed through to the best of her ability. Then, on Sunday, the discussion meandered for a while until the panelist started joking about the absurdity of trying to answer that question in such a short frame of time. I happened to be standing next to the woman who'd asked the question, and she was clearly upset at being discussed in a decidedly less-than-respectful way. She tried to defend herself, but went unheard, and decided to leave very quickly. The incident struck me as entirely unnecessary and unpleasant, and I think that the panelist should have considered that her past audience would have carried over from the previous day.
Anyway, never mind that. Saturday was the Cosplay Contest, which is always a fun event, I think. The skits tend to be pretty hit-or-miss, but there are always a couple that make the show worth seeing. This one, for example, was easily the best, but Alice in Smashland was pretty cute as well. Plus, while the popularity of Vocaloid kind of mystifies me, I have to love the Vocaloid skit for referencing a movie that I thought only I remembered (it has an awesome soundtrack shut up don't judge me).
On Sunday, I spent most of the day dragging around a big, heavy bag of junk to trade. I had a bunch of figures for the trading figures swap, and then there was a manga swap afterwards. I realized that, unsurprisingly, I'm a total pushover. I accepted most trades people offered, and I got some nifty things, like trading figures of Aeris (FFVII) and Zidane (FFIX), but also some crap I don't really want, like a Sesshomaru figure that constantly falls over. That's fine, since I was mostly trading things I've had for forever that I didn't want in the first place. I noticed my pushover-ish tendencies particularly at the manga swap, at which there were two little kids who looked. at. me. with their giant adorable eyes, and I would've handed over every manga I own if they'd asked nicely. Luckily for me, they were very polite and only asked for fair trades, and, thank God, did not ask for any manga that contained dominatrixes or creepy discussion of rape (see: Sorcerer Hunters and Great Teacher Onizuka). I traded for a lot of manga I've never heard of, and I haven't gotten around to reading most of it, but from what I got I can recommend Tactics, by Sakura Kinoshita and Kazuko Higashiyama. It's silly and a bit fluffy, and that plus Japanese folklore means that I am so there. It's adorable.
...And then I had to drag all of those figures and manga home on the bus. Yaey.
Be warned that there are lots of pictures to load under these cuts.
ECCC was the first comic convention I've gone to, and as far as I can tell, the main difference between a comic con and an anime con is the amount of spandex per costume.
The rest of these were taken of the stage at the Masquerade contest on Saturday, after which all of the Batman characters were brought onstage for a photoshoot. (Apologies for photos including parts of people's heads, but there was a very small, crowded area for picture-taking.)
The children's section was brought onstage as well, but they quickly and inexplicably started dancing and couldn't be convinced to hold still long enough for photos to be taken.
And, finally, everyone who'd entered in the contest crammed together onstage for a photoshoot that was impossible to fit into one picture - or at least, it was impossible with my camera's crappy flash.
ECCC was much, much smaller than Sakura Con in terms of attendance; they're held at the same location, but large parts of the convention center were closed down for ECCC that were packed at Sakura Con. I spent my time at various panels at ECCC, and the one that stands out in my memory is easily the Spotlight on Stan Lee. Aside from being basically a comic god, Stan Lee is hilarious, and I'd happily listen to him talk about pretty much anything. The panel was in a question-and-answer format, so topics ranged from the origins of Spiderman to working on The Big Bang Theory.
I missed a lot of the big events, mostly due to my own apathy. I skipped the premier of the Trigun movie, because it was being shown in Japanese without subtitles, so I didn't really see the point. I skipped all of the concerts, too, because meh. Friday was the AMV Contest, which wasn't terribly impressive this year. There were a few videos that stood out to me, like Only Bob, which has some really impressive effects. Yag Si Thgil was one of the better comedy AMVs; it was cute and well-put together, even though that song has been used more than Linkin Park's "In the End" (and I'm not going to tell you how long it took me to figure out that title). Inky Bloaters was cute, and GoHancock and Vlad G. Pohnert's Gurrenlander (which I can't find a link for) were well-worth watching, but on the whole I was underwhelmed.
Friday was also the first day of the Anime Art Basics panel, a series of three panels that extended from Friday to Sunday. I'm afraid I'm too much of a dumbass to remember the name of the artist who ran the panel, and I can't find her name anywhere on the Sakura Con website, so you'll just have to wonder. The panel covered penciling on Friday, inking on Saturday, and coloring on Sunday, with the panelist demonstrating via laptop-and-projector. It was most definitely a basic introduction to drawing anime, so there was a lot of material I already knew, but since it was run by question-and-answer, I did learn plenty besides. And anyway, the panelist was very funny and enjoyed making fun of Twilight, so I approve. My only complaint: on Saturday, when the panelist made the call for the last question in the panel, a young woman asked for an explanation of how to draw feet - a complicated but legitimate question, which the panelist rushed through to the best of her ability. Then, on Sunday, the discussion meandered for a while until the panelist started joking about the absurdity of trying to answer that question in such a short frame of time. I happened to be standing next to the woman who'd asked the question, and she was clearly upset at being discussed in a decidedly less-than-respectful way. She tried to defend herself, but went unheard, and decided to leave very quickly. The incident struck me as entirely unnecessary and unpleasant, and I think that the panelist should have considered that her past audience would have carried over from the previous day.
Anyway, never mind that. Saturday was the Cosplay Contest, which is always a fun event, I think. The skits tend to be pretty hit-or-miss, but there are always a couple that make the show worth seeing. This one, for example, was easily the best, but Alice in Smashland was pretty cute as well. Plus, while the popularity of Vocaloid kind of mystifies me, I have to love the Vocaloid skit for referencing a movie that I thought only I remembered (it has an awesome soundtrack shut up don't judge me).
On Sunday, I spent most of the day dragging around a big, heavy bag of junk to trade. I had a bunch of figures for the trading figures swap, and then there was a manga swap afterwards. I realized that, unsurprisingly, I'm a total pushover. I accepted most trades people offered, and I got some nifty things, like trading figures of Aeris (FFVII) and Zidane (FFIX), but also some crap I don't really want, like a Sesshomaru figure that constantly falls over. That's fine, since I was mostly trading things I've had for forever that I didn't want in the first place. I noticed my pushover-ish tendencies particularly at the manga swap, at which there were two little kids who looked. at. me. with their giant adorable eyes, and I would've handed over every manga I own if they'd asked nicely. Luckily for me, they were very polite and only asked for fair trades, and, thank God, did not ask for any manga that contained dominatrixes or creepy discussion of rape (see: Sorcerer Hunters and Great Teacher Onizuka). I traded for a lot of manga I've never heard of, and I haven't gotten around to reading most of it, but from what I got I can recommend Tactics, by Sakura Kinoshita and Kazuko Higashiyama. It's silly and a bit fluffy, and that plus Japanese folklore means that I am so there. It's adorable.
...And then I had to drag all of those figures and manga home on the bus. Yaey.