In 2002, Sugoi Con may have established itself as the family convention. this author spotted three or four babies in strollers who spent the entire weekend at the hotel, and several of the younger fans had parents nearby. One of those younger fans won a second prize in the Saturday night costume contest, resulting in a proud pair of parents who wanted the world to know what their daughter had done.

Sugoi Con stayed small in 2002, although it's starting to outgrow the limits of the Holiday Inn in Erlanger, Kentucky. The convention organizers said they'll have to look for a new home in 2003; among other things, there wasn't enough room for an art show and the artists' alley was filled to capacity. The Holiday Inn Cincinnati Airport, as indicated in the opening note, was pleased with the convention crowd (and the con chair spent a lot of time patrolling the building with the hotel staff, making sure everything went well). 

For the first time in the three years of the convention, the author was able to stay for two full days and part of a third. That gave the author a chance to see the way Sugoi Con handles its costume contest. They line up the entrants and usher them into a room to be judged, while fans stay in the hotel's small atrium and holds a karaoke party.

The author would have preferred some sort of public presentation of the costumers, but he finally realized why there's no stage presentation: the hotel doesn't have enough space. By the time Sugoi Con allocated room for the dealers and a video room, the remaining room never would have held the audience, the costumers and a stage. Add the lack of a backstage area and the Sugoi Con contest approach was the only reasonable option. 

Thanks to the convention organizers for letting the author inside the judging room to take pictures of the contest participants. The author would never dare tell about the one poor judge who seemed to always be the odd one out when it was time to choose the award winners. He will note, as a aid to costumers, that this panel of judges was very demanding when it came to each costume's details - and those details were big factors in selecting the best efforts.

The convention was one of the few anime events attended by Reba West, the voice that introduced the role of Lyn Minmay in Robotech to television viewers, before hard-core fandom was born and nearly anyone knew about Macross and Mari Iijima. Watching how West reacted to fans and the way that people accepted her, it was hard to imagine that her Minmay performance generated such dislike in the 1980's. Of course, that also might show that fans are more restrained in the world of a convention than when they're behind the safe, anonymous barrier of a computer monitor and keyboard.

By contrast, Senno Knife and Nekoi Rutoto were making their third North American convention visit of 2002; not bad when you remember that they hadn't been in the U.S. since 1999. Knife sent a lot of time sketching for fans to the light of a lamp that someone temporarily liberated from a hotel room (the atrium was dark on a rainy Saturday). Nekoi was an enthusiastic singer in black shiny outfits as she performed Psy-doll's greatest hits.

The wildest performer of the weekend was the lead guitarist for Swek, who spent as much time at their Friday concert in the audience's laps as on stage. That concert caught some unprepared fans by surprise for its loudness: the author used earplugs and enjoyed the show at a lower volume.

Thanks to the Holiday Inn for having a 24-hour "business center" room with high-speed Internet access, which made the uploading of web site files extremely convenient, especially since the center was a few steps away from the convention's meeting rooms. Even more thanks for putting the author in a ground-floor room (just down the hall from the con suite) on his request. Even the spider in the room was friendly - and insistent in returning to the room when the author tried to evict it.

Sugoi Con was near the end of the 2002 convention season in North America, with only three more U.S. conventions left in the year. (The author plans to attend two of them.) However, the season's just getting started in South America, where spring is underway and there will be five conventions in the next few months. This author mentioned the Brazilian conventions ahead to a U.S. industry representative and he was intrigued by the idea of big conventions in that country; he might try to slip down south and see one of those events, he hinted.

Better Brazil than Cincinnati if you want to see football. Brazil has the world football (called soccer in the author's home) champions, while Cincinnati has the Bengals, rapidly establishing themselves as one of the worst teams in NFL history. And for that the citizens of Cincinnati increased their taxes to pay for a $500 million football stadium. County commissioners were talking about suing the Bengals for non-support.

The only sports enthusiasm in Cincinnati at the time of Sugoi Con was the big sale of old seats from the demolished Riverfront Stadium. People were actually unhappy that they couldn't buy seats because of the huge crowds at the wrecking yard.

In the past, the World Series, which started on the convention weekend, would have been a major event in Cincinnati, a baseball town for 150 years. But the Reds were little more competitive than the Bengals, so the Series was just another diversion.