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to convention travels after a couple of weeks back at the old race track
job, making money that will immediately be used to pay for more
convention travels. Some fans may wonder why the author is so tolerant
of convention shortcomings - blame that attitude on too many years at
race tracks. Conventions don't need uniformed sheriff's deputies to
stop the riots, and you don't need wreckers and ambulances to run a
convention. Anime Central marked the author's return to book and picture sales, balanced against a few panel discussions and interview sessions. A week before the trip, the author scrambled to get more paper to feed the two printers he uses to print the cosplay book pages. Then there were a few trips to the bookbinders, followed by the four-hour drive to Illinois for the convention, with camera equipment filling the trunk. As always, the irrational travel strategy was to drive in the early morning hours, trying to avoid the worst of Chicagoland traffic. Part two of the strategy was to book a room in the cheapest motel within a short drive of the Hyatt where most of the convention was held, and to have that room ready right when the author arrived around 4 a.m. Friday, leaving just enough time for a short nap, a shower and a dash over to the convention hotel for the start of the event. The strategy worked perfectly, for once. There was only light traffic on the drive to Rosemont. The author's cheap Schiller Park motel room was ready on his 3:15 a.m. arrival. The author got to Chicagoland ahead of a driving rain that drenched the convention's Friday morning start. The only thing the author could have done better was to print more cosplay books for sale at the convention, but he was caught by surprise. Based on the largest number of books that fans had bought at a single event, the author decided to print a few more. By Friday evening all of the books had been sold. More were sold in eight hours of Anime Central than at three days of Katsucon, the last time the author sold all of his small print run at a convention. The strategy of making some bonus material available for book buyers may have helped, although some customers seemed pleasantly surprised when they were told of the "bonus bag." It was interesting to watch what was taken: the ADV DVD's went first, followed by the Anime Network bags, then the Anime Network caps. Last to go were the Dragonball Z action figures. But the decision to spend the weekend at a table in the foyer eliminated the panel discussion and interview session stories from this site. Pleasantly, there were many customers and costumers, but so much time was spent with them that no time was left to listen to the wonderful collection of creative people brought from Japan to the convention. The best the author could do was to leave a tape recorder in the interview room; that material will be used to flesh out the Protoculture Addicts story on the convention. The author prefers to have a balance between costumers and artists on this site; he hopes the emphasis on costumers at Anime Central did not tip the balance in the wrong direction. Cosplay is great, but there would be no cosplay without the imaginative artists who design the characters that inspire the costumes. The author barely had enough time to sneak away for a couple of minutes to the Excel Saga panel on Saturday, where he spent three minutes getting the mandatory pictures of the two Nabeshins, Brett Weaver and Shinichi Watanabe. One of Anime Central's 2004 changes was moving registration lines from the Hyatt hotel to the Rosemont convention center. The move paid off when rain poured over the convention on Friday morning; had the convention used their 2003 registration setup, where the lines ran outside the hotel and onto neighboring streets, fans would have been soaked. In 2004, the fans faced long walks to the convention center over skybridges, but at least they were dry walks. The convention also added some entertainment in the registration area, erecting a big screen on which they projected music videos. Some fans needed the entertainment to pass the time during long waits, but that followed an unusual pattern. The convention alphabetically organized the registration lines, and they grouped people with last names J-L. For some reason, those lines tended to be longer than other lines; one guess is that ethic groups in Chicagoland and the Midwest have large numbers of people with those names. Strangest cosplay moment of the weekend came on Saturday when a man was spotted in a cowboy hat and a plaid shirt with torn-off sleeves. It wasn't actor Scott McNeil; it was actor Vic Mignogna cosplaying McNeil. We missed the moment of revelation, and it must have been great to see the look on Scott's face. The Saturday night costume contest set new standards for raunch and imaginative cosplay. High points were the big cat from the Dirty Pair TV series and the catbus from Totoro that took four people inside to carry on and off stage. The low point was the twin announcers' flubbing the names of entrants and characters. Before the author dashed home on Saturday morning, he was told that the convention was likely to have 7,500 attendance during the weekend. Looked like that Buffy convention down the street drew no one away from the anime show. The amount of interest in Anime Central was reflected in the amount of traffic to this web site, which set records. Traffic on a convention weekend usually peaks on the event's final day and the following Monday, but the Anime Central traffic was astounding. Each day saw more than 100,000 page views and nine gigabytes of file transfers, more than on any other day of this site's six and a half years. Just as happened with the brisk convention sales of the cosplay book, the traffic was a heartwarming validation of this site, its concept and execution. The author hopes to keep up the work with some more convention travels. Unfortunately, he'll have to skip the Anime North event to stay at home for some weekend race track work, but that money will be put to use for a long trip on the Memorial Day weekend. After long thought, the author decided that attending only one of the weekend's four conventions would not be good enough. So he's booked travel for two of the events, thousands of miles apart, which will be... |
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