AnimeIowa's deliberately small size doesn't mean anything close to a lack of enthusiasm. Fans have to really, really care about anime and conventions to make an event viable in a town that has fewer people than some suburbs of the big-city anime conventions, and isn't even the largest place in Iowa. You'll find more people at tailgate parties before Iowa home football games than at AnimeIowa.

Still, Iowa does have a small-town charm that makes it easy to attend this convention. It's the anime equivalent of the Knoxville Nationals sprint car races, a race held in a tiny town outside of Des Moines that draws tens of thousands of race fans each year. Some people travel from Australia to the Nationals, and there was one person from the U.K. who went to AnimeIowa.

The new guests of honor had to be pleased with the reception they got when they traveled from the cornfields to the convention. (That's no joke or insult: the Eastern Iowa Airport, a marvelous miniature, is out in the country south of Cedar Rapids, and you have to drive between a mile of cornfields to get from the airport to the interstate that leads to the convention.)

Actor Tiffany Grant had to extend her autograph session for an extra half-hour. Artist Stan Sakai was amazed by an Usagi Yojimbo costumer. And artist Lea Hernandez was overjoyed by her audiences. Even Steve Bennett of Studio Ironcat, who has supported AnimeIowa since its tiny beginnings in 1997, was overwhelmed by the gift of an elaborate table cover, bearing the company logo and mascots, from a fan who just wanted to do something for Ironcat.

When master of ceremonies Charles Piehl asked an audience how many had come from Minnesota, there was a wave of cheers that rocked the house. Since AnimeIowa continues to grow (maybe around 1,200 people in 2002), since Cedar Rapids has only one other facility that could hold the event (the downtown hotel where the convention was held in 2000), and since some of the people who run the convention come from MInnesota, there's been talk that the convention might move to Minneapolis, one of the largest U.S. metropolitan areas without an anime convention. Not true, AnimeIowa's organizers said. They are looking at setting up a new event in Minnesota, but they say they're not going to pull an Art Modell and move AnimeIowa to a larger market (as Modell did when he sneaked the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore).

AnimeIowa could use more room, and there's always the Five Seasons hotel and U.S. Cellular Center downtown, but there were hints about other ways that could be used to keep the event small...and unsaid was the idea of a limit on attendance. The author thinks AnimeIowa's staff are too nice to make that work: someone would drive for hours to get to the convention (we know of one fan who drove 14 hours to get to the event), be told the attendance limit had been reached, start to cry and the staff would take pity on them and let them in - and the attendance would keep going up.

The closest this convention got to crowd control problems was when a couple of hundred fans gathered in the lobby for the smashing of the Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh piñatas. Yes, a tire iron was brought out to bust open the Yu-Gi-Oh head. And this author was fascinated by the fans' rush for the candy that spilled from the broken piñatas; one thinks it would be cheaper and easier to drive to the shopping mall down the road and buy the candy.

Those who visit this site for the costuming pictures already have noted that there were a lot of Final Fantasy outfits, and there were plenty of Dark Chiis and Light Chiis from Chobits - not bad for a series that hasn't been released in North America. The quality of the best costumes was as good as you'd find at larger conventions. It should be noted that the Mochi-Mochi gang won a best of show award, including the one guy who helped carry C. on stage and was not beaten up for once.

The AnimeIowa people kept joking that this site was part of the reason that so many people showed up at the event, that they were getting close to having too many people at the convention and that they insisted that stories on the convention have nothing but bad news. Well, it rained a lot on Friday, so much rain that a tornado was spotted somewhere in eastern Iowa. And then there was the moment, after the Saturday night costume contest, that the hotel's night manager led a police officer with a dog into an elevator and shooed away the others who wanted to ride upstairs. The curious author tracked the officer and dog to a second-floor room, where the dog was spotted dutifully sitting in front of the door to a room. 

There was chatter that someone might have been suspected to be smoking some funny stuff in that room, but the author was too tired (and impatient to get the web site updated) that he didn't hang around to learn the outcome. What made that episode interesting was that it showed that Cedar Rapids doesn't accept something that might be tolerated in a big city, and that - from what we understood - the convention went along with anything the police and hotel felt was necessary.

Problems? The Collins Plaza hotel, once a pioneer in offering high-speed Internet access in its rooms, dropped that access in 2002 when the service provider disappeared, forcing the author back to a 26kbps dialup connection. The author's connecting flight from St. Louis to Cedar Rapids was delayed by a storm that insisted on hanging in in the airline's flight path for a couple of hours.

Those small disappointments were canceled by the author finally getting to use both parts of his equipment upgrade at the same time. The Canon D30 digital camera got back from the New Jersey repair shop (one of only two places in the country that can fix those cameras) just in time for the trip to Iowa. In concert with the new Toshiba notebook PC, the combination makes producing the site much easier than before, especially in setting up the costume picture pages.

The new Toshiba also makes it possible for the author to sit in an airport and watch the Evangelion: Death and Rebirth DVD and not have anyone else know what was going on - a pleasantly subversive feeling.

Another good point of AnimeIowa was that the author and his collaborator on the planned cosplay book finally got a chance to sit down with Steve Bennett of Studio Ironcat and talk over how they could handle the project. Nothing's been signed yet, but it looks as if Ironcat will publish the book sometime in 2003. There's a long way to go with the project - all of the interviews have not been completed and production work is a long, long time from starting - but things look good.