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Monday, August 22 7:49 am (link) -
Wikipedia can pretty much tell you everything about anything. Oh, and are you reading Death of the Party?
So Otakon was this past weekend, and I went mostly to see some of the other webcomic artists. When I got there Baltimore's Inner Harbor looked like Madison on Halloween, which if you don't know can pack 100,000+ people on downtown streets in full costume. The kids at the convention weren't drunk, though...yet. I would say every 5th person walking around the streets of Baltimore in that area was unabashedly in some bright costume. The ratio dropped to about 1 in 3 inside the convention.
The convention was sold out when I showed up, which meant you were supposed to sneak around to the side and walk in when the bouncer wasn't looking. I only stayed for about an hour and a half, and I didn't buy much, so I don't feel bad about missing the $20 entry fee. Once there I walked past all the High School kids who would get their asses kicked at school for dressing how they were, making my way to Artists Alley. The MacHall guys were there, as were the Applegeeks dudes, and the Little Gamers Boys had a table. The guy who does Dominic Deegan (who apparently goes by "Mookie")is a really nice guy who did very well for himself at the convention. When I showed up he was telling a girl he had already sold out of all 100 copies of his book the day before, as well as tshirts, scarves, you name it. He seemed really cool, and we chatted a bit while I gave him a Big Cheese Press Sampler.
Oh, and I guess the Rob and Elliot guys and the VGCats dude were there too, but I couldn't find them.
The wierdest part about Otakon for me was that I was very into anime when I was in 4th grade through early HS. I lived overseas in 4th and 5th grade, so anime was just "cartoons" to me. But then when I came back to the US (bear in mind, this was 1994 and I was 11) it was impossible to find. Upon coming back to the US I called every comic book store in the area and the conversation always went:
Me: Do you have manga?
Clerk: What?
Me: Japanese comics
Clerk: We have Robotech. That's it.
So anime has come a long way in the intervening years. I used to order Dragonball Z comics from France when I was in 6th grade, and had them sent to a local Japanese grocery store in Middle School. Other than that and Akira, it wasn't until I really got into the internet that Japanese comics became more available to me. By the time I was done with HS no one I really hung out with was into much more than Ghost in the Shell, so I kinda let it drop. I'll still watch a movie or pick up a book now and again, but that's it. It's sort of like comic books. If you don't ardently follow it, you have no idea what you're getting. That's one of the biggest problems with comic books as far as I'm concerned. I'll write about it sometime. It'll save the industry.
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