Brill Building: Fueled by Pocky

Fueled by Pocky

I covered the recent Anime Expo for PWCW. When I covered the Yaoi-Con late last year I got the sense of being out of place because I felt no connection to the material celebrated there. This weekend was much different. There was a wide enough variety of manga and anime that there was plenty to get me excited. Viz’s Golgo 13 program and two of Del Rey’s titles, Eternal Sabbath and Q-Ko-Chan (by Ueda Hajime, the artist on the FLCL books, whose work I learned sells better in the U.S. than it does in Japan), are all books I am interested in. I saw some cool anime titles that actually got me browsing Netflix’s database when I got back to my laptop (I still have to see Neon Genesis Evangelion). My fandom is miniscule compared to a lot of people at that con, though. The outpouring of enthusiasm I witnessed was a real shock compared to the comic conventions I’ve been to that were dominated by American content.

I had seen giant booths on convention floors before, such as DC Comics’ booth at San Diego every year, but I didn’t expect crowds of people around ADV’s two-story booth shouting “A! D! V!” while trying catch the free stuff being thrown out to the crowd. I hadn’t seen live performances like the one Pata witnessed on Saturday (Pata’s coverage of the con on a whole is worth reading). Nor do I recall seeing what had to be close to half the attendees in costume, various costumes for various days in some cases and many elaborate ones at that, to let everyone know what their favorite property was. My favorite costume was the guy who dressed up as an iPod, although the person dressed as a box of Pocky comes in at a close second. The biggest difference between what I saw here and what I saw at San Diego last year and WonderCon earlier this year is the presence of female fans. There are plenty of female fans at those other two conventions but so much of the content and atmosphere of the anime and manga at AX was geared especially towards female consumers. Talking to officials I discovered that AX’s growth over its fifteen years was due to younger readers, many of them female, discovering manga as favorite reading material at a young age. I've seen kids fill the aisles of the manga section at Borders now I was seeing the phenomena taken to a higher level.

I actually witnessed what could be seen as a microcosm for the evolution of manga/anime fandom as I covered two panels in the same room. At Dark Horse’s panel there seemed to be about an even split between male and female fans, with older men asking a lot of the questions to the panel. Editors such as Carl Horn talked about their samurai books and even mentioned their new acquisition Satsuma Gishiden as their “manliest yet.” The properties they discussed were some of the first published in the U.S. like Oh! My Godess and Blade of the Immortal, all appearing in a flipped format. Seeing the change in the room as the Shojo Beat panel started was hard not to notice. Now you had lots of teenage girls and some guys, many in costume, cheering in delight when the editors announced new serials in their magazine, now in color, like Princess Princess and Vampire Knight. Questions were dominated by fans asking when the titles they already read through scanlations will be picked up. Almost every panel I saw had a few editors with a pen and notebook taking down all the suggestions that were offered. The Dark Horse panel was smart, Horn speaks very eloquently on manga in America, but the Shojo Beat panel had an air of excitement I hadn’t seen at a comics convention. At the end the editors gave out freebies for those with stickers under their chairs. As I was walking out I saw men and women on their hands and knees desperately looking under not only their own chairs but any unoccupied seats. When have you seen Marvel do that to a crowd? This kind of difference might be nothing new to some people but I've only seen it on such a large scale recently.

To keep using San Diego as my comparison point to AX, imagine if the comics side of SDCC had as much excitement attached to it as the movie side of SDCC. I couldn’t make it to the con in time to see CLAMP’s appearance but the reports I got sounded not too different when a movie star or big time director make an appearance at Hall H at the San Diego Convention Center. I think American comics are on an upswing compared to five or ten years ago but because the audience is older the appreciation from fans is more muted and perhaps a bit more jaded. The fandom I saw in Anaheim had something close to that bursting spirit I had heard about whenever a bunch of older comics/sci-fi fans get together. Perhaps in a decade or so when manga fans get older and let careers and family life deplete their fan intensity we’ll hear similar nostalgia-tinged stories.

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