So August arrived, and with it the East Coast version of the unofficial race to become the Biggest Anime Convention. Five weeks earlier, Anime Expo had drawn 12,000 people to California where the event was held in the harbor town of Long Beach, at a convention center not far from the berth of a famed sailing ship (the Queen Mary). And in Maryland, Otakon was held in the harbor town of Baltimore, at a convention center not far from the berth of a famed sailing ship (the USS Constellation).

Otakon staff expected to get 10,000 fans for the weekend.

The weather got fans' attention in 2001. The Otakon weekend began with Friday temperatures in the mid 90's, followed by "cooler" weather that dipped all the way to 87 degrees. Fans sweated in the outdoor heat, but they quickly cooled off in the Baltimore Convention Center's (thankfully) effective air conditioning. It took a lot of BTU's to cool off the thousands of fans who filled nearly every corner of the three-block facility. For 2001, Otakon moved its main events theater to a ballroom in the newer west section of the convention center. The dealers' room expanded to use two huge halls in the east side of the center, and the artists' alley went in a big hall where the cosplay had been staged two years earlier.

Early arriving fans had to line up outside in the Friday morning heat, but they were eventually let inside to form their lines where the air conditioning worked. The dealers' room line was unusually long at first because that part of the convention didn't open until 3 p.m. on Friday, but there was little waiting for the rest of the weekend.

Anime Expo drew complaints for being too big and spread out, using several hotels. Otakon had a different set of complaints, mostly because the Baltimore convention couldn't get all of the room blocks they wanted in Inner Harbor hotels. The closest and least expensive rooms filled in a few weeks, leaving late and lazy fans (including the procrastinating author of this site) to scramble for housing. The author foolishly passed up a chance to stay in a neat bed-and-breakfast in favor of a cheaper hotel north of downtown, about a mile north of the convention center. 
But that sort of thing is what happens when anime conventions grow up. They get more like real conventions because there's no place with enough room to put them except for huge hotels and metropolitan convention centers.

And Otakon needed all of that room. The larger amount of space used by Otakon spread out the crowd, but there was no doubt to this author that attendance was larger in 2001 than in 2000. And the number of costumers was astonishing. The author caught a lot of them with his camera, but many, many others got away. On Saturday night, a couple of costumers approached the author and asked "We had a big Escaflowne group all day. Where were you?" The author thought hard, and realized that he couldn't remember where he had been unless he turned his laptop back on and read through the list of pictures.

Lots of people at Otakon wanted to know how many pictures the author expected to take with his Olympus C2100 digital camera, so here are the totals: 2,539 pictures in two days, of which 1,049 were posted on the site, and 999 were costuming pictures. (There are 1,381 pictures on the site from the previous month's Anime Expo, and 1,262 of those are costume pictures.)

On costuming and the Saturday night costume contest: it started 90 minutes late, one of the staff members got in an argument with some costumers who were on stage over the music that was played for their act, the announcer kept complaining that he was given the wrong information, and everyone seemed more interested in "chair" jokes than giving the walk-on entries and the award winners enough time to be recognized on stage.

Those missteps were offset by the quality of the entries, including a pair of wonderful original dance acts based on J-rock bands and shojo characters from the X manga series. One entry had what the author considered to be a neat story: a girl with a Kero-chan costume from Card Captor Sakura wanted to have other girls in Sakura outfits join her on stage. So she searched the convention on Saturday, rustled up five Sakuras in five different costumes from five different places, and got them to enter the contest with her. It wasn't the greatest act - the poor girl had to shout to be heard over the audience - but it showed how you can meet new friends at an anime convention without hardly trying.

For once, there was no directly competing fandom event on the Otakon weekend. There was a pay-for-autographs Star Trek convention on the previous weekend in Arlington, Va. - not far from Otakon's 1998 location near Washington, D.C. But the big entertainment competition this weekend should have been the Madonna concerts on Friday and Saturday in nearby Washington, D.C. And across the street from the convention center was a Hispanic street festival that drew a large Inner Harbor crowd.

More interesting - and a lot more frightening - was what happened in Baltimore before the convention. First, three weeks before Otakon, a freight train exploded into flames in a tunnel west of the Inner Harbor, and the smoke from the flames caused large parts of downtown Baltimore to be evacuated. That included Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which is a short distance west of the convention center where Otakon was found. Firefighters needed nearly a week to put the fire out and drag the charred rail cars out of the tunnel, and a collapsed water main forced Baltimore police to close some streets leading to the convention center.

Then, a week and a half before the convention, a chemical plant caught on fire about two miles north of the convention center. Workers ran for their lives and the surrounding neighborhood had to be evacuated. The day after the fire, a helicopter crashed at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, killing a pilot and a photographer and closing a runway. The run of trouble left the author hoping that Baltimore would exhaust its bad luck in time for Otakon.

It didn't. On Saturday, some booming noises could be heard in the convention center. Some of the sounds were thunder from afternoon storms, but a few may have been explosions from the tripropolene gas that accumulated after the train explosion. The blasts blew off some manhole covers and closed some streets, but fortunately they didn't stop the convention.

If the big tunnel fire had happened during Otakon, it could have led to the cancellation of the event and forced thousands of fans to turn around and go home, unable to even get close to the hotel rooms they had reserved. That's probably going to be among the risks of holding a convention in a big industrial city, which is where you're going to find the fans.

Oh, by the way: there won't be any dramatic, head-to-head, Otakon-versus-Anime Expo New York competition in 2002 - at least not in the author's opinion, because the events will be one month apart. Otakon will be on the first weekend of August 2002, back in the Baltimore Convention Center, and the Anime Expo event will be on the first weekend of September next year.

Since anime uses cats as characters, it's proper to note that a man who voiced an American cat died a week before the convention. Lorenzo Music was the voice of the animated Garfield, and his dry delivery made the orange tabby more popular on TV than the character had been in newspaper strips. Indiana artist Jim Davis created Garfield and turned the cat into a star, but Music's voice completed the character. In the same way you can't think of Belldandy without hearing Kikuko Inoue or Juliet Cesario, the sight of Garfield brings Music's voice to mind.