The author of this site likes showing up early for events and dislikes rush hour traffic, so we timed our Columbus, Ohio arrival at Ohayocon for a ridiculously early hour on the convention's opening Friday. When we wandered into the Columbus Convention Center and strolled through the halls, we were surprised to see a hundred people, with portable video games, music players and notebook PC's, sitting in the registration line, hours before it was scheduled to open. For them, the convention already had started, despite what the clock said.

That was the theme of the 2008 Ohayocon; people wanted this show badly, and they were determined to have a good time. They flooded the convention center in what had to be record numbers; we heard that more people had registered in advance than for any of the previous editions of the convention. Rooms that were adequate for events in other years were filled to overflowing in 2008.

This site spent all but a few hours of the convention in a second-floor photo sales booth, where the foot traffic and the customers rarely slowed. A few times, we got up from the table and recruited costumers for web site pictures, but most of the time the costumers came to us. We'd see an interesting costumer or group walk by and not be able to reach them, but they'd always come back. All of those 6 a.m. wakeup calls, intended to get us to the convention in time to be ready for business by 9 a.m., clearly paid off.

The closest thing we had to a problem was when a dancing Gundam, enjoying the music played by the neighboring Anime Punch booth, bumped our backdrop support and knocked it over. It took 15 minutes to piece things back together, but that was just a minor loss of time. With this site's history, anything at Ohayocon that doesn't involve an ambulance is only a minor inconvenience.

One of the families we met at the convention was a group from Minnesota. They mentioned they'd had some disagreements with the way Anime Central had been run in previous years, but we knew that convention's management had changed, so we got the two sides together and got that resolved. Later, that family and its Magna Carta costumes got one of the top rewards in the Saturday night costume contest. The audience had to be surprised when the guy in the big, cute, white furry suit turned out to be the grey-haired father of the 15-year-old girl who made the outfit.

We apologize for not getting any pictures of the “Voices for” and Eyeshine concerts online this time. We were a few feet from the hall where the concerts were held, but so many people wanted to buy pictures that we didn't have a chance to break away for those events. The photo booth was so busy that we missed the opening of the costume contest and didn't get pictures of the first two entries; apologies for that as well.

We were on the convention center's second level because that was the only open space left. Our previous third-floor location was taken up with artists' alley tables, so many that one overflow tale had to be moved next to our second-floor booth on Saturday. It turned out to be a good location because most of the convention's foot traffic seemed to head by our spot.

Several people stopped by the booth to ask directions to the registration line, a few paces to the north (and a line that ran far quicker than in 2007). Others were interested in the dealers' room location, which was in the large third-floor ballroom previously used for concerts. A few dealers had to go to the balcony because there was no more space, but our friends from Funimation finally got the up-front location they wanted.

We heard some rumblings that there might have been staff cutbacks at Manga Entertainment that could have included a fan favorite or two. 

On the other hand, we spoke to another fan favorite, actor Tiffany Grant, who said she was thrilled with the possibilities at the mid-April Kawaii-Kon in Honolulu. That offers a meeting of the Auskas; Grant dubbed that character in Neon Genesis Evangelion, and another guest at the convention is Yuko Miyamura, Auska's original Evangelion voice. There have been few meetings of Japanese and American creators and actors who worked in the same series; the Princess Tutu gathering in Austin in 2007 was a rare treat, and the inability of Romi Park to get to Anime Expo and appear with Vic Mignogna (both voiced Ed in Fullmetal Alchemist) was a sad disappointment. If both Auskas get to Hawaii in April, it'll be a very special event.