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Anime Vegas - Author's Notes - 2006 There's a flashy, glamorous side to Las Vegas, the side people know through pictures of towering, billion-dollar casino hotels. Anime Vegas wasn't in that part of the city. Rather, it was north of the new strip, next to the minor leage ball park, in the small Cashman convention center. Its most prominent neighbors are a natural history museum, a state office building under construction - and a couple of mortuaries. No, it wasn't the first time an anime convention has been held across the street from a mortuary, since that already happened with the conventions that were held at the Holiday Inn in Virginia Beach. The Cashman center was the perfect place for the event that drew around 2,500 people for the holiday weekend, a spot that had more than enough room for the event. The convention center has meeting rooms on the north end, a long hall in the middle and a nice theater on the south end. Anime Vegas used the meeting rooms for panels and video showings, the theater for rock concerts and the costume contest, and a portion of the long hall was used for the dealers' room. The rest of the center was turned over to a gun show, and we didn't see anyone moving back and forth between the two events. However, there were Nerf guns being carried by the guests of honor (heard they were part of the gift package), and actor Sonny Strait showed his deadly accuracy with a shootin' iron. "I'm from Texas," is all he could say. After covering two huge events in Otakon and Gen Con in the previous month, it almost took some time to get used to the slower, gentler pace of Anime Vegas. Once, an anime convention that had 2,500 people was considered big, but Anime Vegas was easy-going and laid back, with no drama that we could find.  Maybe the 100-degree heat drew some of the excess energy and emotion away from the event (it was 25 degree warmer than the temperatures at the author's home), or maybe Western fans just take things easier. Anyone who doubts the cross-cultural appeal of anime should consider that one of the nicer gothic lolita outfits we saw was worn by a young woman from Salt Lake City, and she was one of the organizers of the mid-October Anime Banzai convention. This writer really wanted to double up on the Labor Day weekend, but time and money weren't available. So, rather than head to both AnimeFEST in Dallas and Anime Vegas in Nevada, we traveled only to the Las Vegas event for its final days on Sunday and Monday. Fortunately, the long holiday weekend led Anime Vegas' organizers to hold their costume contest on Sunday evening (as did AnimeFEST). Yes, we know that we bypassed Kumoricon in Oregon, the five-headed Fan Expo in Toronto and the big Dragon*Con in Atlanta. Add all five events together and you got a world-class guest list, with director Yasuhiro Imagawa in Toronto, Monkey Punch and Yoshitoshi ABe in Dallas, and dozens of guests in Atlanta. In theory, with a fast plane (minus snakes, of course) you could have gotten to four of those events, but the snakes took the plane we were planning to use and Gulfstream wouldn't loan us a replacement. We did double up a bit over the weekend, which we started at the U.S. Nationals drag races. Over the weekend, there probably were as many racing fans in Clermont, Ind. as there were party fans in Atlanta, but the environments are radically different. A lot of drag racing fans stay in campgrounds for the Nationals, while Dragon*Con fans fill most of Atlanta's most expensive downtown hotels. We'll guess that earplugs are equally useful at each event. On the other hand, there might be an unofficial competition between Fan Expo and Dragon*Con to see which show has the largest attendance. So why did we go to Vegas? After so many trips to Dallas, we wanted to try something different. We'd spent time over Nevada, but on the ground, this writer had never gotten beyond the McCarron airport. It was a stop on the way to Anime Expo, and we learned at that stop that all of the talk about slot machines in the terminal was true.  If you can gamble at the airport, what is the rest of town like, we thought. Of course, we made the trip for the convention and not to bet. Besides, our legal gambling record is absymal; we gave up on slot machines after an unsuccessful trip to a gambling boat on the Ohio River. In Vegas, there weren't slot machines in the convention center. There were machines in the lounge next to our motel and in the convenience store on the corner. That store was where we bought our glamorous Vegas meal of a loaf of bread and cold cuts on Sunday night after the costume contest: we were too tired to search for a restaurant and didn't bother to check the lounge, so we settled for sandwiches. A week before Anime Vegas, we got a pleasant surprise in the mail. Regular visitors to this site will recall that we helped Studio Do-Do, the group run by Hiroaki Yabunaka and Ippongi Bang, with the Cosplex cosplay magazine they published. We were disappointed when only one issue of the magazne was released, but much of that disappointment went away when we checked the mail and saw we had received a copy of the new Studio Do-Do project. Published by Marble Books of Japan, it's a book titled "Madly in love with cosplay." Along with dozens of pictures of some breathtakingly beautiful Japanese costumers, there's a page of some of the cosplay pictures we sent to Do-Do that had previously been unused. Those adventuresome enough to order materials through Amazon will find listings for the book on the Japanese Amazon site, both in Japanese and in English. The ISBN number is 4-12-390129-8 and the listed price on the book is 1,800 yen. Anime Vegas Main Page