The companies that were present, had a few interesting offerings. Bandai Entertainment will be bringing out the Gundam 00 anime. Their booth seemed to be the most popular with a lot of swag giveaways and lots of Haruhi and Lucky Star dance lines :). There was even a NYAF Lucky Star dance contest video that is hilarious :) Del Rey Manga was there promoting a Dean Koontz manga, In Odd We Trust. They will also be putting out The Genshiken Official Book soon. Yen Press was new to the show promoting their Haruhi and Soul Eater manga. They also had free copies of their Yen Plus magazine.
I only went to a few panels at the con. At the Gaia Online panel they announced that their ZOMG MMO will be out by the end of the year. Robin Sevakis of Anime News Nina fame had a panel on making comics with Photoshop. I also attended a panel on the history of Gekiga, which is a genre of mature, dramatic comics from japan. Where Manga literally translates to "Whimsical Pictures," Gekiga literally translates to "Dramatic Pictures." One series brought up in the panel was the Sanctuary manga, which the lecturer said was out of print and took him over a year to find the entire series. I happily thought in my head how I bought and read the entire series around the time they were released ages ago :).
I attended the mc chris concert on friday night at the convention. One thing that bothers me is that the con charged $10 extra for tickets to the concert. At every con I've ever been to, the concerts had always been free, even at last year's New York Anime Festival. Last year's Unicorn Table concert was awesome. This time around the extra ticket price had the effect of low interest among the con goers. Only about 1/3 of the seats were filled. The mc chris performance also had so many sound and lighting technical difficulties. It was a real disappointment, but mc chris's performance and comedy pulled the show together as best as possible.
I was not able to see the Rie Tanaka concert at the Masquerade event, which was free. The room they had it in was filled to capacity leaving many attendees to miss the event, another flub of the con organizers. I don't know how Reed Exhibitions could make these kinds of mistakes when they know from last year's con how popular these performances are. This year they did not provide adequate seating and space for most events.
So, what did I get at the con? Well, mostly manga. I needed to catch up on some series and there were many good deals on manga at the con. Pictured here is the stack that I got. I picked up some Negima, Genshiken, Welcome to the NHK, Megatokyo and others. I also got a Yotsuba Revoltech figure and the Yuki Nagato Figma figure :). Not pictured is the Final Fantasy VII Yuffie figure in the original costume and the Gundam: Char's Counter Attack DVD which I got.
Overall, the con was great, but with a few problems. The attendance is growing with enthusiastic crowds and cosplayers, but the con organizers and industry really slacked off this year and provided a less than stellar show. I don't know if it is due to the economy and lowered promotion budgets, but one thing is for sure, that the fans are willing to gather in great numbers and have fun even if they have to rely on themselves to party :).
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