Comic Con Crazyland

Where'a a wonderful place to spend 24hrs? 

My sweet nostalgic answers, like sleepaway camp and family vacations, are long in the past. Relaxing local spots, such as community gardens, I'm lucky if I can spend an hour. A couple years back, did a weekend trip to Woodstock with a couple friends, but that's hardly a place I know well, as every step was a completely new discovery. The best, closest to accurate, and most unique views I can provide are the absolutely overwhelming - yet personally & professionally rewarding - full experiences of frequent involvement with comic conventions. 

There are large crowds of visitors at events like these, so mine is hardly a solo perspective, but for the uninitiated it remains a mystery. Even for regular attendees, even if you went for the first time right now and saw the whole thing for yourself, it's a "choose your own adventure" smorgasbord of options for how to spend your time, money, and attention. Especially at a large event, you are inherently only seeing a small sliver of what's happening. It's only from going over and over again, to various events and wearing multiple hats (as an eager fan, art exhibitor, industry pro, press reporter, informal educator, etc.) and asking several more friends, that I can attempt to give both a broader and much more nuanced description than your standard attendee.

The first events I ever went to were the anime cons. The art of Japanese manga (comics) and animated shows were a budding interest in middle school that I gleaned from a few friends and jumped fully into from the start of high school. Being an arts student in NYC meant we had a club for it already, and beyond the ordinary network television we were covertly accessing popular content before it was formally released in the US. My friends already knew what events happened locally, and we continued to discover more. At the time, these were in hotel spaces. Despite being a painfully shy kid, the festive atmosphere and access to new info and inspiration was invigorating. Truly won me over.

People dressed up as their favorite characters and had fortuitous encounters, quoting memorable moments or staging battle scenes. Around then, my favorite show had been cancelled from American television during a critical moment. At a merchant table, I found the full DVD box set with a special figurine. Without the time or guts to make a full costume of my own, I did turn a t-shirt inside out and drew with Prismacolor markers a silly chibi face and quote from a ridiculous villain.

But the biggest anime con in our region was Otakon, at the Baltimore Convention Center. We actually took a trip together, split a hotel room multiple ways, attempted costumes, and ran around this huge crazy place. People started calling out to me, things that would be annoying to my character - oh yeah, I'm supposed to get mad!

Within a couple years, I was at art college in Baltimore, where we had a pre-established anime club too. Because the big local event already happened in the summer, we would travel to DC for Katsucon in the winter. That's especially why I think of this as a nearly or literally 24-hour thing... throughout the day, you could go to talks about all different topics. And afterwards, there would be a rave party (was a bit cowardly/tired/meh/confused so I don't recall anymore if I actually went, called it a night, or just chilled in the hall to chat?) and the programming rooms would keep showing episodes and episodes of obscure shows late into the night. Being a hotel, the building's doors never completely closed, so it may have been continuing truly round-the-clock.

From there, it was Baltimore Comic Con, SPX, then MoCCA Fest and NYCC. And a bunch of other local-ish cons in between, then 2 trips to SDCC mixed in. I'll add more to the story eventually, but it became more about learning and growing professionally, to the point that I'm now officially becoming the "courtroom artist of comic cons" and trying to visually report about all the industry news and delightful moments. The biggest ones, I tend to describe as a "pop culture extravaganza" where people go for the sheer novelty of it, or any number of interests. Of course, I still love the art for most of all, but the spectacle and community of it continues to entice me back again.