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The
Anime Reactor weekend was the most productive this site has seen in
promoting and selling the "A Fan's View" cosplay book. The author had
planned to have a bunch of books on hand to sell, but the printer
broke. So the author brought eight copies to Rosemont, and fans bought
every one. The left the author with the mixed feeling of having
something that people wanted to buy, but also having to tell people
they couldn't buy it. So the author headed home to print more books for
sale by mail order, and get even more ready to sell to fans at the
following month's NekoCon in Virginia Beach (he bought a plane ticket
just before he got the replacement printer). The author spent most of his weekend in the Anime Reactor's artists' alley, located in the atrium of the Holiday Inn O'Hare. There was plenty of room, light and foot traffic during the two days the author was on hand. The rest of the two days were spent in a few panel discussions and interview sessions, listening to the Japanese guests of honor. Listening to those guests helped reinforce Anime Reactor's theme, that there's a growing trans-Pacific interest in art and culture from both America and Asia. The big revelation of the weekend was hearing Kia Asamiya tell how U.S. TV shows were part of the inspiration for his manga series. People who follow that artist's career will be interested to learn that his business cards have "Michitaka Kikuchi" in big letters and "Kia Asamiya" below in parentheses. Fans are going to want a comparison between Anime Reactor and the previous fortnight's Kazecon, held a couple of miles north. There's no doubt that Anime Reactor was the larger convention, with more fans and a bigger sense of enthusiasm than Kazecon. One measurement: this site had posted more files online by mid-afternoon of Anime Reactor's second day than from the entire Kazecon. If costumers are a sign of the most intense of fan enthusiasm, then Anime Reactor clearly had the edge. There were two sets of Misu sisters from Sorcerer Hunters, a trio of waitresses from Tokyo Mew Mew, and as many as four Harukos from FLCL. It helped that Anime Reactor had Japanese artists as guests of honor, but it also should be noted that all of the announced guests of honor showed up at Reactor, where they didn't at Kazecon. Anime Reactor was small but not tiny, quite the pre-Halloween party for anime fans. Reactor had a better-funded, better organized feel than the other convention. However, it didn't feel as big as the inaugural Anime Central, held five and a half years ago at the same hotel. It should be noted that some people were seen at both events, including a couple of Kazecon's organizers. The only hint of trouble the author saw all weekend was when a sign-toting guy was asked to leave. He must had done something real bad, because there were plenty of sign-carrying people all weekend, and no one gave them a hard time. Anime Reactor did have a bit of an Anime Central feel, since some of its organizers and volunteers had worked for Anime Central. Even some of the inaugural convention's guests of honor had previously appeared at the older convention. Anime Central even had a table in the dealers' room, featuring the convention's latest novelty, Anime Central soap on a rope. The ACen campaign to get fanboys to bathe, which started as a joke in 1998, seems to have turned into an institution of sorts. The ACen booth had plenty of soap, but they didn't have any of the prized Sailor Bubba bobblehead dolls, for which they were taking names on a waiting list. The author's only weekend complaint came with the lighting for the first of the Saturday costume contests. Anime Reactor started the evening with an "Anime Fabulous" runway show, then reset the main events room for an "Cosplay Idol" skit presentation. The following is something that you'd hear only from a person who spends too much time using cameras and is obsessed with the direction and intensity of light: the author was waiting for the stage lights to come up for the runway show, getting ready to make the usual last-second metering adjustments when the presentation began. But the stage lights at the side of the hall never were used, the house lights that might have illuminated the scene stayed dark, and most of the light for the show came from a decorative fixture of fluorescent bulbs that was behind the costumers. The light's supposed to come from the front, not the back. With that extreme backlighting, the author's camera equipment got fooled on its exposure settings, so it took a while to get the settings right. That's why some of the pictures in the early part of the Anime Fabulous section are overexposed or underexposed. Fortunately, the skit show had the light coming from more or less the correct direction. The "Cosplay Idol" presentation was loosely based on the American Idol TV series, where most of the entertainment came from the judges' comments and jokes about the skits they had seen. The author didn't know if that would work at first, because some costumers are thin-skinned about their work on stage, but the audience ate it up and the skits were perfectly risqué for a Saturday night. Everyone had a good time, even tolerating the major gaffe when the wrong entry was announced as the first-place winner. The crowd was too excited over asking a slender Vash from Trigun Maximum to take off his outfit to get upset over the error. It was great to see people having fun in Chicagoland again, since one would have thought that fun passed away after the Chicago Cubs blew the National League championship series. Game six of the World Series was scheduled for Saturday night of Anime Reactor, and the author was ready to write all sort of glowing prose about how wonderful it was to have the nation's newest pastime happening on the same night as the ultimate expression of the nation's traditional pastime, but the Cubs threw that away. Over the weekend, a couple of people were spotted in Cubs' hats, but no one was seen that looked like the guy in the left-field stands at Wrigley Field who was blamed for the Cubs' loss. If Chicagoans recovered quickly from the Cubs' debacle, it may because they've seen worse - such as the fatal office building fire in the Loop - overcome that adversity, and come back for more. The author chose to take the risk of using the Tri-State Tollway on his way to the Rosemont Convention, despite being trapped in stopped traffic during the previous trip. The fresh, imaginative strategy called for the author to get to his motel at 3 a.m. Friday; making that early of a trip would make sure there was little traffic on the highway and would eliminate the chance of any trouble, right? Wrong. at 2:30 a.m. Thursday, barely ten miles into Illinois, traffic slowed and ground to a stop. The author switched off his engine and headlights and spent a half-hour staring at unmoving truck trailer lights in the distance. Finally the traffic rolled again, and the reason for the stoppage loomed large: perched on a flatbed wrecker was a white sedan, with the rear two-thirds intact and the front third smashed and burned. In recent highway trips, the author has learned something important: if they're passing you, you're not going fast enough, so speed up. That works just about everywhere except Ohio. The other bizarre travel experience happened when the author tried to leave the Holiday Inn for his motel, a half-mile south. In the years since Anime Central was held at that hotel, a new Rosemont Theater has blossomed on the lot across the street. It's a state of the art facility that holds 4,400 people, and those crowds mess up traffic on the surrounding roads. Traffic was moving into the theater for a 10:30 Chris Rock show on Saturday night, just as the author was trying to leave the parking lot. He needed to make a left turn to get back to the motel, but that was blocked by theater traffic. So the author turned right, and was forced to drive back onto I-294, then cut north to I-190 to return to River Road - only to find more theater traffic blocking the way. By making a couple of dumb, selfish moves through heavy traffic (see, the author's already learned Chicago-style maneuvers), the author managed to get to the far lane, where he avoided more of the backlog and got to his motel after a looping four-mile detour. |
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