The guy who piloted the shuttle van from the Norfolk airport to the Holiday Inn Chesapeake asked the author about Neko-Con and wanted to know if there was going to be any Dragon Ball stuff there. He said that all of his college buddies stop everything at 5 p.m. to watch the Dragon Ball episodes on the Cartoon Network, wondered how much it cost to get into the convention, and asked if the event was going to have anything from Dragon Ball GT.

Buy a membership and see, the driver was advised. And you'll find people at the convention dressed as Dragon Ball characters (at least three on Neko-Con's first day).

After taking lots of time off from work to attend every day and hour of a bunch of conventions this year, things finally caught up with the author, who was able to attend only two of Neko Con's three days. (So it's Sunday and hundreds of people are still having a party in Virginia, while the author had to be at the airport at 5 a.m. to catch two planes and rush home for the privilege of sitting behind a desk to keep his job. Damn.)

Apologies from the author, but as enticing as anime conventions may be, they can't escape the flow of events in the real world.

Neko Con started in 1998 as a way of returning the spirit of the original Katsucon to that convention's original home in Virginia Beach. When Katsucon outgrew its hotel they had to move to larger quarters outside of Washington, D.C. the same thing happened to Neko Con, which moved from Virginia Beach to the combination of the Holiday Inn Chesapeake and the Chesapeake Conference Center.

In 2000, Neko Con stayed a "small convention," just the way the fans seem to like it. There were exactly two more people on hand in 2000 (1050) than in 1999 (1048, and 505 in the inaugural year of 1998), but the event was spread over a larger area. There's about a city-block walk between the Holiday Inn, where the video rooms were located, and the Chesapeake Conference Center, used for the main hall and the dealers room. People were scattered between the two buildings, which led to an uncrowded feel for the event.

Of course, there were a few rumblings from the dealers that there weren't enough people on hand and no one made money. Someone even speculated that more fans would have attended if the Sony Playstation 2 hadn't been released a few days earlier; they thought some people spent their money on the console and games, then stayed home from the convention.

In any case, Neko-Con plans to move back to the Holiday Inn Executive, its location for the first two years, in October of 2001. That will create an interesting competition with the Anime USA convention, which is scheduled to occur two weeks earlier. Overall, there are four anime conventions set for Virginia in 2001.

It's been noted before and bears repeating: fans keep on asking why there aren't more "small" conventions, and the answer is still that the small events keep growing because more people show up. So far, the only ways to keep small conventions from becoming big ones are to brutally mismanage them so that no one wants to show up, or to limit attendance. Capping a convention's attendance might seem like a great idea to some fans, but those fans will scream if there's a limit of 1,500 and they're number 1,501.

Neko Con was just outside of Norfolk, Va., an old-line Navy town. When your flight approaches the city's airport, you get a good view of the navy yards and the Norfolk Naval Station. The shipyard here was established in 1767, before there was a U.S. Navy. The Confederate ironclad Virginia was built here. The first Navy battleship and aircraft carrier came down the ways in Norfolk. The carrier Yorktown sailed from this port during World War II, never to return; it was sunk at Midway.

And Norfolk was the home port for USS Cole, the destroyer attacked while in dock in Yemen. The attack came two weeks before Neko-Con, leaving many in Norfolk wondering about the fate of friends and family on that ship. The bad news of death and injuries came for dozens of families, and it wasn't until one week before Neko Con that the bodies of all of the dead from Cole were returned stateside.

Then there was the word that Michael Alben, the voice director who had handled the acclaimed dub of Record of Lodoss War and was preparing to work on the His and Her Circumstances dub, had died a couple of weeks earlier in New York City, leaving behind a wife and two children.

And a week and a half before Neko-Con, Frederick S. Clarke died in Chicago. Two years earlier, Clarke had taken a step into the anime world by publishing Animefantastique magazine, a spinoff from his influential Cinefantastique. Dan Parsons, Animefantastique's editor, saw the magazine as a way to link the worlds of American and Japanese animation - but the publication never sold enough copies and was discontinued after only four issues.