Twenty-one conventions seems like a lot, but more time and money could have seen the author attend 35 events in 2002. There are at least five new events planned for 2003. Fans had hoped to hold as many more inaugural events in the new year, but plans fell through for various reasons, most having to do with money.

The author is a long way from being burned out over anime conventions. He's already started to make hotel reservations for 2003 events, and is counting his pennies to get the cash for the plane tickets to take those convention trips. The author prefers to collect conversations, friendships and memories. It's great to look at a video store's anime display, watch a show on TV or read a review and be able to think, "I know the people who made that."

Several of the people who made the shows were at C-Kon, which had a neat guest list for a small event. Wendee Lee managed to end her string of bad-luck cancellations with a trip to Indiana, joining convention mainstays like Michael Brady, Tristan MacAvery, Tiffany Grant and Amy Howard Wilson.

The 2002 C-Kon wasn't the first one, but it was the first time that event had been held in a hotel, or in Indianapolis, or was a full-fledged convention with guests of honor. C-Kon was an example of a bunch of college kids getting together in a fairly small town and putting on a show. In this case, the small town was the overwhelmingly average Muncie, Ind. and the kids were from Ball State University, best known for sending Bonzi Wells to the Portland Trail Blazers. The Muncie area has a bit of an animation angle - it's the home area of Jim Davis, creator of Garfield the cartoon cat - but it wasn't a hotbed of anime fandom.

The Ball State anime club had managed to overcome that and had held a couple of small C-Kons on campus, named after the Project: A-Ko character, but they weren't able to get a convention going in a hotel until 2002. What they got was the same kind of small startup event seen with AnimeIowa and the Middle Tennessee Anime Convention, comfortable and not crowded. 

Just after noon on a rainy mid-November Friday, the author had that familiar feeling of expectation when he drove into the hotel parking lot of the east side of Indianapolis for C-Kon. But for a long moment, the author thought he was in the wrong place when he saw a line of police cars heading in the opposite direction. It turned out that there was a conference of police hostage negotiators at the same hotel, which wrapped up around the same time that dealers were starting to stock their convention tables. Another fan said it was the perfect security arrangement.

So the author sat in the hallway between meeting rooms, drowsily trying to bang out another magazine story from the previous week's NekoCon while watching a handful of fans drift around, looking for a registration desk that hadn't been set up yet. Friday morning, bustling and busy at established conventions, was almost too calm at C-Kon.

The convention's attendance got a bit of a bump upwards from a bunch of high school kids who were in Indianapolis for a major national marching band contest. Those kids had to be tough; on Friday evening the band rehearsed in the hotel's parking lot, in a steady cold rain that was turning to sleet. Not long after the band members trudged back into the hotel, a tiny Pikachu costumer dashed through the hotel's main concourse, delightedly exclaiming "It's snowing." 

And to think that one week earlier, NekoCon had been blessed with shirtsleeve weather in Virginia Beach. But the brief snow never was more than a trivial thing that melted when it hit the ground, so Friday and some of Saturday were only cold and wet.

Maybe it was because of the presence of the Michigan high school band that stayed in the hotel for the weekend contest downtown, but C-Kon seemed to have the youngest attendees seen by this author at an anime convention. Most of the Saturday crowd appeared to be high school kids, and lots were accompanied by parents.

That youth led to some of the liveliest atrium scenes of the season: the nine-foot No Face previously seen at Sugoi Con was playfully following fans and gently bopping them with its big foam head, while a bunch of model builders smoothed the surfaces of their latest creations. Steve Bennett and Robert DeJesus sketched for the fans who drifted from the video game room (and its projection-screen Dance Dance Revolution game) to the video rooms (where Tiffany Grant scampered to put up signs advertising a showing of the Laughing Boy movie in which she appeared). And glomping, the first seen in central Indiana, continued through the weekend, until the convention closed on Sunday afternoon and everyone went home.

The Marriott's only drawback was the strange scheduling of the hotel restaurant, which was barely open during the convention weekend. Fans reacted by dashing down the street to the many fast-food places in the area. 

The biggest fan reaction of the weekend was the Saturday night charity auction for the "A Better Way" domestic violence shelter in Muncie. Fans went a little crazy when Evangelion items were placed up for auction, offering around $500 for a "Groundwork of Evangelion" art book and nearly $400 for an autographed "End of Evangelion" DVD. The auction raised $3,000, small numbers by Anime Expo standards but impressive for a small convention.

This is where the author should pause and look back at the convention season, but he's having trouble coming up with any original thoughts. He's stated so many times that anime conventions are among the best expression of youth culture, and that their growth is an amazing and positive development, that there's nothing new there. The criticism of those conventions remains the same; the author wishes the events started on time, that lines waiting for events were shorter. He'd like to see convention web sites updated more often and for all sites to post event schedules in advance. 

The best part of conventions is that they continue to attract new fans and guests, and those fans are compelled to start their own conventions. Usually, when someone starts going to conventions, they never stop. The author looked at the 214 names who were on the Anime Convention Personality of the Week list as of this writing and noted that several of the first fifteen on the list, chosen four years ago, were at the last three events of the 2002 season. That list will continue to grow as fresh faces discover the fun of conventions. No, the author has not run out of names to put on the list. And it if seems like everyone at conventions is on that list, it's because there are so many people to choose from.

Five years earlier, when this page began, the author split a convention weekend with a trip to the season's final NASCAR Winston Cup race. That was an extension of the annual Florida racing trips the author once made in February. During that last racing trip, the author was waiting outside the Daytona International Speedway for the Daytona 500 qualifying races when he bumped into a young race driver and his father. The driver hoped to move up from midget racing to drive in the Daytona 500 one day. Five years later, Ryan Newman was a winning stock car driver and one of NASCAR's top rookies.

On that same trip, the author drove a half-hour south of Daytona to watch the World Series of Asphalt Stock Car Racing at the New Smyrna Speedway. Driving a modified on the half-mile track was an Indiana competitor who also wanted to get to the Daytona 500, but couldn't get a ride at the big track. Five years later, Tony Stewart had that ride and won the Winston Cup championship.

Much the same has happened for this author and conventions. Once he dreamed of going to those events, and now he's been able to live that dream for five years. In a couple of months from this writing the sixth season begins, with the promise of more fun and greater memories ahead.