This pen is amazing.

The packaging here is nearly identical to the “pocket brush pen” from last time, but these two pens are completely different. While the other pocket brush was very similar to the Tombow Fudenosuke or the Kuretake Fudegokochi, this “flexi-brush” is much more comparable to the fabled Pentel Pocket Brush or the Kuretake #13. Yes, really.

DAISO “pocket brush pen” comparison.

Above is the comparison between the pocket brush pens of similar packaging; the pen from the previous post is on the left and the new pen is on the right. Both use a water-based ink, so they aren’t waterproof, but both are Copic-proof/alcohol-proof. You can tell from the above that the “flexi-brush” pen definitely gets a lot more flex than the other pocket brush pen. Look at that line variation! You know why that is?

Because it’s got nylon bristles. The other pen is felt tipped.

Actually, after I posted my previous pen review, Sam (Jacobin) mentioned that they’d gotten a DAISO-brand brush pen with nylon bristles and I almost didn’t believe them because really? Really? A pen on this level for A DOLLAR FIFTY? For 100 yen?? Apparently so.

Nylon bristle brush pen comparison.

Other than the ink tones, can you even tell the difference? The DAISO pen has a cooler colored ink while the Pentel and the Kuretake have a warmer one (though the Kuretake’s dries a tad lighter than the Pentel). I compared the Pentel Pocket Brush and the Kuretake #13 last year; the difference in their performance is negligible. And so far, this new DAISO pen almost as good as those other two. I just can’t get over it.

You can’t tell from the above sample, but you can get very fine, tiny strokes with all of these pens — because all the tips are made from individual nylon bristles, they don’t wear down over time and you always get a fine, perfect point.

The length of the tip on the DAISO pen is more similar to the Kuretake’s, about 7.5mm from base to tip. Though the packaging says 4.0mm, the widest stroke you can get is actually about 6.0mm, though most of the time it’s closer to 5.0mm.

Top to bottom: DAISO pen, Pentel Pocket Brush, Kuretake #13.

Feathering isn’t as smooth with the DAISO pen and the ink shows through a bit thin, but the biggest downside is, of course, that it isn’t refillable. Once the ink runs out, that’s it. You toss it and buy another one. But at freakin’ $1.50, this entire pen is almost as much as one refill for the Pentel Pocket Brush ($1.25ish). The ink is also not waterproof, which is a weakness the Kuretake #13 also has, but the Kuretake is compatible with converters, allowing you to fill it with whatever ink you want.

But the Kuretake #13 is a whopping $33.00 and the Pentel Pocket Brush is $13.50.

This pen is $1.50.

This pen is $1.50.

This pen is $1.50.

No, this pen won’t replace the Pentel or the Kuretake — those are both stellar pens that you’ll buy and refill again and again and keep for the long term — but all the downsides of this DAISO pen are waved away and easily excused by its price point. In conclusion: if you live near a DAISO Japan store and have not played around with a nylon bristle brush pen yet, GO. GO NOW.

This sketch used the DAISO “flexi-brush.” For real~.

AnC is basically a reverse Elance for the hobbyist and semi-professional art market. I want to call it the “fandom art market,” which I’m sure is a very poor term for it, but you know what I’m talking about. AnC is aimed primarily at the artists that have, over the years, peddled their wares on sites like Livejournal, deviantART, FurAffinity, and most recently, Tumblr. It aims to provide a better platform to facilitate commission transactions, which are frequently rife with problems, many stemming from the simple fact that none of these other sites were made to handle commissions.

The site launched to the public in late July and has been growing quietly since then, adding and implementing new features on a fairly regular basis. In January, deviantART launched its own platform for commissions — it’s pretty awful, but dA is the big fish in the pond, and people will use their platform because they’re young, poorly-informed, and already on the site. AnC is the little fish, and while it’s also not a perfect platform, it’s off to a far better start. So I think it’s worth talking about, because there really does need to be a better way to deal with commissions on the Internet.

Your Basic Transaction

AnC works like this: artists can create a listing for a certain type of commission, name a base price, and decide how many of that kind of commission they want to be able to handle simultaneously. This almost exactly mirrors what many artists already do in their dA journals and Tumblr posts. An artist can create a listing to accept 10 slots for a colored character bust at $20 each. Through the listing, clients can start a conversation with the artist about what they want to commission. When the artist has enough information, they can set the final price (so if the client’s request is especially complex, that $20 bust might go up to $25 at the artist’s discretion) and accept the commission. At this point, the filled slot is reflected on the artist’s listing and the client is asked to pay via Paypal.

When the client does so, the money is held by AnC. After the artist uploads the finished work, the client can mark the job as complete, and it is only then that the payment for the commission, minus a 10% fee, is released to the artist. AnC has a built-in watermarking system that will, if the artist chooses, keep uploaded work watermarked until after the job is marked as complete. Both artists and clients can access their commission history from their control panel, along with an exportable list of their monetary transactions.

The Client’s Perspective

Most of you reading this are probably artists, though in this market, a fair percentage of clients are also artists. I commission others almost as regularly as I’m commissioned myself. Regardless though, don’t skip this section. It’s important.

The client side of things on AnC is pretty straightforward. You can browse commission listings, search by tags/keywords and price range, and sort results by listing rating, age, or price. The tagging system is a little haphazard since artists aren’t especially consistent with how they decide to tag things, but the search system does also pick out words from listing titles and descriptions. Ratings for each listing correspond to the number of successful transactions the listing has had, so it’s a decent indicator of artist reliability. Artist profiles also note their average response time. You can also browse by artist, and you used to also be able to sort artists by age and rating, though this seems to be unavailable at the moment. Once you find a listing you like, you can begin your commission.

There are a few things about the way commission listings are displayed that bother me, but for the most part they’re minor complaints. I’m not a big fan of the magnification feature on the listing example. Often the magnifier lags or takes a long time to load, and there’s no indication that it’s doing anything. And in general, I just like the typical lightbox zooming better. I want to see a bigger version of the whole image, not just a bigger version of a tiny corner of the image.

I also wish artists could upload multiple examples to the listing. Given just space for one example, artists will of course choose their best work, but the question is whether they’re able to produce something at that quality consistently. Can they do as well as they did in that example for me? Multiple examples help a lot in building client confidence! A lot of artists have strong personal preferences for drawing one gender over another; it’s really frustrating to me when I find an artist with a commission listing I’m interested in, but their example art is of a woman and I have no idea if they can draw men. Some artists supplement their default example with linked or embedded images, but these artists are rare.

Thumbs up indicates the number of successful transactions.

I think it’s funny sometimes that Artists Beware is named what it is. Sure, there are posts now and again where artists ask advice on how to deal with a crazy client, but it seems it’s mostly the client that comes out on the losing end of a bad commission deal and a majority of posts are call-outs to flaky artists.

The most common story is basic: the client pays an artist to do a job and the artist never delivers, never refunds, and/or never responds. If the client is lucky, the artist is concerned enough about their reputation that they seek a resolution to the blotched transaction after an AB post is made, but even in these cases, the client has frequently already been waiting years for their commission, which is absurd for even the most complex of jobs. And more often, even after the AB post is made, the artist just can’t be bothered, and the client is forced to cut their losses — sometimes to the tune of a few hundred dollars.

AnC addresses this prevalent problem with the obvious solution: an escrow system. This is easily my favorite feature of the site.

The client still pays upfront, but artists aren’t paid until they deliver the work. This eliminates the incentive for an artist to overwhelm themselves with too much at once, which is usually to get a lot of money at once. (It may be obvious that I’m generally leery of “emergency commissions.”) If an artist fails to deliver in a timely manner or stops responding, the client can file a dispute. If the artist doesn’t respond within a week, the client is automatically refunded. If the artist protests the dispute, the issue is escalated to AnC staff. Partial refunds can be negotiated with staff as a mediator if the artist has begun, but hasn’t finished, the work. Sure, outside of AnC, you can dispute via Paypal, but only within 45 days of payment, and often, it isn’t clear that things are going to be a problem until well after those 45 days.

My biggest concern when commissioning someone new is always “is this artist trustworthy/reliable?” Commissioning through AnC means that the worst that can happen is I waste time dealing with an unreliable artist, but lost time is still a lot better than lost money!

List of applicants to your job posting.

Recently, AnC implemented a job board, which allows clients to create specific jobs for artists to bid on — so, normal Elance. The feature is very basic and feels a bit underdeveloped, but I suppose it works as advertised.

Artists can navigate to the job board through the main browse page, but the jobs are listed with minimal detail and are not sortable or searchable. Basic job postings expire in fourteen days, and the artist-to-client populations on the site currently are probably very skewed to the artist side, so I suppose the site doesn’t anticipate there being enough jobs to require search and sort functionality? Clients can pay to extend the job post’s lifetime to thirty days, which also gives them a “featured” status on the job board and additional visibility elsewhere on the site. Until the site gets more actual job posts, this paid feature is relatively useless, but I guess it doesn’t hurt to have it there.

My main quip with the job board is just that the job listings themselves are too simple. Clients can’t converse with applicants through the job listing before accepting one, and while they could send individual artists private messages, this fragments the process and would create multiple threads of conversation that aren’t tied to job listing, which can get confusing. URLs that artists paste into their applications are also not auto-linked to their destinations, which is annoying.

I also kind of wish that the text of each artist’s application, instead of being displayed in a lightbox popup, would be displayed in the table view (above), maybe with an automatic ‘read more’ after a few hundred characters, or an option to expand/collapse text. It isn’t like the table is very crowded (why the hell is the price column so wide), and that’d make it easier to compare applications.

I also somewhat dislike that artists can’t bid higher than the your budget, but I might just be weird. Artists can tweak their price after conversing with a client about a slot, so why shouldn’t clients be able to talk it out with an artist and maybe agree to a higher price than they were originally looking to pay? Then again, I haven’t tested to see what happens after you accept an artist bid on a job — if it proceeds to a normal “slot” conversation thread, then the artist would be able to adjust their price higher from there anyway?

Further Development

For the most part, commission listings on AnC are under $100. Artists undervaluing themselves is an oft-discussed topic in the community but even without getting into that, there are already a few regular outliers in the market, including adult-themed commissions, fursuit commissions, and plush/doll commissions. As such, I think it’s important for there to be a multi-payment system implemented for the more expensive commissions. It’s rare that you’ll find a client wanting to pay for a $1250 fursuit in a lump sum, and the fursuit builder will likely want access to a down payment outside an escrow system to procure materials.

A system where an artist and client can mutually decide on the number of payments, the work to be completed in conjunction with each payment, as well as deadlines, would be amazing. Essentially, it would be splitting a single commission into multiple transactions, each with an escrowed payment and a negotiable deadline (deadlines could also be implemented on their own, actually…).

An example scenario would go like this: a client and artist agree to multiple payments and the work needed for each payment. They agree to a deadline for the first part of the job and the client pays the first payment. This payment is held by AnC. The artist should upload something — the agreed upon portion of the work — prior to the deadline so the client can mark that first portion of the commission “complete.” The first payment is then released to the artist and the client is asked to pay the second payment, which is again held by AnC. And repeat until the commission is done!

Artists and clients should be able to re-negotiate deadlines as needed. If an artist fails to meet a deadline and a new one isn’t discussed and set within, say, fourteen days, AnC could default to refunding the client, similar to the dispute system. Even outside a multi-payment system, being able to set deadlines would be a great feature. As a client, I like to know when to expect things and when to check in for progress, and as an artist, I know we basically need deadlines to function anyway. <_<

The Artist’s Perspective

The artist side of AnC is similarly straightforward Artists can create listings  — they’re called “slots” on the site, but I like “listing” better because then the terminology doesn’t conflict with the slot availability within each listing — for as many different types of commissions as they’d like, set an example image, set a price, etc. The platform is really pretty simple and intuitive as a result of that simplicity.

Artist commission listing management.

As an artist too, I dislike not being able to upload multiple examples. I also don’t like Markdown for text formatting over BBCode or limited HTML, but I guess that’s more of a personal preference than anything else? Markdown emphasizes default readability, which is well and good, but HTML and BBCode-styled syntax is much more widely used and therefore more familiar to most users. The comparative unfamiliarity with Markdown is enough to deter most artists, including myself, from using it at all. Pasted URLs beginning in http:// are auto-linked to their destinations in listings, but not elsewhere?

Tag management is another weak point at the moment. As mentioned, artists aren’t terribly consistent with how they choose to tag listings, which leads to a lot of duplicated tags like “colored”/”color,” “realistic”/”realism,” and “bust”/”headshot.” This means if I tag a thing as “color” but everyone else uses “colored,” then a client searching through “colored” will miss my listing. Having the site auto-suggest tags when an artist begins typing would be helpful, as would providing an alphabetized list of existing tags displayed in a dropdown alongside the option to create your own.

When payments are released to the artist after a successful commission, they remain in the artist’s AnC balance until withdrawn to their Paypal account. Unfortunately, withdrawals are not automated; one of the site staff has to manually send you the amount via Paypal.

Correction: Withdrawals are apparently not manual, but are done on a schedule, so they aren’t immediate. That’s better than the previous thought, but still somewhat inconvenient. AnC’s Paypal account is operated under co-founder Jesse Hamilton’s name, so I assume it’s a less-than-ideal situation borne from either Paypal integration or difficulties with business incorporation with a geographically scattered staff…?

I kind of also wish there was an option to auto-withdraw the amount after each successful commission so I have a separate Paypal record for every commission automatically, but this is because of the way I manage my personal records and probably no one else cares.

Transaction log.

Artists (and clients) have easy access to their commission history on the site and a separate list (above) of all the monetary transactions, which is exportable as a CSV file. I wish the two lists could be consolidated though, because the transaction log isn’t especially useful for record-keeping purposes. It really only gives you a date, an amount, and the ID of the commission, which you have to cross-reference with your commission history to figure out what it was. It would be better for the job to be listed outright, with the name of the commission listing and the client. At the very least, the list should link to record of the job, but that link wouldn’t carry over well once exported. I dislike each of the fees listed as separate entries and would prefer the fee amount be displayed in the same row as whatever job it was for, or not at all.

Again, some of my annoyance is based on the inconvenience of needing to consolidate my AnC records with my personal records, but the logs on the site could definitely stand to be a bit more sophisticated.

The biggest concern of many artists, will probably be the 10% fee. 10% is far better than deviantART’s absolutely absurd 20%, but I still think it’s too high. AnC does eat Paypal fees for you so you’re not losing anything additional there — if you charge $50 for a commission, you will get $45 — but I still want the fee to be 5%, or whereabouts. Nevertheless, AnC’s decision not to go for a subscription route means that artists only forfeit a fee upon a successful transaction, so AnC only gets paid when artists get paid — an assurance that their interests remain mutual.

Since it’s the client that benefits more from the escrow system, I think it’s acceptable for artists to charge more for a listing on AnC than they might off-site, so AnC can be a very useful tool for an artist who hasn’t built a dependable reputation yet. If the multi-payment system is eventually implemented though, AnC will also be useful for artists with higher-priced offerings, since even artists with solid reps will encounter a client who would feel better with an escrow system to back them on a $250 commission. Higher-priced commissions leads me to think that there should be a maximum fee though ($10?), even if the percentage doesn’t change. 10%, or even 5%, off $1000 is a lot. AnC may only rarely encounter an artist offering a thousand dollar commission, but if the site wants to expand its market, then it certainly shouldn’t write anyone off.

Further Development

Where escrow is the primary benefit of AnC for clients, commission management and organization is the primary benefit of AnC for artists. And yet, most of the things I can think of to suggest for the artist side of the platform seem like they might be “too much” for the artist AnC targets. I want better logs for record-keeping and maybe more tools for money management — auto-withdraw at a certain amount, maybe? Integration with platforms like Mint.com or Outright.com could also be useful. AnC lets artists plug in Google Analytics code so you can track traffic to your commission listings; I haven’t tested that out, but built-in analytics of some sort would be nice regardless. Being able to see some of the overall site stats on a personal basis would be interesting.

Do most of the other artists on the site care about that kind of stuff?

AnC targets the hobbyist, amateur, and semi-professional art market for personal, non-commercial commissions. The “fandom art market” is in desperate need of such a platform. The issues that come up every week on Artists Beware really need to stop, and the artists and clients involved need to have a better system to keep both sides honest. Elance and similar sites already exist for professionals, but I think it’s important for AnC to keep in mind that many of the artists in fandom are either seeking to become professionals, or already consider themselves professionals. In the business of drawing “cartoon characters,” there is a certain level of casualness that’s expected and accepted, and the Internet makes it easy for younger artists to partake, but that doesn’t make these commissions any lesser of a business transaction. There’s still money and time and effort involved. That makes it serious.

The problem is that there’s no one to educate these artists about business stuff. While beta testing, one of the things I pushed for was artists being able to set their own terms of service, but in reality, most artists don’t even have a terms of service. They don’t know that they should. I suppose AnC doesn’t exist to educate artists so much as to make up for and help them deal with some of their common shortcomings, but additional descriptions or explanations for things (like that terms of service) and tool tips, and maybe even off-site links to additional resources, might be nice things to add. Creating some kind of community element or discussion space for artists to share and learn from each other may also be something to think about.

Is that blood…?

Overall

ArtistsnClients.com still has a lot of growing to do, but one of the nice things about that is that it’s still a pretty malleable platform. There are only two developers, and the lead, Eugen Rochko, has been very open and responsive to suggestions both via email and Twitter. I suggested the dispute resolution thing a while back and it was turned around and implemented within a week or two. The original fee calculation algorithm was more complicated, but after some user feedback, it was changed to the flat 10%. The site’s a constant work-in-progress, but that isn’t a bad thing. It’s the best thing about startups, really: the company is still human, and you can actually talk to them.

To be perfectly honest, AnC doesn’t have nearly as much value to me personally as an artist as it does to me as a client. I’ve been taking commissions online for a long time and have rather an impeccable record, if I do say so myself. I’ve never not delivered what I said I would, and while not every commission has gone flawlessly, every commission has had a resolution that was acceptable to both parties. I obsess over record-keeping, so commission management/organization has never really been an issue for me. The artist discovery aspect of AnC remains a low highlight for now while the site is small, so I still get far more exposure through the regular avenues of advertisement.

Having $5 taken off a $50 commission (VS the $1.75 I’d lose to Paypal handling a $50 commission off-site) is also a significant deterrent for me. Still, for an artist who is new at taking commissions or who is bad at keeping track of and/or organizing their commissions or who does want/need more exposure, the simple interface AnC offers can prove very valuable. And maybe that will be worth the 10% to them.

But as a client, man! I wish every artist that’s ever posted about commissions on Tumblr would sign up because I would feel so much more comfortable commissioning them through the site. There are many less established artists on Tumblr, which means a great variety of work, but virtually no accountability whatsoever. Many artists don’t have separate websites or additional web presences at all, and Tumblr accounts are easy to rename and delete. The unknowns are many and the risks are great for the commissioner. And I mean, really. Taking commissions through Tumblr asks and fanmails? Are you kidding me? What a terrible system that was obviously not made for that!

I think I’ve contributed as much to AnC as is possible without actually being part of the team, and I like to think I’ve been helpful by being able to take both sides of the platform into consideration, as well as being able to consider multiple segments of the market (anime, furry, etc).

Admittedly, my want of commissioning more artists without the risk of losing money on the flaky ones is one of the main reasons I want AnC to thrive, but that’s as good a reason as any, really. It amazes me, too, that it took so long for something like AnC to get made. Artists Beware has been around for ages. Some of these solutions presented here are so obvious. What else are we overlooking? Hopefully spreading the word about the site will get more folks involved — more opinions and more suggestions will keep the devs busy and the site growing.

Artists want clients to give them money. Clients want artist to actually be reliable. Give them a platform where the latter is guaranteed for your money back and the former will happen naturally. Everybody wins?

And recently I noticed they carried some “made for DAISO” brush pens. $1.50 is damn cheap for a brush pen! They carried four or five different ones, but I grabbed two to start:

Mysterious DAISO brush pens.

The bottom pen in the photo — the one with the red packaging and the patterned body — looked fancier, so I started with that. At first glance, I thought it would be similar to my Kuretake #13 or Pentel pocket brush because the tip is similarly long and flexible. It’s a felt tip though; no nylon bristles on this one. Still, I was kind of hopeful that I’d struck gold and for all of a minute thought that maybe despite being a felt tip, this pen was in the same league as the aforementioned.

Pen test on watercolor paper. Prawn red is Copic marker; seafoam is watercolor.

Because the tip is so long, this pen writes flexibly. Unfortunately, the felt tip isn’t as flexible as it needs to be and has a bad habit of “flicking” the tip up unexpectedly if you’re too rough with it, or try to transition from a thin line to a thick line and back again very quickly. The line width variation is still pretty decent, but only if you can live with needing to make thin and thick lines in separate strokes. And it’s way better for the thick lines than the thin ones. The point of the felt tip isn’t very fine, nor is it very hard, so it’s difficult to get a consistently thin line. You don’t have enough control.

The packaging for the pen boasts that it’s “waterproof and fade-proof,” but I’m not so sure about that. Wetting it after 2-3 minutes will smear the ink. Wetting it after five minutes of drying time yields better results…some of the time. The line width tests that smeared all over the upper right had been dry for probably 4-5 minutes when I wet it, though maybe it ran more badly because I used straight up water instead of diluting it with watercolor pigment? Copic smears it regardless of drying time, though not really as badly as water/color. Still, I wouldn’t really say that this pen is waterproof or alcohol-proof. Fade-proof? Well, I’ll get back to you on that in a few years.

All in all, I’m rather disappointed with this pen. It’s not a very good sketching pen because it isn’t good with thinner lines, forcing larger-format roughness. Maybe it’d be better if I sketched on like 22″x30″ sheets, but I don’t! It’s not a very good inking pen, again because of its lack of precision, but also because of it’s lacking resistance to marker and watercolor, which are what I pair with my inks the most. Oh well. It was a cheap pen.

Pen test on the smooth backside of watercolor paper, ha. Vermillion is Copic marker; seafoam is watercolor.

The other pen has a sparkly grey-blue exterior and I was less excited about it because it looked like it would be like most of my other felt tip brush pens (all my fude pens, basically), which don’t really have that much variation between them. And I was kind of right…

This “pocket brush pen” writes like something in between the Kuretake Fudegokochi super fine and the Tombow Fudenosuke soft, which is actually pretty amazing because that is the entire range of my fude pen collection in terms of tip hardness and flexibility. The Kuretake super fine writes a very thin, consistent line because the tip is short and hard and easy to control. The Tombow soft tip is deceptively flexible and so has the greatest line width variation of the lot, though at the expense of ease of control. This mysterious DAISO pen also has a deceptively flexible tip, and it comes to a surprisingly fine point as well. The line width variation it gets totally dominates that of the Tombow Fudenosuke. It is also somewhat hard to control at times, but its tip is half the length of the Tombow, so that difficulty is cut back by about as much.

The packaging on this one says outright that it uses water-based ink, so definitely not waterproof, this. It holds up against Copic very well though — I’m not sure how long I let the ink dry on this one, but it was probably 3-4 minutes. But the tiny smudge in the 鮮 up there is the only imperfection, so I’m confident enough to declare it alcohol-proof. And Copic is what I normally use with my fude pens, so this works out great! Very pleasantly surprised by this second pen. It’s still way too early to tell, but it may end up a contender to my Tombow Fudenosuke hard tips as my favorite fude pen??

I wish I knew the official names for these pens.

The Tombow fudes run $2.50 on Jetpens while the Kuretake fudes are $3.50. Both are probably a little more expensive at Kinokuniya, though I’ve never actually checked that they carry them there. There are a few other brands that make fude pens I’ve yet tested, but nothing goes for less than $2.50. So basically, the mysterious DAISO fude is both awesome and a great deal; if you’re lucky enough to have a DAISO store in your vicinity, definitely check them out! The other DAISO brush pen doesn’t do much for me, but it could still be a nice pen for someone else, particularly for someone who likes working bigger/looser?

I should have taken a photo of DAISO’s complete brush pen offerings at its Westlake Center location (where I got these pens), but I didn’t. I remember there were at least another version of both these pens though, in different tip sizes. The pen with the patterned body is a “medium point,” so there’s probably a “small point,” at least, if not also a “large point.” The 2.3mm is probably the projected max line thickness on it. Same with the 0.4 – 2.0mm on the other one (though I think it can actually get to about 0.2mm on the thinner side).

I’ll definitely grab all variations of the fude pen next time I’m there, and while I don’t think variations of the other will get much better results, I’ll probably cave to curiosity and nab them too. ‘Cause $1.50 is damn cheap for a brush pen.

Addendum: The body of the DAISO fude pen is identical to that of the Kuretake disposable brush pens; however, my specimens of those pens are pretty old/dried out, so I can’t do a proper comparison. I’ll report back when I get fresh ones…

Worth mentioning: both pens smear like a bitch if you don’t let them dry at least a few minutes, nevermind even coloring on top.

Sakura-Con’s program.

Last year at Sakura-Con, I helped my friend Kiiyame with her table all weekend and had a few pieces in the Art Show, but I didn’t have an Artist Alley table of my own. I made sure I got a table for this year though, and I was extra excited for the con because after ECCC, it was a show back in my ‘home’ subculture. And besides, Kara, Sloan, and Tori were all staying with me for the weekend. Yay! Friends visiting! Yay! Conventions are literally my only social life! 8D

This report is 5,900 words long.

Jump to: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Overall.

THURSDAY

Irrelevant story abbreviated, I didn’t sleep a lot the week leading into the convention, and when I did, it was like, between 9am and 3pm (actually that’s just the story of my life at this point, huh). I stayed up all night between Wednesday and Thursday finishing stuff up, but got in a glorious two hour nap from ten to noon. Kara’s flight from Austin landed around then, Sloan went to pick her up, and they arrived at my apartment shortly after. Set-up hours for the Exhibits Hall, which includes both dealers and artists, were from noon to 8pm, and Tori was being dropped off at the convention center closer to 5-6pm, so we had plenty of time to just do nothing and relax before heading downtown.

First order of business: food! As someone who has no food allergies and who can and will eat basically anything, I tend to be pretty ignorant in regards to special dietary needs. Kara recently discovered that she needed to go gluten-free though, so meal situations for the weekend were kind of an adventure!

I usually order pizza when I’m too busy or too lazy to cook, but the place I usually order from didn’t do gluten-free from the location that was near enough to deliver, so we looked up a different place and ordered a ridiculous olive (??), mushroom, and pineapple pizza. The delivery guy got lost and then we ended up hanging out on the sidewalk for a while waiting for him to find us so we could flag him down? The pizza was good though! Then we sat around in my living room a while talking about nothing in particular. This all sounds very boring, but it was so nice for once to have a slow, relaxing afternoon just chilling with friends before the busy weekend.

Settin’ up in Artist Alley.

After loading my stuff into Sloan’s car, we finally left for the convention center around 4pm. The WSCC’s parking lot connected to the third floor and the Exhibits Hall was once again on the fourth floor, so it was a pretty easy walk, even with an escalator and four suitcases involved. It helped that Sloan didn’t have a lot of stuff and that everything Kara and I had had wheels, haha. Badge pick-up at the entrance of the Hall was painless. Most of the Alley was empty when we got there, though a handful of cube displays and printwalls were already up. Kara and Sloan were sharing a table facing the far wall, while my table was nearer to the middle (map!), so we split up to tend to our individual setups.

It occurred to me at some point that it’s kind of weird that Sakura-Con has a 4′ height limit for artist table displays, which is supposedly checked by the fire marshal, when we’re in the same space as dealers, who obviously don’t have this limitation on their booths. ECCC, who also uses the same space for their exhibitors, doesn’t have this limit either. I think it’s probably a rule hanging on from when Sakura had Artist Alley out on the skybridge? The crowding/traffic in that area would have made taller displays more dangerous, I think. It didn’t end up mattering for me because Sakura-Con also has glorious ~*eight-foot tables*~, and with my combination of precut PVC lengths, I didn’t have the right pieces to really build taller than 4′ if the table was 8′. (I usually build to 5′ when the tables are the more common 6′ long.)

Fake Lemonade Stand @ Sakura-Con 2013.

I did have enough miscellaneous pieces to build that side thing though! I think this is the first time I’ve had an end table so I could really take advantage of that space. It was strange that none of the rows had endcap tables though, so they were definitely just rows and not islands. It was very roomy behind the tables, so not having a table perpendicular to mine there made me feel extra exposed.

It took me a little over an hour to set up, during which the three artists that run the Goddammit Aki-Con Tumblr came by to say hi! I am terrible and don’t remember any of their names (told you I wouldn’t!), but we had a good time talking about the failings of the con and speculating about how things might go this year at the new location.

Tori, whose table was beside mine, still wasn’t there yet when I was done setting up, so I wandered over to where Kara and Sloan were when I finished. Meg (Daunt) was dropping her stuff off at the table next to them, so I got to say hi to both her and Sarah (Sakky/Senshi-Stock), who was randomly wandering by! We didn’t chat long though. Kara and Sloan were also done setting up by then, so they came with me to set up at the Art Show.

Kara and Sloan’s table, featuring Sloan.

Art Show was in the same place it was last year: on the second floor, near the side escalators. I still don’t like the location. It isn’t really that far away from the other areas of the convention, and it is very obvious if you’re going up/down those set of escalators, but it still felt very lonely and isolated because there are no other rooms nearby, so no other events nearby. The area around it is all empty hallspace.

I brought the originals of The Moon Rises and The Sun Also Rises, along with Jack Frost and a handful of older pieces to fill out the rest of my 4′x7′ panel. Setting them up and checking them in didn’t take long (the art show is well-staffed with super nice and helpful people), but we didn’t really stick around to browse the rest of what had already been set up. And I forgot to ever get a picture of my stuff hanging in the show this year, oops!

It was probably around 6pm then and we left the convention center to wander around downtown a bit. We went to the Daiso (Japanese dollar store) in Westlake Center, stopped by the nearest Starbucks, then stood outside Chipotle just chatting for half an hour. Tori met us there eventually, after getting dropped off and dragging all her stuff up to the Exhibits Hall, and then we all got burritos and stayed in the restaurant past closing (they closed really early okay??). Riveting conversations about nothing in particular were had that night, and we all turned in before midnight.

Here is a nice picture of downtown Kara took from the skybridge.

FRIDAY

The Exhibits Hall was open for set-up at 8am and set to open to the public at 10am. We were up at 6:30am so we could catch a 7am bus. Even though we had Sloan’s car for the weekend, with all of our stuff was already at the convention center, it was easier and cheaper to just bus every day instead of dealing with parking. And apparently neither Kara nor Sloan had had many encounters with public transportation, so bonus adventure for them??

I had decided to take my nap Thursday morning instead of going to get my inventory sheets printed (no home printer), so I split from the group to do that once we got downtown Friday morning. The Office Depot on 5th wasn’t open until 8am and I got there at 7:45ish. Rather than wait the fifteen minutes, I went to the Kinko’s on the first floor of the WSCC, which was totally deserted. I always thought it got decent business over convention weekends from artists doing last-minute print runs, but the single employee there said nope, things aren’t especially busy those weekends? Hm! Good to know, I guess.

Second thing I wanted to do that morning was drop off a few more pieces at the Art Show since I had leftover space at the bottom of my panel, but the Art Show wasn’t open for setup until 10am (open to the public at noon)…and the Exhibits Hall opened at 10am. Dammit. I knew this, but I went over to the Art Show anyway to confirm the doors were locked and no one was there before finally heading over to Artist Alley to get everything ready for the day.

Genderbent Loki and Tony Stark.

I only really had my bookmarks and a few signs to set up before being ready though, so I stopped by Meg’s table to whine about Teen Wolf and tea, then wandered around the Alley with Kara to find and say hello to people. :> I chatted with PK a bit about the new Eeveelution; Kara spoke to her friend Yoon (teaat2am), while Yoon’s tablemate Astro (nogutsnoglory) slaved away at commissions (already??) and I silently fangasmed over both of their work. It was nice going through the tables and recognizing lots of art from people I didn’t even realize were going to be there, haha.

Sakura-Con’s Alley seemed really well-rounded in general. Lots of well-known artists and familiar con alley regulars (I used to try and list everyone, but man, I’ve been doing cons for five years now, and I freakin’ give up on listing everyone I know because I know too many people now! (even if they don’t know me, lol)), and lots of locals that I recognized from both Aki-Con and the deviantART meetup the weekend prior. Good mix of 2D and 3D artists.

Actually, the general feeling of the Alley reminded me a bit of Otakon’s Alley last year, though at exactly 100 tables and 16 small press booths (VS Otakon’s 284 tables last year), it was a much saner size. Anime Boston moving from Easter to Memorial Day weekend undoubtedly freed up a lot of artists to come to Sakura when they otherwise would have gone to Boston instead. There were still like four other cons over Easter, including Anime Matsuri and MTAC, but nothing else in the same attendance bracket as Sakura and AB.

Near the end of our round, I realized that one of the small press booths was Yuumei. o_o Kara wandered back to her table, but I freaked out a little bit before going up to talk to her and her friend/booth assistant. They had only gotten confirmation of their space a week prior, so their being there was kind of unexpected for them too. I think I managed not to fantard too hard and have a decent conversation with them?? It was nice. ;___; Yuumei’s art is so awesome, ugh.

Jack Skellington.

Various dealers not being quite ready for a 10am Exhibits Hall opening meant that the whole thing got delayed to about a quarter after. This was awesome because it meant I had time to run down to the Art Show and drop off my last minute addendums! While I was there, I noticed that one of the panels in the first row was free even though I was sure it had been taken the day before. It looked like a better spot, so I ended up moving all of my pieces over, haha. Thankfully the Art Show coordinator, Jeff, helped me out so it didn’t take very long, but I still made a mad dash back to the Exhibits Hall when I finished checking in the extra pieces.

Last year this wasn’t an issue at all since I didn’t have a table, but man, they should really make Friday morning Art Show setup hours start before the Exhibits Hall opens so artists doing both won’t have this problem. <_< The public had already started milling into the Exhibits Hall by the time I got back, but I don’t think I missed all that much? Everyone guns for the Dealer’s Room first anyway, right??

Flareon and Jolteon.

It was right around then that I realized that I never got to get coffee that morning. Truthfully, I don’t know how much caffeine even affects me anymore, but coffee is delicious and it usually makes me feel better via placebo effect, if nothing else. I hadn’t slept very well, was super tired, and really, really wanted some coffee. Some desperate tweeting followed.

Traffic Friday morning was pretty steady, but sales were slow in that typical Friday way. Everyone’s browsing and filing away that potential shopping list for later. I had a few fun commissions to start the day, including one from a repeat customer from JCCS, but was otherwise pretty restless.

Flim and Flam let me have some of their apple juice. It was good, but it wasn’t coffee!

A random staff member stopped by my table in the early afternoon. She didn’t know about my tweeted offers to draw in exchange for coffee, but she left vowing to get me some…and she did! A freakin’ quad shot latte and a quiche from Tully’s. It was the best. ;___; She couldn’t think of anything she wanted me to draw her, so I just gave her some posters instead. Amber (Unicorn Empire), who I met at ECCC and who was helping Meg at her table, also got water for me a while later. Yaaaay. <3

I didn’t get any commissions for the rest of the day, so I passed the time taking more cosplay photos than I have in a few conventions. There were a lot of really good ones at Sakura, including two groups of ATLA and Korra cosplayers that involved multiple people in the same outfit. I think those are especially impressive to see because of the amount of coordination needed. It isn’t the same as other group cosplays with just multiple characters from the same series because these guys’s costumes were made together as a group, so there was a good consistency in craftsmanship, etc. There are so many ways to do the same costume that this consistency is really obvious and really awesome to see. Being on the end of the row and not having a table on the endcap made it easier for me to take photos of groups, too!

I was kind of disappointed that there weren’t any Chuunibyou cosplayers to be found, but I guess it isn’t all that surprising since Crunchyroll doesn’t have it streaming and The Anime Network‘s stream service is waaaaay clunkier and harder to use, not to mention unceremonious periods of downtime. On the flip side, did everyone suddenly get together and watch Darker than BLACK?? It’s been available for a good while, but I’ve never seen so many cosplayers or had so many people recognize the stuff I have from it? o_o Series popularity trends at anime cons are weird! I would really like to see some Chihayafuru cosplayers someday too, but they would potentially be hard to recognize even if they were there… Is this what changing/evolving tastes is? Liking more and more series where characters aren’t outlandishly recognizable?? Sob.

Amon, some equalists, and Korra.

Around 5pm, Jer showed up and brought me more coffee, which was great and delicious, but somehow only made me more tired. D; It was just as well though because same as last year, the Exhibits Hall closed for the day at 6pm — relatively early, but it makes for a nice 8-hour work day.

Kara, Sloan, Tori and I were all starving, but we did make a quick trip down to the Art Show before leaving the convention center. Many of the same artists participated, but it looked like there were fewer total pieces in the show compared to last year, and only one person bothered to get print shop tables (last year they were all occupied). I’m not really sure of the year-to-year entry numbers for the Art Show, but the drop did surprise me. Was everyone as disappointed with the returns last year as I was? But if so, why? I was unhappy with the placement of the show in relation to the rest of the con, but mostly I was miffed that a vast majority of the pieces in the show were open edition prints, which meant my pieces, as originals, were priced way higher and didn’t seem to really belong.

But other than that, the Art Show was well-run and organized, the staff is great, and the space is cheap. I think the location is still the biggest factor though. It’s out of the way, and in general the Art Show could use way more exposure. Basically nothing changed about the Art Show between this year and last. The items for the charity auction were still in the same space, as well as the showcase for the Bonsai Association, but I don’t think those two things are enough to get people to go out of their way to find the show. Jeff mentioned a few months back that they were maybe going to do a spotlight for the Art Show in the con program and include a few pictures of the pieces there, but that apparently didn’t end up happening as the blurb about the Art Show in the program was very small.

Oh well.

There were five Kyoshi Warriors, but one of them was missing for this photo. D;

We went to Rock Bottom for dinner, which was the same place I went the last day of ECCC. Kara enjoyed making jokes about hitting “rock bottom” on the first day. I was just proud of myself for being able to find it again, haha. They were able to cater to Kara’s gluten-free needs and delicious food was had by all. A food coma followed immediately after and we missed our stop on the bus ride home. (Don’t worry, we got off at the next stop, which was only a block later, lol.)

Eevee!

I said last year that the Exhibits Hall at Sakura-Con was pretty roomy, which probably made things feel slower than they were. Open spaces are great, let me take nicer cosplay photos, and make the area feel more comfortable/relaxing in general. Cramped spaces and the associated crowding makes things busier and more hectic, but small crowds attract other small crowds, and I do feel that it leads to more sales to some extent. It’s definitely a trade-off. Still, I’m glad Sakura didn’t increase the number of tables in the Alley, even though they technically have the space. I still think it would be interesting to move the Alley so it’s in the middle of the Exhibits Hall with dealers on either side of them, but honestly, that isn’t really in line with what the convention should want to promote. Dealers remain far more important on the whole, especially since industry booths like FUNimation and Aniplex are mixed in with the dealers.

And in the end, the numbers for Friday were pretty robust. Not as good as my Fridays at A-kon for either year I went, but still good, so I guess there isn’t much to complain about. I’ve acclimated pretty well to dealing with lots of things at once behind the table, so anything less than crazy hectic feels “too calm” for me?

Alakazam!

SATURDAY

Since we didn’t have setup to worry about, we got up a whole hour later on Saturday. We still made it down to the convention center pretty early though, and I made another circuit around the Artist Alley, this time to buy stuff!

I picked up Loki’s Stuttgard scarf from Threnodi. Later someone commented that “[I] finally caved on buying that, huh?” What? Are you kidding? I knew the second I saw it that I was gonna get it, lol. 8D This addition to my Saturday clothing ensemble confused some people. But hey, if I procure a glowing staff thingy and grow my hair out a bit more, I could actually cosplay Stuttgard!Loki now? :O It is a relatively simple outfit and probably wouldn’t get in the way much at the table, right? It’s been ages since I cosplayed.

Had a fun chat with Marl at PK’s table before picking up PK’s new Eeveelution and Pinkie Pie prints along with a handful of buttons. We talked longer than I planned for, so after that I only had time to stop by and grab a couple of Yuumei’s prints before rushing back to my table for opening. It’s too hard to socialize and buy things! Bah!

Full page pony commission.

Saturday got off to a pretty great start though. Commissions! Yay! Things to keep me busy! Ponies to draw! Traffic seemed only slightly better than Friday — it was steadier, but I didn’t really notice a significant surge in the number of people stopping to browse, or in sales. There were noticeable pockets of quiet when very few people were around; presumably those were all the times a big panel or event was going on. But it didn’t bother me as long as I had something to work on. And cosplayers to look at!

I’m really pleased to see that guys are becoming more and more comfortable with crossplaying. I think it started with the popularity of Touhou Project and has grown in tandem with the crazy brony thing and the recent wave of feminism and social awareness. Most dude crossplayers still seem to be Touhous and ponies, but I also saw a fair amount of others, including a crapton of Madoka characters, a few Haruhi Suzumiyas, a few sailor senshi, and the stray Misty from Pokemon? Break down those gender barriers, guys~. I think it’s doubly impressive for them to successfully pull off these cosplays because while a lot of male characters are effeminate and/or androgynous, it’s pretty rare for female characters to be especially masculine. But man, a lot of dudes have really shapely legs, lemme tell ya what. 8D

Reimu.

A Nibutani cosplayer stopped by my table for like half a second, but ran off at top speed before I could ask her for a picture. ;___; As the only Chuunibyou cosplayer I saw all weekend, I am still kind of upset I didn’t manage to get her picture. However, a dude came by later and enthusiastically geeked out with me about the series and joined in my lamentation that there weren’t any cosplayers around, so that counts for something, right?

One of my most random commissions for the day was a duck. I asked the commissioner, “Any duck?” Her response: “Well, a nice duck!”

A nice duck!

I got a small wave of commissions right around 5pm, so I wasn’t able to finish everything before we closed at 6pm. Once again, we packed up pretty quickly and embarked on a delirious quest for food. There was apparently a bunny bar hop going on downtown (Easter weekend and all that), so there were several dozen drunk people running around in bunny ears on Pike. 6:30 is still pretty early though, so the restauraunts in the area weren’t especially crowded or anything. We ended up at the Hardrock Cafe, where Kara bombarded our waitress with lots of questions about gluten and Tori regaled us with the story of the craaaaaaaaazy commissioner she had to deal with that day. That’s what you get for saying you’ll draw anything, man. o__o

All four of us had commissions to do that night, so a work party started in my living room as soon as we got back to the apartment. Kara, Sloan, and I each only had a few things to draw, but Tori had something like 20 commissions backed up because the Crazy Commissioner took up so much of her time that day. <_< Whelp.

I got a fancy drink. It was fancy.

SUNDAY

We took Sloan’s car to the convention center Sunday morning since we’d be loading stuff up in the afternoon. Parking was pretty painless. I intended to spend the morning before the usual 10am opening browsing the Dealer’s Room side of the Exhibits Hall.

And that is what I did for all of five minutes before an interesting conversation between a FUNimation rep and a dealer caught my attention and I accidentally jumped in. XD And then I ended up chatting with the FUNi rep for like twenty minutes?? She had a lot to say about the convention scene, conventions’ relationships with the industry, copyright (no doubt that whole recent ordeal was on her mind), and Homestucks (lol), and it was really interesting and enlightening being able to speak with her and to get her perspective on things. The poor lady is apparently traveling for cons 40 weekends out of the year though, so man, if you talk to FUNimation at some convention somewhere, be nice!

It threw me off my window shopping, but the conversation was a big highlight of my morning. I haven’t really spoken to an industry rep since Viz Media visited SCAD for Editors’ Day that one year and that had mostly been about Viz’s never-realized OEL/original comics initiative, rather than conventions.

Lacus! It’s been so long since I’ve seen SEED cosplay!

I made a quick round through most of the rest of the dealers, but then remembered I needed to say hello to Pawstar, who I hadn’t realized would be there until I saw like fifty people wearing their ears. Iceman, one of the owners, had taken a break from the con circuit a while but was back now, so it was nice catching up. I basically ran back to my table just prior to opening though! I’ve whined a lot about how artists are never at their tables before show time so I can’t buy their stuff, but that was basically me Sunday morning, so whoops.

I really need to start planning proper meet-ups or something with friends at conventions, haha. (I’m pretty sad I never caught Robin at her table!) Unfortunately, basically all of them are vendors, whether dealers or artists, so we’re all tied to a booth or table all weekend and the only time we have for socializing is during setup time, which is both limited and generally hectic. Folks tend to do meals with whatever group they’re rooming with or staying with for the weekend, which is most convenient and makes sense, but that leaves no time for everyone else? I suppose more artists can arrange work parties for overnight commissions, but then we need to find a space where everyone can work, which can be difficult. Sigh!

HANGING OUT AT CONVENTIONS IS HARD. I vote for more pre-show drink and draws.

Princess Peach and Tuxedo Mask make a pretty adorable couple.

Sunday was a pretty chill day though.

I got a couple of commissions in the morning, but was done before noon and had nothing to really occupy me after that. Traffic was similar to Friday, if a little slower. Last year (and in 2011, I think), Sakura-Con only had full weekend badges for attendees. This is (probably?) because it’s a registered non-profit and technically all attendees are members of the organization and the convention is a great big meeting. This is pretty much the way Otakon is set up too? This year I noticed a bunch of single-day badges though, so I guess they’ve returned! Not sure how much that affected overall attendance though, and I can’t compare sales figures since I didn’t have a table last year. It’s a bummer because I think that’d be a pretty interesting thing to look into.

The afternoon winded down pretty gradually and things felt like they were naturally coming to an end anyway when the doors closed at 4pm. Pick-up at the Art Show was supposed to be from 1pm to 3pm, but there was no way I was leaving the table in the last hour the Exhibits Hall was open, so I jetted over there the minute the lights dimmed. Thankfully, there was still plenty of staff hanging out in the Art Show room and I was able to get my unsold pieces without a problem. Once again, I sold nothing! One piece did get its minimum bid, but the bidder never returned to pick up and pay, so it did not actually sell in the end. Oh well!

By the time I got back upstairs, Kara, Sloan and Tori were all pretty much done tearing down, so they got to help me with my monster of a table set-up, haha.

Happenstance let Tori stay with us for a bit longer than planned, so we all headed down to the International District for delicious Chinese food and obligatory wandering around Kinokuniya. Kara also completed a mission to obtain melon soda at Uwajimaya. Eventually we all parted ways after a pretty swell weekend of hanging out.

I gave my houseguests a bunch of quarters for the bus. At the end of the weekend, all the extra ones ended up by these guys on my bookshelf for some reason?? Why are we paying tribute to billionaires!

OVERALL

Yes, it was a pretty swell weekend.

Since they have the target the same demographic and have a similar attendance, I automatically compare Sakura-Con to A-kon. But Sakura is in a huge, roomy convention center while A-kon has been in a cramped, crowded hotel; that makes for a huge difference in the general feel and atmosphere of the convention. I’m also realizing that in the two years since my first A-kon, I’ve probably leveled up quite a bit as far as working cons goes, which means it takes a lot more for a con to overwhelm me once I’m behind the table. I’ve also raised prices on commissions since that first A-kon, so it makes sense that I should get fewer of them and end up less busy (and more restless) as a result.

So really, traffic and sales were pretty steady throughout the weekend, but this wasn’t obvious to me until after I ran the numbers. I grossed more at Sakura-Con than at A-kon 2011 — not by much, but A-kon also cost more for me to attend, even when I lived in Texas, so the net ended up being a bit better. :o

Not actually sakura.

Sakura-Con remains one of the best organized conventions I’ve attended, perhaps second only to ECCC? Most of my interaction with staff has been via email, and while they aren’t always prompt with responses, they have always responded to me — and they’ve been patient, helpful, and professional in doing so.

I do kinda wish more of the Artist Alley staff would go through the Alley to check up on artists throughout the weekend though. Someone did ask if I needed anything Sunday morning, but that was the only time. Most of the staff I saw were from other departments, presumably on break, and I only knew they were staff because they were close enough for me to see their badges. They didn’t wear anything else visually distinguishing, so it was impossible to tell who was staff from a distance. I know AA staff had a control booth near the bathrooms, but it was out of the way enough that I couldn’t really take advantage of it. The #1 reason I’d need staff’s help is to watch my table for five minutes while I run to the bathroom, but it kind of defeats the purpose if I first need to go to the bathroom (area) to get a staff person, leaving the table unattended for the interim. :( Still, a relatively minor complaint in the scheme of things.

Another minor thing: I think Sakura-Con could stand to lift its 4′ height limit on AA tables. I never saw the fire marshal coming through to check tables, but I was cruising through the Alley with Kara at the time, so it would have been easy for me to miss him or her. I don’t know how hard the rule was being enforced anyway. I’ve measured my PVC pipe plenty of times; the display is actually slightly over 4′ because of the connectors and the clamp at the bottom, so I’m glad it wasn’t suuuuper strict, but at the same time, there were definitely tables with displays a half foot to a foot taller than mine, so. But no one really builds higher than 5′ because structural integrity is obviously compromised if you go any higher and there isn’t the space in Artist Alley to build something sturdy and tall. So it’s kind of a non-issue, in my opinion? 4′ worked out just fine for me in the end, but I’m just not a fan of rules that seem unnecessary and/or which aren’t enforced.

I’m pretty disappointed with the Art Show, and it’s frustrating because the staff is so nice, haha. At the risk of sounding repetitive: I still think the main issue is the location. I wish it were closer to the Exhibits Hall, or even inside the Exhibits Hall in a roped off section? Bring the charity auction and the bonsai along too if you have to, but just get it out of that deserted corner! I would also really like it if the labels used for the art pieces had a spot to indicate whether it’s a print or an original, and if the former, a spot to indicate print editions so everything isn’t open edition by default. If the panels weren’t so damn cheap, I’d probably skip it for next year, but they are, so maybe third time’s the charm? Jeff’s confirmed that they do still plan to devote more space to the show in the con program, so hopefully that will help!

My glorious loot pile.

All in all though, Sakura-Con’s a well put together show. I’m really glad they’re my local con now! I look forward to next year and hope Anime Boston remains not on the same weekend so all my friends come back and visit instead of going to Boston. XD (And so maybe I can hit up Boston someyear too??)

THANKS FOR READING. HERE ARE THE REST OF THE PICTURES~.

Comic cons are still outside my comfort genre and demographic! I don’t know very many others going! 60,000 attendees is a lot of freakin’ attendees! Aaaaaaaaa!

Well, here we go…

This report is 6,704 words long.

Jump to: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Overall.

THURSDAY

Show floor = HUGE.

A work emergency Thursday morning meant I ended up not sleeping between Wednesday and Thursday before the convention. I managed to take care of issue pretty quickly, but I still had a full afternoon of errands to run on fumes and irritation. ECCC had pretty generous setup hours from noon to 9pm Thursday, so that wasn’t really affected, except that I was just in a really bad mood by then, hahaha. <_< On the up side, Jer had agreed to help me move my stuff to the Washington State Concention Center so I didn’t have to worry about dragging my weight in suitcases onto a bus, etc.

We got there around 5:30pm. The show floor has doubled between this year and last, so it was great that both convention center and ECCC staff were extremely helpful in directing us to where we needed to go, because I was confused the second we got up to the fourth floor. Last year, the south side of the skybridge had consisted of panel rooms and registration. This year, almost all of that was now additional exhibitor space, though registration was still somewhere in there.

I usually study con maps pretty thoroughly, but man, with an area that big, it’s hard to mentally map a 2D blueprint to a 3D space. It didn’t really help that if you came up from the north lobby, huge, looming dealer and industry booths blocked the Artist Alleys on both ends of the map. Once we figured out where it was though, exhibitor check-in was a very painless process, and we were able to find my table easily enough from there.

We started to set up, but I soon realized that I’d forgotten to pack my PVC connectors. I couldn’t even remember where I’d put them last?? IKKiCON was my previous con, but I have a separate set of PVC stashed in Texas so I don’t have to fly them back and forth from Washington. This meant that the last time I used my WA set of PVC and connectors was at Aki Con and that was like five months ago. I had no idea where they were. Bah!

We’d planned to hit up the con-sponsored Drink and Draw that evening, along with others in SICAGA, so going back to my apartment to find the connectors and then re-parking downtown would have been inconvenient and roundabout. We decided to just go get dinner with Jer’s Danish exchange student friend Maria before going to Drink and Draw. But Maria got stranded in Fremont, so we ended up leaving the area anyway to meet her up there for delicious curry and headed back downtown afterwards.

ECCC Drink and Draw

The event took place at the Daily Grill, right across the street from the WSCC, and they had it set up in its own room. I think there were maybe ten tables, each comfortably sitting 6-7 people. Some tables had more than that, but those didn’t leave people a lot of elbow room and made it difficult to actually draw. The room seemed pretty small at first, but I think that was because we showed up right around 7:30-8pm, when it had just gotten started, and a lot of people showed up who didn’t end up staying.

The SICAGA guys that showed up were mostly all at one crowded table. Jer, Maria, and I ended up at another table which included Sara, who runs the Bellevue half of SICAGA, J. James, W.P. Morse, and several others who did not have business cards on them. We, the newcomers at the table, all ordered a round of drinks and proceeded to dig out our sketchbooks and drawing utensils.

I…am really pretty awkward in the meatspace when I’m not sitting behind an Artist Alley table. The Drink and Draw sounded fun to attend, but when I got there, I had no idea what to do, haha. I had to draw to distract myself! But while I don’t have a problem with people watching me draw, I have a big problem with coming up with things to draw while being watched, which usually means I end up drawing what I see in front of me, which is everyone else at the table.

Other people at the table.

I felt a lot better after I filled a page or two and got through most of my first Long Island Ice Tea.

They had large sheets of paper over the tables, so I drew unicorns and monster wolves on them. We talked about conventions and drawing and business and ponies and other easy go-to subjects for a table full of nerdyass artists. I had more drinks and drew more people and felt progressively more optimistic as the evening progressed, lol.

Yeah, I was pre~tty drunk by the time we left around 11pm, but that’s all the more reason to declare the Drink and Draw a rousing success, I guess? I came, I drank, I drew, I talked to people I otherwise wouldn’t have, and I felt significantly better about facing the weekend when the night was through. (And don’t worry, Jer was an excellent designated driver. <3 I got home fine.)

More people at the table.

FRIDAY

Despite not sleeping at all Wednesday night and passing out drunk around midnight Thursday, I woke up suddenly and inexplicably at 4:30am with the knowledge of exactly where my stupid PVC connectors were. That was all well and good, but I couldn’t get back to sleep after that and dozed on and off until maybe 7:30am, when I got up and showered. The 9:02 bus downtown failed to arrive completely and the one scheduled after that was about twenty minutes late. The Exhibits Hall didn’t open to the public until 2pm Friday, so I still had plenty of time to take care of everything before go time. Finally got to the convention center around 10:15 and proceeded to set up.

Have I mentioned that Greg Rucka and Gail Simone were among the people across the aisle from me? Or that Joe Casey and Matthew Southworth were directly to my left? ECCC goes out of their way to mix their guests with everyone else, man. Drew Rausch and Aaron Alexovich, who were on my right, were also pretty intimidating to me (though they were both very nice neighbours).

A more familiar sight — though I’d never met her before and I think ECCC was actually her first convention?? — was Amber’s Unicorn Empire a few tables down. I’ve seen her gorgeous, gorgeous lettering work around Tumblr plenty of times and we have fandom in common, so I felt more sure of myself in approaching her to say hi (and to buy a shirt!). Kevin (Yanimator) also had a table on an endcap a few aisles away, but a few aisles is like miiiiiles. Cari (Blix-it) and Amanda (Cinnamoron)’s booth was even further away: all the way across the skybridge on the north end of the floor (and I didn’t even find them until the next day).

I spent the weekend across the aisle from famous people.

(Sorry for the low quality of the photos in this report. My 7-8 year old point and shoot camera finally died recently, and I hadn’t tweaked my phone’s camera to take higher resolution pictures yet for ECCC.)

I was mostly set up by a quarter to noon and so went to the library to get my inventory sheets printed. I’d never actually been to the central branch downtown. The building is really neat looking?? (Actually a lot of buildings downtown are cool…) The upstairs printer was broken and the librarian spent some time trying to figure out the problem before just directing me downstairs, but I wasn’t worried at all about the time, so it was all good. Friday being only a half-day is really nice and relaxing…plenty of time to ease into things. (It’ll be a full day for next year though.) There was a girl scout on the NW corner of 5th and Union selling cookies, so on the way back, I got two boxes of cookies. My first purchases of the con! I wandered around a little bit in south end of the Exhibits Hall (never crossing the skybridge) in the time before opening, but it was mostly to blindly grab business cards.

It was kind of weird because last year, I had a grand ol’ time cruising through tables, looking at everything and buying a ton of books, but now that I was amongst their number, I felt really out of place. A majority ofthe  artists on the south end were promoting a book and/or webcomic, including many involved with Benign Kingdom, the Blind Ferret collective, and Topatoco. There were a handful of professional pencilers and inkers, a few plush and print artists (clear anime AA regulars), but for the most part, the south Alley consisted of webcomickers. It’s hard not to feel like you should have a webcomic or something when everyone else does…

Half of the nearby Alley

People appeared everywhere rather abruptly when the gates opened at 2pm, but there was only a teeming mass at the entrance for a few seconds; after that, it seemed like everyone was suddenly evenly distributed in the aisles. And traffic was casual-to-slow throughout the day.

I was fine all morning, but my tiredness caught up to me really fast once I sat down at the table and had not-very-many people stop to talk and browse. I made a lot of sketch card commission examples and ACEOs and wished every five minutes for coffee in those long afternoon hours, but I honestly remember nothing else about Friday?? There were a few good cosplayers here and there, but not nearly enough to keep me entertained with taking pictures. I think I took fewer cosplay photos at ECCC than at any other con ever? Afterwards, I saw plenty of good cosplay photos by other people at the show, so I guess they just never made it to the Exhibits Hall in costume. Considering how packed it was last year though, I don’t really blame them — it’s rough being in costume in a crowd — but the Exhibits Hall was most definitely not crowded that Friday.

And yet, Emerald City was a sold out show! Weekend badges had sold out a month prior, and Saturday-only badges went not long after. Friday-only badges sold out midway through the afternoon, and I’m pretty sure Sunday-only badges sold out sometime Friday as well? 60,000 people (or whereabouts) is not a bad number to cap attendance at, but I wasn’t feeling those numbers by a long shot. Even when the traffic seemed decent, there weren’t many people actually stopping to browse or chat.

The Exhibits Hall had the same hours as the rest of the show (except for Gaming), and on Friday, we closed at 8pm. I’d fidgeted my way through the last hour, and at closing, I threw a sheet over my table and high-tailed it to the MINTCondition #2 show opening at the Ltd. Art Gallery, which, being an actual local gallery and not technically part of the convention, was across the freeway in Capitol Hill. It really wasn’t that bad of a walk though (there’s a sidewalk that goes over the freeway, those of you who aren’t familiar with the area). It was nice outside. Hey, mid-40′s is pretty nice to me?

Oh hey, Hawkeye.

MINTCondition #2 opening reception

The gallery opened at 7pm, so I got there about an hour and fifteen minutes late. I really don’t know why I fretted so much about the time though. Gallery openings last hours. Ltd. Art is pretty small, and the place was still plenty packed when I got there. Free booze has a way of luring people in, I suppose.

The show had a general “comics” theme. Most of the pieces featured DC and Marvel characters, with the occasional other thing, like Hellboy or TMNT, but the styles were all over the place, which made it a pretty diverse collection overall. All the ECCC Alley artists had been invited to participate, and so I had (predictably) contributed a pair of watercolor/gouache paintings of Thor and Loki. I’d meant to make them more stylistic, but I was using photo reference and went a bit too close, I think.

Hey, it’s my stuff.

I met up with Jer at the gallery, but we didn’t hang around long because it was so crowded and hot. You could just about see the steam on the inside of the windows from the collective body heat. <_< It was soooo much nicer outside.

Because it was nearby, we headed over to the Live Art even at the Baltic Room. It wasn’t supposed to start until 9pm and we got there around half past eight, so there weren’t a lot of people there yet. Six blank canvases had been set up in the middle of the dance floor. We hung around for a little bit, but all of the seating was apparently reserved, and it didn’t take long for me to get really sick of the strobe lights. I dunno how long Jer stuck around, but I bailed pretty quickly, walked back downtown, and grabbed a bus home. There were a few other after hours events I kinda wanted to check out, but I was too out of it by then to bother.

It hadn’t been a very encouraging first day. Going home was good. Sleep was good.

MINTCondition #2 opening

SATURDAY

Of course, actually sleeping properly Friday night made me really, really tired Saturday morning. <_< The adrenaline had worn off, and caffeine is not a potent enough replacement.

I got to the convention center around 8:30am and spent the time before opening browsing through the north end of the Exhibits Hall, mostly in the Artist Alley area. Unlike last year, when the AA been to the left of the skybridge entrance and stretched on to the back of the room, they now just filled the space in the back of the room (see map way up there somewhere). So industry booths definitely blocked them from view. You had to make a point to way to walk past all of the big, shiny things to get to the artists. (Last year, also, the first industry booth you see walking in is Topatoco, which leads very naturally into the AA since, you know, they’re all webcomics.)

Naturally, almost no one was there in the pre-hours, so I, once again, mostly went around collecting business cards. The artists I did get to talk to confirmed an equally slow Friday on their side of the skybridge, but I realized that as slow as Friday had been for me on the south end, they probably had it worse because 1) unlike us, they were no where near registration, 2) those industry booths seriously blocked everything, 3) the northernmost end of the north Alley was a wall while the southernmost end of the south Alley was two-way traffic leading out to a hallway.

I managed to chat briefly with Cari and Amanda right before opening and they echoed more of the same sentiments, including ‘it was way busier last year.’ Well, among other things, I suppose there was also half the competition last year.

Venusaur!

The convention opened to the public at 10am. The first full day! Badges for Saturday had been sold out for weeks! People are off work and out of school! …But traffic really did not seem to improve from the day before.

One of the things that drove me nuts was the fact that I wasn’t getting a lot of commissions. My theory for why is thus: because the properties are company-owned, fans of mainstream superhero comics are already used to seeing their favorite characters rendered by different artists. It’s nothing special to commission an artist for their interpretation of a character. Styles change every time the artist changes on a series, and for properties that have been around for 70+ years, that’s a lot of artists. And some of those artists are at the con! So why commission the unknown?

This is a pretty big downer for someone whose convention revenue is 25-40% commissions, and who relies on commissions to keep her occupied and sane for the duration of the weekend. There is nothing quite like sitting at a table for nine hours with nothing to do, lemme tell ya what. Between Friday and Saturday, I drew over 30 sketch cards and ACEOs out of restless boredom.

Daphne and Velma.

I got a lot of thinking time in Saturday, too.

Despite Marvel mysteriously not having a booth there, ECCC draws a pretty mainstream crowd, for both comics and general geek fandom. Its artist and writer guests mostly work in mainstream comics. Its celebrity guests are from the typical cult sci-fi lineup: Star Wars, Star Trek, BSG, Stargate, Babylon 5, etc. Newer fan favorites in the supernatural genre, like Supernatural and True Blood, were also represented. All of these are well-known series with enormous followings. I’m sure plenty of people attended specifically for one guest or another. (How many people tweeted excitedly at me to go see Misha Collins on their behalf? Go on, guess!)

So most attendees in the Exhibits Hall seemed to be looking for specific people. They were fans and wanted things signed. Getting things signed is a thing you do at conventions! Joe Casey (who was next to me, remember) was not actually at his table very often, but if I had a dollar for every person that came by to ask me when he’d be back… <_< Traffic was casual, but it wasn’t bad. There were people around (how can there not? sold out show!), but they weren’t browsing. They were just beelining to people they knew, which included ‘mainstream’ webcomics.

I mean, if you know anything about webcomics, you know about Benign Kingdom, Blind Ferret, and all of those guys. So I wasn’t surprised that when I sent Jer over to Johnny Wander to get my copy of volume #3 signed and a hat drawn in, he reported back that Yuko was too swamped to draw hats that weekend. Those areas of the Alley seemed to all do well.

I hope you didn’t think this would be a Loki-free report.

The rest of us though? The indie comic artists with the stapled copybons and self-financed book runs, the webcomickers no one’s heard of, the print artists that are used to anime cons? …I think it was a pretty bum day for most of us. There’s only so much you can do to keep yourself busy behind the table before the frustration catches up to you. There were a few good conversations here and there, yes. I had a pretty interesting conversation with a guy from CrystalCommerce about e-commerce solutions for hobby stores and artists, and someone from Kumoricon came by to ask for charity auction donations. All the same, at the end of the afternoon, the last of the Thursday night drunken optimism was gone, and I was just tired, hungry, and discouraged.

The show closed down at 7pm on Saturday (one hour earlier than Friday — why?), and as I was packing up, @Chiparoo came down to say hi! This was one of the high points in my day. It is always awesome meeting people you’ve only spoken to on the Internet, even if it’s only for a few minutes!

After bailing, Jer and I went for some amazing Chinese food. It almost made up for a supremely lackluster day. Almost!

I said got these pony cards for reference, and I’m stickin’ to that.

SUNDAY

I didn’t sleep well Saturday night and was really out of it Sunday morning, though it wasn’t physical exhaustion as much as mental and emotional exhaustion.

I again got to the convention center around 8:30am. This morning, I got into an elevator with Oni Press editor James Lucas Jones. I knew it because of his badge. It wasn’t a very long elevator ride — we were just going four floors up — but I told him I’d graduated from SCAD, where he’d gone to speak a few times for various events, and that I felt like I should have some kind of idea to pitch to him as we were most certainly in a fabled “elevator pitch” situation. But I told him that I had no idea what to pitch. His reply was an understanding “that’s Sunday morning for you.”

Walking out of the elevator, I thought ‘not really.’ If I really had a thing I wanted published by a publisher, I’d have had something to say, Sunday mornings be damned. The encounter made me feel awkward and out of place again.

The north end Exhibits Hall, before opening. See how the artists are hidden way in the back?

I wandered through the north end of the Exhibits Hall again in the time before opening.

This time I went through more of the industry booths and non-artist vendors, but nothing really caught my eye…except this one booth selling a lot of DVD sets of 90′s cartoons. I think if I’d been in a more attentive frame of mind, the whole booth would have struck me as suspicious sooner, but I wasn’t, and so I bought a “full series” DVD of Gargoyles…which you might know doesn’t actually exist. There have only been official DVD releases for the first season and first half of the second season of Gargoyles. The full series is not available on DVD. What I bought was a bootleg.

It should have been obvious. The packaging was pretty terrible and the details on technical specs, etc, were lacking. Much of the rest of the booth’s offerings were also highly suspect. Even for series that have been released in their entirety on DVD (like Animaniacs, Freakazoid!, Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, etc), no one releases a multi-disk “box set” in a single box… ~_~ I’m really irritated by the whole affair and am surprised the vendors were around Sunday because the bootlegs were obvious and someone should have really reported them…I wish I’d realized I’d been duped sooner than three days after the fact. :/

And the best part? I don’t remember exactly which booth it was, but looking at all the booths in that general location on the map leads me to believe that the most probable culprit is…Manga Kissaten, LLC. Yeah. Those guys that run Aki Con and who were banned from Sakura-Con for selling bootlegs. >_> I can’t verify that it was them, but they were at the convention, and most of the other booths in the same area were fine arts, t-shirt, or collectible vendors. Manga Kissaten’s website does not sell DVDs, but neither does it look like it’s been updated in a while, aside from the Aki Con stuff. Who knows? Again, I can’t confirm that it was them, but it’s an extra punch in the gut if it was.

Black Widow and Captain America.

I returned to the south end to browse a bit more there, but ended up spending the entire rest of the time at the Copic booth loading up on new markers. The best time to buy Copics is definitely at a convention, man. Five bucks a marker is as good a deal as you’ll ever get anymore! Copic also passed out a voucher to everyone in the Artist Alley to come by and pick up one free 25th anniversary Sketch marker, which was pretty neat.

The anniversary markers are awesome because not only do they have a black body instead of the light grey (which means smeared and smudgy ink won’t be as visible!), they have a brush tip and a fine tip! I really wish all the Copic Sketch markers were made that way, but normal Sketch markers have a brush tip and a chisel tip, and the regular markers have a fine tip and a chisel tip. I basically never use the chisel tip, so obviously a combination of the two other tips would be greaaat. (Yes, I can buy the fine nibs separately, but who wants to swap out half the nibs in their 100+ marker collection??)

I’m gonna need to buy that Copic suitcase soon, aren’t I.

Sunday ended up being the busiest day of the convention. The word on the floor at the end of Saturday was that most of those with weekend passes would do their spending on the last day, and I guess that was true enough? It was on Sunday that Jason showed up to say hi and give me a copy of The Flying Castle and Other Tales (which I forgot to ask him to sign, dammit). He’d been on the north end of the Exhibits Hall all weekend, but I was never been able to find him??

I did better on Sunday than both Friday and Saturday, but I think it was too late in the weekend for a morale boost. Don’t get me wrong; talking to attendees is pretty much always a positive experience for me, and Sunday was pretty awesome for that, but I was feeling kind of crummy in general by then, and it was a lot harder for me to dig up the enthusiasm needed to get the most out of interacting with others. D;

The equivalent of an ink sketch card in someone’s sketchbook. Best commission of the weekend.

The show closed down around 4pm. I’d sort of planned to grab dinner with Amanda and Cari at some point over the weekend, but they’d been busy for Friday and Saturday, and Sunday is always kind of a mess of people getting ready to leave, catch flights, etc. Hanging out at cons is hard! Nevertheless, after Jer and I loaded his car with my stuff, we headed over to help Amanda, Cari, and their helper (whose name I’ve unfortunately forgotten, SORRY) break down and pack up. Eventually, everything got situated and we headed out to Rock Bottom to meet up with some of Cari’s friends.

Josh, Kat, and Michael of 01 Publishing (not to be confused with :01 Books; “zero one” publishing VS “first second” books) had already finished their meal by the time we got there, but we got a bigger table and they hung out with us while we got ourselves food too. I remember talking about Doctor Who and My Little Pony with Michael a fair bit and Josh and Cari telling various convention horror stories, but for the most part, I was really, really out of it and didn’t contribute much to the overall conversation, hahaha. Still, amazing burgers is how I like to end my convention weekends, and it was great being able to hang out with friends for an evening even though we were all pretty much ready to pass out.

Color sketch of commissioner‘s OC.

OVERALL

One of the most frustrating things about the whole weekend was the fact that Emerald City Comic Con is a wonderfully run convention.

The staff is proactive, attentive, responsive and organized, and my interactions with them have been nothing but pleasant. Early on, one of my emails to Artist Alley registration got lost in an inbox and was not responded to for several weeks, but staff owned up to their mistake readily and apologized, and that’s really all anybody needs, y’know? Pre-show instructions regarding loading, check-in, power access, and so on were informative and precise. Volunteers came around several times a day to dole out bottles of water and to check that everything was okay. It’s a little hard to accept that I did so poorly at such a well-run show.

Sure, ECCC had its share of problems — and those problems likely did contribute to my not doing so well — but I think the main thing, for me, was just a disconnect in what ECCC’s attendees were looking for and what I had to offer.

The skybridge.

One of the biggest general issues was that ECCC probably expanded its show floor too quickly and by too much. Doubling the exhibit space in one year is a bit overzealous, especially when the convention was only expecting a +7,000 increase in attendance (+13%)…or when the convention was capping attendance after that +13%. (I can’t find any official figures for ECCC’s attendance in 2013, but 60,000 is the number I’ve seen floating around most often. 2012′s attendance was roughly 53,000.)

Because the show floor was so monstrous and because it was split by the skybridge, a lot of attendees reported not knowing that there was another half to the Exhibits Hall. Despite the north end being the half that occupied last year’s exhibit space, it seemed to be the side that got overlooked — possibly because there are doors on the north end of the skybridge blocking exhibit booths from immediate view? Meanwhile, the south end of the skybridge was where the main escalators came up and there is a large cavernous space to the immediate right/south, leading attendees somewhat naturally towards the exhibit booths on that side. As mentioned before, registration/badge pickup was also on the south end and opened directly into the space between Artist Alley and the other exhibitors.

The fourth floor is clearly the best place in the convention center for vendors and industry booths, so there’s no moving it. Shrinking the floor space after expanding it is awkward and unlikely, but while registration could be relocated and its space commandeered, I don’t think ECCC plans to expand the show floor again next year.

On the other hand, they could probably stand to raise the attendance cap next year? At no point over the weekend was the floor as crowded as it was Saturday afternoon last year. Okay, so that Saturday afternoon was borderline fire hazard, but still. I think we can fit more people in there.

The north end Exhibits Hall, before opening.

Rearranging things on the map we have should help a fair bit with visibility and traffic though. On the north end, Artist Alley should definitely be moved back towards the front. The arrangement from last year worked out really well! Because artist tables are smaller and shorter, I think it’s really important for them to be up front where they aren’t blocked from view. More signage on the south end of the skybridge and the skybridge itself reminding attendees that there is additional exhibit space across the skybridge would also help with visibility. There are some vendors/booths on the skybridge, but the lead-in to the space north of them wasn’t obvious this year?

On the south side, I also think the artist space should be swapped with the rest of the exhibitor space so that the artists are seen first when people wander in from the north. However, this isn’t as big a deal on the south end because of the way registration leads into the middle of the space.

Lolita Loki with adorable plush Sleipnirs seems to be a thing and I am okay with this.

Another issue was the mixing of industry pros/comic guests with the rest of the Artist Alley. It’s a nice idea, in theory, to place well-knowns next to unknowns, but in practice, anytime a line formed for autographs for a guest, the tables around that guest get blocked. This was a problem last year, too, since I remember being in the line for Bruce Timm and having little choice but to block other tables while I waited.

I still kind of like the idea of mixing everyone together, but there needs to be a better line management solution — taping a path on the floor helps a little, but it isn’t enough when the aisles are only ~6 feet wide. It’s difficult to manage both a line and two-way traffic in the same space. Maybe just place all the guest artists along a side wall (I believe that’s how it was on the north side, actually?) so they’re all next to each other. This way, the ‘regular’ artists are still nearby, but not in a position to be blocked.

Honestly though, if it’s between being near con guests and not having your table blocked, I think most would go for the latter. Sure, people came down my aisle for Joe Casey, Gail Simone, and Greg Rucka, but…they came down the aisle for Joe Casey, Gail Simone, and Greg Rucka. It was very rare that such an attendee paid any attention to the rest of us.

I still haven’t seen Star Wars (YES, REALLY), but I can still appreciate cool-looking costumes!

The layout of the show floor and the table-blocking autograph lines were pretty much the biggest problems, but both are easily addressed, I think. I don’t know what ECCC’s plans are for future growth, but I hope they stay about the size they are now. It took me basically an entire day to cover the show floor last year as an attendee. And I focused mostly on Artist Alley — I didn’t bother with most of the big industry booths. I only attended one panel. If it takes double the time to cover a show floor that’s double the size, that’s two whole days needed to cover all exhibitors (probably more if you go through the non-artists more carefully than I would!). Most other attendees are also probably more interested in panels and autographs and photo-ops and gaming than I am. How do you even fit all of that into a weekend? Even with a full day for Friday next year?

60-65k is a good, manageable attendance, and probably at or near the capacity for the Washington State Convention Center (was the attendance cap mandated by the venue or was it just a voluntary precaution?). Since the show floor kept the same hours as the rest of the convention, I never really got to check anything out, but from the map in the program, it does looks like they were using almost all of the convention center.

And I definitely don’t want them to move! Downtown is a damn fine place for a show, and I doubt there’s another venue within Seattle city limits that would be able to accommodate ECCC anyway, and they can’t move out of the city without forfeiting their name, right?

My loot, including two of Amanda’s display prints that got too scuffed up for her to want to keep??

Right now, I’m leaning towards not returning to ECCC as an artist. The intersection of what the attendees expect/are looking for there and what I have to offer is too small.

My experiences throughout the weekend made that clear enough (decent traffic, but minimal browsers), but the numbers make it even more obvious: I did better at IKKiCON than I did at ECCC. Not by a huge margin, but IKKiCON had ~7,000 attendees this past year, so ECCC is almost ten times bigger. IKKiCON is also not local for me, while ECCC is, but even after expenses, I still did better at IKKi (in part because ECCC’s tables are three times as expensive, which neutralizes the cost my plane ticket down to Texas for IKKi). Sure, sales is just one part of the bigger picture, but it’s still one of the few hard metrics I have to go on.

I fixate a lot on the fact that I don’t really have a big comic project to promote at comic cons. It’s my #1 reason for feeling awkward and out of place at comic cons VS anime cons. I have comics, but they are small and short and not at all in the same category as the books everyone else has. And at ECCC in particular, I got the impression that no one was looking to buy a comic they’ve never heard of before. If you draw for a mainstream title or if you have a big webcomics following, you’d probably do great at Emerald City — people will go looking for you — but for the unknown indie? Spoiler: I sold more of my comics (three times more, even!!) at Sakura-Con this year than I did at ECCC. Not really sure how/why that happened, but there you go.

These are blanket statements, of course. I mean, I know for a fact that Jer goes out of his way to buy every damn independent comic on the show floor. I think he’s definitely the exception though. When I attended last year, sure, yes, I bought a few books from people I didn’t know. But for the most part, I sought out artists whose work I recognized. When a show is that big, it’s a certainty that lots of well-known people end up coming, and there just isn’t enough time to thoroughly browse everything else. I guess that’s why indie-specific shows like APE, SPX, and STAPLE! (which was the same weekend as ECCC this year) exist.

ECCC isn’t really a show for the independent comic artist — unless they’re there to connect specifically with their mainstream brethren, or unless they’re the sort to take advantage of the elevator pitch situation in all the ways I didn’t.

Wednesday Wolf’s piece at MINTCondition #2.

There’s a market at ECCC for sci-fi and fantasy illustrators, too. There was a gallery show of Magic: The Gathering card illustrations. There were also a fair number of fine artists and painters in the north end of the Exhibits Hall, including Wednesday Wolf who can probably be classified as a fine artist, even with all the pop culture subject matter in his work. I don’t know how well any of them did, but there were enough of them in general that I assume there’s a market for them and/or they’ve already cultivated a decent consumer base.

My convention offerings are primarily illustrative, so maybe if I ever get focused enough to churn out a cohesive body of work, I’ll feel more confident about exhibiting at ECCC. But for now, my stuff remains very all over the place. I get asked a lot if everything at my table is mine. Yup. It’s all me. Yup, I drew both this and this.

Subject matter is often all you need at anime cons because there’s little stylistic variation in official work. Subject matter is less important at comic cons because it’s already so easy to get a huge variety art of every popular comic character. So stylistic cohesion becomes the selling point for the illustrator. What do you have to rally behind if not that? How do you establish identity when there are literally 400+ other Artist Alley tables for people to look at and just as many towering industry/non-artist exhibitor booths?

The south Alley melting into nearby industry booths.

So yeah, Emerald City is a great convention, just maybe not right for me as an artist at this point in time. Even if I don’t return to exhibit next year though, I’ll certainly be back as an attendee. <3

Thanks for reading. Here’s the full gallery:

You know, now that I don’t live there anymore,  I can really appreciate that there is basically a Texas convention for every month of the year, which means I can hit up a con (or two) every time I go down to visit. A-kon is the juggernaut that I’d go out of my way for anyway, but it lands nicely in the middle of the year, and IKKiCON is six months after that. How convenient and evenly spaced! Some people worry that IKKiCON being smack between two major holidays hurts attendance, but I’ve never gotten that impression…and I mean, a majority of other conventions are on holiday weekends too?

Fake Lemonade Stand @ IKKiCON 7

This report is 4,077 words long. I guess that’s about average, right?

THURSDAY

Remember last IKKiCON when I gushed endlessly about how awesome Stacy and Michael of Kawaii Ribbons were and how they are the best table neighbours ever? And how I always lament that I don’t have a website or anything to link for them because they don’t sell online or outside of Austin and San Antonio-area conventions? Well, we’re gonna have some more of that I guess because I stayed with them for the weekend this year. :3 Left Houston around 2pm, crossed into Austin city limits by five, continued north because they live just outside of Austin, and…then proceeded to spend like an hour being lost in suburbia. Dear Austin, why the hell does 183 split in two, one of which is a toll road named 183A, and the other of which is supposed to be called S. Bell Blvd. or something. Except all the signs still say 183A? I don’t think there was a single sign that said S. Bell Blvd. even though Google insists that that’s what it’s called.

I got there eventually. u_u

Kawaii Ribbons @ IKKiCON 7

The original plan, as always, is to go set up Thursday evening, but Stacy still had some ribbons to make and I wasn’t feeling much in a hurry anyway… so we hung out at the house and Stacy put Michael, their friend Random, and me to work pinning and ribbon parts together so she could sew them. And maybe it was just as well, because Kiiyame (White Oblivion) called around 7:30-8pm asking if I was at the hotel and if I knew where the hell Artist Alley check-in was. Apparently, the normal registration folks told her that it was inside the Exhibit Hall, but all the doors to said hall were locked…so, she did not end up getting set up that night. (However, another artist reports that set-up Thursday went smoothly, and I don’t remember having any difficulties checking in Thursday evening the last time we were at the Hilton, so who knows??)

After replenishing Stacy’s ribbon stock, we went to Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner before proceeding to Wal-Mart to…buy pony toys. Because we’re adults and we do what we want. <_< Stacy and Michael are total bronies and have a house full of ponies ponies everywhere and it’s pretty freakin’ awesome (I really should have gotten pictures…). Among these pony goods was an awesome tin and I really like tins okay?? So I wanted one for myself. And that’s why we went to Wal-Mart, where I accidentally a bunch of figures too. U_U

The tin came with six trading card boosters and a poster. A few items here and there is okay, but I have zero desire to get into pony collecting (it’s a dangerous thing, collecting), but Michael wants to get a full set of cards, so I gave him all the cards I opened that he didn’t already have. Then we spent a relaxing evening watching random pony episodes, as well as the first episode of Panty & Stocking because I couldn’t believe Stacy and Michael hadn’t seen it yet. It’s totally up their alley, man.

No shame, bronies.

So Thursday wasn’t really con-related for the most part. Honestly, I did pretty much no con prep work for any of my post-Otakon 2012 cons and just coasted through all of them. I plain didn’t have time to work on anything new and had plenty of leftover stock, so whatever? Especially after Aki Con, I was expecting IKKiCON to be a relatively chillaxy, stress-free, drama-free convention anyway. Despite this, I could not sleep at all Thursday night. x_x

FRIDAY

We set out around eight, stopped for gas and then coffee, and managed to get into the hotel’s parking lot before it filled up. Artist Alley check-in was indeed inside the Exhibit Hall, and we got in without an issue.

However…the tables in the Alley were not laid out the way they were supposed to be. Tables at IKKiCON are assigned. We were sent a map a few months prior and got to submit a list of preferences. Everyone has their own idea of what a strategically good location is, and in general I like assigned tables because I like having plans and not having to figure stuff out last minute. So naturally, I get annoyed really fast when plans get planned and then ignored.

To be fair, it seemed the tables were just turned 90 degrees from their original positions so that the rows went perpendicular to the exit wall instead of parallel. And this is actually a really good thing because it meant no one had their backs to the rest of the Exhibit Hall and no one was facing the exit (which is decidedly terrible for sales and one of the reasons some artists did really poorly two years ago). Most people were still roughly in the same spot they were assigned, including me, and while Stacy’s table was not next to mine in the original map, it was now! And Kiiyame, who was rows away from me on the map, was now diagonally behind me.

The original map.

Still, the tables were moved because apparently they had been blocking the fire exit (or something?), so I feel like this sort of thing should have been caught way early on… especially since IKKiCON has used the space before. The way the tables ended up should have been the plan all along, instead of a last-minute rearrangement that happened to turn out for the better.

Michael had work that morning, so it was just Stacy and me, but we managed to haul everything out of my van and upstairs in one trip and began setting up around 10am. The hall was to open to VIP badge holders at 11:30am and to general attendees at noon, so it was the perfect amount of time to get set up. Yume was supposed to have the table next to Kiiyame, but she came down sick last minute and had to skip. :( But because of this, Ladre commandeered her table and was directly behind me. It was cool being next to a bunch of my con friends for once! Tracy (Silver no Miko) and Alice were on the opposite end of the Alley and Darien (Geegeet) was across from Ladre. “Shiny Things” Kat was two tables down from me.

To no one’s surprise, there were at least two dozen Jack Frosts running around.

Despite being in the same space, the Exhibit Hall, which includes both Artist Alley and the Dealer’s Room, was smaller than it was for IKKiCON 5. The section of the map that’s blocked off for the “programming room” was also part of the Exhibit Hall then. As such, the area felt oddly cramped and small. It kind of feel there are more AA tables on the map than there actually were, but I never counted while I was there.

Friday was slow in the way typical of Fridays. There was a decent stream of traffic, but they were all browsers. This was fine, but I got bored a lot. I had only a 20oz bag of jelly beans to occupy me. I had chosen to leave my minicomics in Seattle because I wasn’t expecting to sell any of them and it was just extra weight (my checked bag was so close to being overweight and costing me $100 extra, omg). This left one side of my table somewhat empty, but I still had a wall of prints hanging all around me and thus didn’t have a lot of room to sketch. I really need to do something about that printwall…

Tracy passed out some of those obnoxious party blower horns to a bunch of us when we set up that morning, and throughout the day, random people would blow their horns and everyone else could echo a response. It was amusing to me because it was obvious we were all kinda bored, but I’m sure we were annoying the crap out of everyone else in the Alley, haaa. <_<

Please insert an appropriate Amon pun here.

One thing that did keep me busy Friday though was the fact that I, for some reason, credit card swiping was not working on my Square reader. I spent a frustrating amount of time trying to troubleshoot the issue. My phone recognized that the reader was plugged in, but it could not detect that I was swiping a card 90% of the time. And in the 10% where it did realize I was swiping, it insisted that I was swiping incorrectly. I swapped out my reader for Kiiyame’s and it still didn’t work. I also tried my reader on Kiiyame’s phone, and it did work. So okay, not the reader’s fault. I guess it’s my phone??

I uninstalled the app, rebooted the phone, then reinstalled the app. Nothing. I did this twice more. ;/ I blew into the audio jack to try to clear out dust. No luck. For once I was at a con with excellent reception and I couldn’t freakin’ get the reader to work. Figures!

PLEASE FIX IT, FELIX!

When we had the same set up two years ago with dealers and artists sharing the same space, some dealers were annoyed at the hours which, while still on the shorter end of average for artists, were pretty long for dealers. If I recall correctly, IKKiCON 5′s Exhibit Hall hours were 10am-8am both Friday and Saturday, then 10am-4pm on Sunday, for 26 hours total. Dealers like shorter hours because they feel less time to dawdle on decisions leads to more sales. Artists like longer hours because we’re workaholic masochists and because more time for idle browsing leads to more incidental sales? While many con-goers go through dealers with a game plan and specific goods they’re looking for, a vast majority go through AA “just to see what’s there.”

This year, the Exhibit Hall hours were significantly reduced to 12pm-7pm Friday, 11am-6pm Saturday, and 11am-4pm Sunday, for a total of just 19 total hours, so I guess a dealer won a fight somewhere along the way? Last year at the AT&T Center, artists and dealers were separate, and I went into the Dealer’s Room all of once, so I don’t remember what the hours were.

In literally the last fifteen minutes before closing, a group of girls came by and ordered five commissions. They were awesome repeat customers who had commissioned me at previous IKKiCONs, and the best part was that every single one of the commissions were for characters I liked drawing. 8D Come by earlier in the day next time though!

Color commission of Regulus Black, Slytherin Seeker. :3

Every con where the Artist Alley closes early, I think “now I can actually check out the rest of the con!” But looking through the program and schedule, neither Stacy nor I could find anything we really wanted to check out. Except the Art Show, which for Friday only, was open an hour later than the Exhibit Hall.

The Art Show was tucked in with the panel rooms in the hallway on the far end of the floor. I didn’t think it was very easy to find, mostly because there’s a set of elevators right before the entrance of the hallway, blocking it from view and making it look like there wasn’t anything back there. And honestly…there really wasn’t. The Art Show was in a small room, but there were only five artists’ works on display for a total of maybe twenty pieces, but most of them were small pieces, and many of them were very similar. The rest of the panels were blank. Maybe more got added later, but man, it was underwhelming.

Ty Lee, Zuko, Azula, Mai.

I don’t know what previous Art Show rates and turnouts were for IKKiCON (or of any other convention the same size), but I imagine the outrageous panel prices have something to do with it… IKKiCON charges $30 for a 4′x4′ panel or $5 for a single entry into the Art Show. Compare this with Sakura-Con’s $15 for a 4′x7′ panel (+$10 for additional), A-kon’s $12 per 4′x4′ panel, and Otakon’s $5 per entry (Otakon doesn’t sell space by panel), keeping in mind that Sakura and A-kon have three times IKKiCON’s attendance and Otakon has four and a half times. IKKiCON doesn’t charge an additional commission on sales while the others all charge 10%, but still. $30 per panel is crazy.

Turnout might have also been low could be because area artists are a bit burned on the convention in general? Two years ago, a lot of artists did poorly because of the way the tables were laid out (parallel to the exit wall), among other reasons. Last year, poor communication and confusion among con and hotel staff lead to a lot of frustration in the alley regarding crappy lighting, unclear hours, and placement drama. I’ve always done pretty all right, but it’s easy enough to note the absence of several artists that appear regularly at other Texas-area conventions. And if artists are already iffy on participating in the Alley, why risk the Art Show, which has even less exposure and promotion?

Stacy and I didn’t stay long after leaving the Art Show. Instead, we drove back to her house, walked the dogs, and ordered pizza. I ate an entire 12″ pizza by myself and it was delicious. U_U And then I stayed up working on my homework commissions. All in all, Friday was pretty uneventful, but that’s okay. Uneventful is better than drama-filled, after all, and I felt reasonably confident that things would pick up Saturday.

I don’t care what you say; mushroom and spinach makes for the best pizza.

SATURDAY

Saturday began pretty much the same as Friday, with getting gas and coffee. Since we didn’t have stuff to load, we took Stacy’s car instead of my minivan, and listened to pony music all the way there. The parking garage was full this time though (not surprising), so we parked about two blocks down, which was really fine except for the part where we had to walk past a hobo camp while Stacy was in a pink wig and lolita dress.

It is a freakin’ adorable outfit though.

I didn’t have much to set up at the table when we got there, so I wandered around the dealer’s side of the Exhibit Hall a bit before opening. Browsing the Dealer’s Room is always a mixed experience for me because I’m very rarely looking for anything specific and in the opposite way of most con-goers, I make far more incidental purchases in DR than I do in AA. Everything is neat, but I don’t want it until I walk by it ten times. <_< I did spot a few of the new Banpresto “I ♥ Eevee” promotional line though…including the DX Eevee, which looks really freakin’ amazing and fluffy and soft. >_>

Doors opened to VIP attendees at 10:30am and to everyone else at 11am. Traffic was much brisker Saturday. I got a lot more commissions to keep me busy, and since I still couldn’t get Square to work on my phone, I installed the Square app on Michael’s phone so I could run credit cards again. Michael also did a food run around noon and brought back one of the best burgers I’ve ever had. :O (He was looking for tacos, but wandered lost downtown for an hour instead before he found the burgers.) Best table neighbours ever or best table neighbours ever??

And of course, I got to draw Stacy and Michael again. This is the fourth time?

There really isn’t all that much else to say about Saturday. It was a solid and satisfying day of work, even if it was really short. 6pm closing time? Ridiculous. I never understand it when DR/AA closes earlier Saturday than Friday, but there you go. A-kon’s (secure) AA was like this the last two years too, and staff always tells me it’s the hotel’s decision, not theirs, but they’ll be moving to a new hotel this year, so we’ll see if that changes.

Michael and Stacy were kind of interested in attending the pony panel on the schedule, but it was at 10pm and no one was interested in hanging around the hotel that long, or in leaving and coming back. So we bailed, went and had Vietnamese for dinner, then raided not one, but two different Targets for My Little Pony trading cards for Michael. 8D After getting back to the house, Michael and I sorted through all his cards and cataloged one of each into a binder (previously they were all sitting in his tin) while Stacy waited impatiently for us to finish so we could catch the new episode. IT WAS A VERY PONYTASTIC WEEKEND IN GENERAL, in case you hadn’t gathered.

Appropriately, my homework commission for the night was a David Bowie pony.

SUNDAY

Stacy remarked Sunday morning that we took a different route in and out of the city every single day of the convention, but all of the routes took roughly the same time. We parked two blocks down from the hotel again, but this time did not have to walk by the hobos. Stacy, in cat ears and a maid outfit, still got unwanted attention though. But I mean, we were also like a block from 6th street, Austin’s wonderful club and bar street. And it was New Years weekend. Comes with the territory? I would say that this is part of the reason I kinda liked the AT&T Center better, but I don’t really spend enough time outside during a con for it to matter that much.

Not one, but two Hawkeyes, a Tony, and a Bruce Banner~. (Loki was also next to Bruce, but I couldn’t get him in the same shot, and you’re all sick of me posting Loki cosplayers anyway, right??)

On Sunday, I had nearly as many commissioners as I did Saturday, and also the one commissioner I was worried wasn’t coming back came back! Ever since I joined up with the 21st century and got texting on my phone, I’ve asked commissioners to leave their numbers so I could text them when their commission is finished. Every now and then, someone will decline to leave their number. This is fine, and I stress to them that they’ll have to remember to come back and pick up their art… but four out of five times, these people never come back. They pay upfront, so it isn’t like I lose money on them, but it’s really frustrating having finished art that never gets picked up! Like…what do I do with them? D:

One of my few commissioners Friday decided not to leave her number and I worried all Saturday she was gonna become Yet Another No Show, but she finally showed up again Sunday, so yay! All commissions picked up and accounted for!

Vaporeon~

Other than commissions though, Sunday was pretty slow and I don’t remember anything notable. The last hour was awkward in that “half of the Exhibit Hall had started to pack up, but we haven’t yet” sort of way. Kiiyame, Ladre, and a few others headed out to Chili’s in our shared post-con tradition, but that group got pretty big pretty fast, so in the end, I decided to skip and hit up IHOP with Stacy and Michael instead. Departed for Houston around seven and miraculously did not crash and die on the way back because I almost fell asleep about a dozen times. <_< Tiiiired.

OVERALL

This was my third year attending IKKiCON as an artist, and looking back, I think the con’s always been a bit of a mixed bag. As my first convention ever (not as an artist), there is sentimental value here for sure, but I’ve done a lot of shows now, and IKKiCON could be better.

For IKKiCON 5, while traffic was pretty abysmal for much of the weekend, I said the convention was one of the most organized I’d been to in a while. On the heels of Anime Overload and Delta H Con 2010, I suppose that was true enough. IKKiCON 6, by contrast, had better traffic but awful staff organization and communication. IKKiCON 7… well, I guess it has improved. I think overall traffic was better than both previous years, but while staff organization wasn’t bad, it still felt like it could stand some improvements.

General shot of Artist Alley.

Not sticking with the AA map annoys me out of principle, though I know the end layout was definitely for the better. I didn’t like the shorter Exhibit Hall hours this year, but I’m not really sure what can be done aside from making Saturday make more sense and closing at least as late as Friday. The AA check-in guys stayed at their table most of the weekend and were nice and reasonably helpful when I went with Kiiyame to bring up an issue she was having with one of her neighbours. Other than that though, I didn’t really see them wander around the Alley until the very end of the weekend, when who I assume is now the Artist Alley head came around to collect names and emails for information to register for next year. I didn’t have as many issues as last year, but I guess the staff felt kind of impersonal to me.

One of the things that bothers me the most I didn’t find out until after the con though, and that’s that IKKiCON apparently technically had a 50% fanart rule…because they copied Otakon’s AA rules verbatim.

I had to have seen the 50% rule when I finished all the paperwork in April, but I guess it completely slipped my mind because IKKiCON has never had a fanart rule and no one mentioned it ever. I feel bad now for not following them, but if IKKiCON just copied Otakon’s rules, are they really IKKiCON’s rules? Especially if even the staff didn’t seem aware of it? Come on, don’t be so lazy and indifferent. How hard can it possibly be to write up your own rules?

I only saw Melissa — who used to head Artist Alley, but who’s now the Executive Director of the con — once and very briefly Saturday morning, so we didn’t get much of a chance to talk. I think IKKiCON (still?) has the problem of too few experienced staff and/or not having enough reliable people to delegate tasks to, and so corner-cutting happens, and copying Otakon’s AA rules is one such instance. I’m sure it happened elsewhere at the con, too.

Stacy and Michael as ponies. ;)

I really don’t think IKKiCON’s a bad convention, but there’s definitely room for improvement — especially in the care (don’t just copy/paste other convention’s guidelines!) and awareness (did you even look at how other shows priced their Art Show panels?) departments. This can be said for a lot of conventions. It’s just a matter of our being willing to point out places that need improvement, and staff being willing to listen…

But either way, I had a good weekend, and I’ll probably be back next this year. :>

So Aki Con was a small, local anime convention that took place over October 26-28 across the lake at the Bellevue Hilton. It was one of the most frustrating weekends ever, and I wasn’t the only one that felt that way. The backlash from artists in the week following the con was pretty damn vicious. Things have settled down since then, but only because time has passed, and not because any of the issues have been resolved. I was really busy in the time leading up to the con, and was really busy after  — this is the longest I’ve ever delayed writing a con report, and for any other con, I think I would have just given up and let it go, but if any con needs to be written about, it’s Aki Con.

This is the most relevant photo of the convention.

And in fact, many, many, many others already have, in a much more timely manner than I. There is both a Tumblr and a Facebook group dedicated to calling out Aki Con on its bullshit astonishing lack of professionalism. I’m told a lot that I’m the only person who writes about artist experiences at conventions so extensively, so I think the fact that this many others have written about Aki Con is proof enough that it’s a convention with some really serious issues.

This report is 8,228 words long, to the surprise of exactly no one.

Jump to: Pre-Con, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Overall, Fallout.

Pre-Con

I registered for Aki Con in March of last year, a good seven months before the convention. As a small convention (~3,500 estimated attendance?), it really annoyed me that the $75 table price did not include a weekend badge, which had to be purchased separately for $30, making the total cost to register $105. Compare to IKKiCON and San Japan 2011, which each had roughly 6,500 attendees and cost $100 for a table and one badge. Hell, compare to the last Anime Weekend Atlanta I attended in 2009 and the last MomoCon I attended in 2010. Both cost $100 for a table and two badges; AWA had 11,717 attendees that year and MomoCon had ~7,800. Case in point: Aki Con’s Artist Alley tables were hella expensive for a con its size.

Aki Con’s contract was poorly formatted and seemed pretty juvenile, but I figured they were a newer, less experienced con and let it go. I’ve seen the likes of it before with small college cons (Delta H Con came to mind…though maybe that should have been a warning sign). The contract specified that its tables were 1′ x 6′ though, which is tiiiiny. Seriously, do you know how short a foot is?? I emailed staff to check that there was no mistake in those numbers and was told that they would be that size…at minimum. This wasn’t especially reassuring, particularly because the staff member wrote in an abbreviated, lazy sort of way that bordered on unclear, but I decided to let that go too. Surely the tables couldn’t possibly be that small.

And I don’t hear from them ever again after that. Most artists apparently got an email about set-up and stuff a week before the convention, but I didn’t. :\

Sherlock about to harpoon Moriarty to break up the textwall.

I’m eternally grateful that Torikat reached out to me regarding Aki Con. As another Texan transplant to Washington state, we seem to have a fair bit in common and hit it off pretty well. She needed a place in the area to crash and I needed a ride across the lake every day, and so it was agreed that she and her friend (with a car) would crash at my place (~20 minutes from the hotel) for the weekend and we’d all drive back and forth every day. Tori had gone to Aki Con last year, so her previous experience was nice to hear about, especially since I wasn’t getting any more information from Aki Con itself. And really, I was just really glad to have someone to hang with at the con since I wouldn’t know anyone else. I was a little stressed about how our arrangements to work out, but I wasn’t terribly concerned about the convention itself. After JCCS, I was looking forward to being back amongst anime fans, my most familiar brand of nerd~. ;)

The week before Aki Con, I was hit with a really frustrating technological crisis at ‘Souls. Long story short, I went to bed Friday morning of the con at 5am after staying up all the previous day and only getting a pathetic amount of sleep the night before that. And Tori and her friend were supposed to pick me up at 6am. I’m usually very good about catnapping when I need to, ridiculous circumstances be damned, but I overslept my one hour alarm and woke when Tori texted me that they were there. This was not how I wanted to start my weekend. D;

But things will get better, right? I’ll be able to de-stress from my terrible week at a fun convention, right!? Three months after the fact, I put these rhetorical questions here to make myself laugh.

FRIDAY

It’s almost 7am when we get to the hotel. The lobby had no signs or anything pointing to registration, which we only knew to be on the floor below because that’s where it was last year. The mysterious email that I never got said badge pick-up and artist set-up started at 8:30am. The convention itself was supposed to open at 9am, so this was a crazy short set-up time, but we figured it’d be pretty slow in the morning anyway. We sat a while in the lobby cafe with scones and coffee, but got restless pretty quickly and finally headed downstairs at probably a quarter to eight. Good thing, I guess, because there was already a mess of a line.

This convention is already in chaos, so here is a Discord.

Apparently some people had been told that registration was at eight? But most of the mess was because no one seemed to know whether artists needed to stand in line with the regular attendees or not. There were probably a half dozen staff/volunteers at registration, but all of them seemed flustered and confused. Each had been told a different thing, and no apparent hierarchy amongst them meant that they didn’t whose information was more correct. Post-convention, one artist reported:

A while later someone comes up to us and says that artist alley people can skip the line. I was happy, as it was now AFTER 8:30 and I really only had 20 min now to set up before they opened. So me and a couple of people around me left the line and went to where we were directed. A new line formed. Then they told us that they didn’t know why we left the line, and we had to go back and stand in line like everyone else.

Tori and I had not been very far back in the general line, so managed to get our badges relatively quickly despite literally every staff person we spoke to being confused. It was only as we shuffled away from registration that a definitive, separate line was being formed for artists.

With our badges and programs in tow, we were now faced with the question: so where is Artist Alley? The mysterious pre-con email had not provided a map. Last year the Alley was apparently in the hallways around registration, but as there were no tables set up there this year, that couldn’t be the case. In the days before the convention, a few artists had apparently asked via email and Aki Con’s forums where the Alley would be. For some reason, staff didn’t seem very forthcoming with this information. The one answer that was eventually supplied was the cheeky, “it’s at the convention!”

Artist Alley is in the parking garage. Yes, really. (Photo by Umeiwa)

When another artist first told us that the Alley was in the parking garage, I laughed it off. But we followed this artist, because she seemed to know where she was going. Turns out, she wasn’t kidding.

Remember: Aki Con is a convention on the tail end of October. In Washington state. In a city known nationwide for rain and gloom. And as it happened, it was raining that weekend. It was cold and wet outside, which meant it was also cold and wet inside the parking garage. Because it’s a freakin’ parking garage! The glass walls that kept us from being completely exposed to the outside did not do much to keep the cold out. There were weird industrial-looking heaters hooked up outside, blasting some pitiful amount of heat in through two open doors, but I couldn’t feel it at all. It was cold in the garage, and it got colder the longer we stayed there.

I mentioned it was wet too, but even garages have ceilings, right? We should have been kinda dry at least, right? HAHAHAHAHAHA.

Leaky buckets lined the ceiling. It was very classy. (Photo by Umeiwa)

There were puddles here and there on the concrete floor from people tracking them in, but the funny thing is that I actually didn’t notice the buckets for a fair while.

This was because I was too busy being angry about the tables, which ended up being a absurdly tiny 1.5′x6′ after all! You guys have seen my table at other conventions. I have no room for anything. I use up every bit of space I have on 2.5′x6′ tables and can feel crowded at even a 2.5′x8′ table. I did not have a fun time setting up at Aki Con. I wasn’t even worried anymore that we were setting up like ten minutes before the con was supposed to open; I just wanted to fit everything on the stupid table. Spots weren’t assigned, so Tori and I grabbed two tables on the end nearest to the decorated torii prop and the glass doors. The tables on the end facing the garage entrance were already taken, so we took the ones facing away.

The torii prop was actually really cool, and Aki Con had a ton of other neat props and sets scattered throughout the convention space, including a rather impressive model of the school in Soul Eater and a little field with the scarecrow from Howl’s Moving Castle. There were other torii set up here and there with signs for things, but the Artist Alley one was really poorly placed… You couldn’t really see it from where you came into the garage because it wasn’t really facing that direction, and even as you got closer, the LARP/foam-weapon fighting arena was in the way, so the entrance to the Alley was really, really difficult to see. The low ceilings of the garage made it hard to see far in general, and the whole place felt cramped and awkward. Even with the half-sized tables, the Artist Alley felt claustrophobic. There wasn’t a lot of space in the aisle, artists’ cubegrids and printwalls blocked a lot of things from view.

It’s hard to tell from this side, but I had no space behind this setup.

Because of the poor visibility, it also wasn’t until later that I realized the poor, poor dealers were also in the parking garage, which is labeled in the program as the “Exhibition Hall.” They were near the back of the garage and were fenced off from everything else by chain-link. It was the classiest. Full list of things in the “Exhibition Hall”? The Dealer’s Room, Artist Alley, the Haunted House, the arcade, table-top gaming, LARP, and food service. FOOD SERVICE. Remember that Anime Matsuri where people were grossed out by open containers of water and food service ladies finger-combing hair while preparing food? Serving food in a wet, moldy garage is worse.

And to top off Friday morning, things were abysmally slow.

And things didn’t pick up as the day went on.

Check out the puddles and mold! (Photo by Umeiwa)

It was a bit odd because there were people around. It was far from busy, but it wasn’t dead either. There was a casual flow of traffic through the afternoon, but no one was really even browsing, much less buying. It was disgusting in the garage to be sure, but I tend to forget about these things relatively quickly. Sitting behind my table, I couldn’t see the ceiling buckets from behind my printwall. I couldn’t see the gross floor in front of me. I was cold, but I dealt with it. It didn’t occur to me that probably a lot of people weren’t even bothering to cross from the hotel to the garage because it was raining outside. It didn’t occur to me that cosplayers wouldn’t want to get their costumes dripped on, or that many of them wouldn’t want to walk on the gross, wet floor of the garage. It didn’t occur to me that no one wanted to browse because no one wanted to be in such a dank environment long enough to do that.

And because these things didn’t occur to me then, I was really perplexed at how slow things were.

I wandered around the Alley a couple of times. I wandered through Dealer’s. I have never gotten up so many times at a convention out of sheer boredom. I was glad for the opportunity to check out and chat with other artists, including PurpleKecleon/PK, who I am a huge fan of, but the general mood around the Alley was pretty glum. Everyone was freezing. Some artists were right under buckets and/or leaks and were getting dripped on at their tables. Dealers weren’t doing much better, though I got to geek out a little with one of the ladies at Twinbells Doujinshi over Gundam SEED and Asucaga even though they weren’t carrying any Asucaga doujin I wanted and didn’t already have.

This is how much space I had behind the table, that is to say, none whatsoever.

I didn’t have any room to work at the table, but eventually I figured something out so I could do some art trades with Tori to occupy my mind-crushingly bored and sleep-deprived self. The Artist Alley was supposed to be 24 hours, which usually means “I’ll leave when it slows.” But it was slow the whole day, and even before sundown, I was ready to be out of there.

The next fun bit doesn’t have a lot to do with Aki Con itself, though it certainly added to the frustration of the weekend. Tori’s friend who was originally supposed to be driving us back and forth from my apartment that weekend? Bailed. The person who dropped us off that morning was another friend doing Tori a favor, but that person wasn’t staying in town for the weekend. So we were technically stranded at the convention until we figured something out. The bus was an option, though the nearest bus stop was a half mile from the hotel (which was the original reason I wanted a ride). And since the Alley isn’t secure, we really ought to pack up our product every night and bring it back every morning, which makes busing even less attractive. Tori asked one of the volunteers if there was anywhere we’d be able to stow things. The answer was no, but we got permission to leave our stuff with one of the dealers behind their chain-link fence. Better than nothin’!

With our stuff stowed, we decided we’d just take the bus the rest of the weekend. Except we really didn’t feel like looking for the bus stop in the dark in the rain after a pretty crappy day at the con. It was around 7pm we finally bailed. I hate bothering people for favors in general, much less last-minute ones, but I sucked it up and called my friend Ravi to come get us and drop us off at my apartment, where we sat around shooting the breeze for five hours before crashing into exhausted sleep.

Drip, drip, drip. (Photo by Umeiwa)

Friday was my worst selling day since I started keeping records. I think I sold 5 things in 9 hours. In my second worst Friday, I made four times that amount. I spent more on coffee than I made back at Aki Con on Friday. I was sleep deprived and grumpy and the coffee was overpriced, but it still wasn’t that much coffee. And even in the terrible conditions, I was really, really baffled by the whole thing. I didn’t feel especially optimistic about the rest of the weekend, but even so, never had I believed so strongly in it can’t possibly get worse.

SATURDAY

And for what it’s worth, it didn’t get worse. For me, anyway.

Laaaaadies.

After sleeping seven whole hours, which seemed like forever and ever, we left the apartment around 8am and got on a bus to Bellevue. It was drizzling and misting outside, but that’s pretty much the extent of rain around here anyway. There was a Starbucks right by the bus stop on the Bellevue side, so we picked up coffee, and the half mile walk to the hotel wasn’t so bad.

We got there around 9:30am, but there was basically no one around. There wasn’t even anyone checking for badges at the entrance of the Exhibition Hall parking garage, despite Dealer’s Room being open and Artist Alley being 24hr. The lack of security would have been hilarious if it wasn’t so sad. Dealer’s Room protected from theft by just a chain-link fence? In whose mind is this a good idea?

I sat idly at my table for a while but wasn’t able to stand it for long. I got up to browse again, and Aki Con thus became one of my most spendy conventions. After the amazing slowness and lack of sales on the first day, I just felt extra inclined to patronize my fellow vendors. With over fifty tables, the Artist Alley was huge for a convention Aki Con’s size — this might have also contributed to the slowness, among other things — but it was very well-rounded. There was a good mix of skill levels and wares being offered. I think there were a larger number of first-time Alley artists than I’m used to seeing, but as a small, local con, this wasn’t surprising. It was sad to hear about the crappy time a lot of them were having. :(

Oh, look, fake Pokemon plush.

Wandering through the Dealer’s Room, I found Jiuge and bought an embarrassingly large number of prints from her.

And then I spotted a whole bunch of Pokemon plush that were probably bootlegs. Post-convention research confirmed as much, and while I didn’t look too closely at anything other than the Pokemon, other artists reported an alarming number of other bootlegs in the Dealer’s Room, including a lot of fake Alpaca plush. On one hand, most of these were pretty impressive fakes and it’s hard to tell if you don’t know what you’re looking for; it is not hard to imagine that the dealers themselves probably didn’t know. On the other hand, it’s still obvious they didn’t order these goods from the manufacturer. <_<

I felt like I wandered around a lot, but even with all the wandering, I didn’t actually pass a lot of time. I sketched at the table, even though it was awkward and uncomfortable. I did an art trade with PK. I sketched some more.

PK’s half of our trade!

There were a lot of nice cosplayers to look at, though I’ve gotten pretty lazy about taking pictures in general, and unfortunately, I lost about three months of data in November because of my own idiocy, including most of my Aki Con photos. What’s in this report is what I managed to salvage from the wreckage, along with photos from other artists.

Some people had trouble getting reception in the garage, but I wasn’t one of them, shockingly. As such, I at least could tweet incessantly because there was nothing else to do. I continued to get up and wander a lot. In addition to being bored out of my mind, it was also still freezing, and walking around helped with that a little. I’d never felt so sure that I wasn’t missing any sales by being away from the table. I did more art trades. I did merch trades. Anything to keep occupied and to move things from the table.

Saturday at Aki Con was better than Friday, but this doesn’t say much at all. Saturday at Aki Con was slower than Friday at almost every other convention I’ve been to. A lot of artists were worried about breaking even on their $105 table price. Most of the artists were locals, so it’s good they didn’t have too much in travel and lodging costs, but everyone still has print costs, time and labor costs. A lot of people said they probably wouldn’t bother with Sunday at all.

My half of a trade with a cute SCAD freshman. x_x

The afternoon dragged on forever, and by 6pm, I was ready to leave again. Tori found a friend with extra space in the con hotel, so she decided to spend the night there to avoid bus fare and travel time. It was raining a little harder than it was that morning, so dawdled for another hour before finally leaving, walking the distance to the bus stop, and catching a 7:30 bus home.

On the bus, I saw someone on their way to Steamcon, which was the very same weekend in the very same city. I wonder how that convention went? Better, undoubtedly.

SUNDAY

Not in a hurry at all, I got to the con around 10am. I made a quick round through the Alley and Dealer’s, then finally sat down probably at 10:30. And in the first hour Sunday, I made more than I did on Friday. An hour after that, I’d made more than Saturday. I was finally getting commissions, too. Hallelujah.

Then someone pointed out that the Aki Con program includes a “con survival guide,” which includes the following tip (sic):

If you ask politely on Sunday some vendors can be bargained down for a cheaper prices because they are simply trying to clear inventory.

No.

The note really rubbed me the wrong way. It doesn’t matter that yes, some vendors will do Sunday sales and deals. It doesn’t matter that plenty of others balk at the suggestion that they might be so desperate to move product. It’s one thing for individuals to give casual advice to friends suggesting Sunday shopping. It’s another thing entirely for a convention, an organization, to suggest to its attendees that they should try to haggle with its vendors. It’s irresponsible and unprofessional. As a told someone on Twitter, a convention has a responsibility to both its attendees and its vendors. A con isn’t responsible for ensuring its vendors turn a profit, but neither should it be trying to cheat them out of proper sales. And a con’s concern for attendees should be safety and entertainment, not getting cheap deals on vendor goods.

Oh, here is a nice picture of workers emptying overfilled buckets. In case you forgot that we were in a ~*parking garage*~. (Photo by Umeiwa)

Honestly though, even though the note in the program was in very bad form, I don’t think it was the reason sales went up so dramatically Sunday. Maybe a quarter of the artists in the Alley didn’t come back Sunday, or only came back to pack up and leave, so there was less competition. It was also not raining on Sunday, so probably more attendees decided to finally, finally check out this “Exhibition Hall” thing across the way from the hotel. There’s usually not as much going on event-wise Sunday, and a fair number of people do make an effort to spend out their budgets on the last day. It was also not as freezing in the garage on Sunday. All the little things that together matter so much.

So Sunday easily became my best day of the convention, netting more than Friday and Saturday combined, and bringing my total for the weekend to something that is actually fairly reasonable for a ~3,500 person convention. At that point though, it didn’t even matter anymore.

Aki Con was a frustrating, frustrating weekend, and I was very ready to leave that afternoon. Luckily for both Tori and I, we both found rides at the last minute, so she didn’t have to be stranded in town, and I didn’t have to lug my weight in con gear half mile to the bus stop. Take your victories where you can get them, I suppose.

I told you this was a spendy con for me. No, that is totally not five different prints of Loki shut up.

OVERALL

It’s a foregone conclusion that Aki Con was not a good weekend for a vast majority of vendors — a lot of artists definitely didn’t break even. In the end, I did okay, but the percentages are terribly skewed. I made an astounding 7% of my weekend sales on Friday, 37% on Saturday, and 56% on Sunday. Compare to overall averages of 25% Friday, 47% Saturday, and 28% Sunday. I’m still pretty baffled at just how slow Friday and Saturday were, because again, there were people around — they just weren’t shopping. We were in deplorable conditions, okay, but it is still weird to me that with so many people around, so little product was being moved.

Maybe I’m too tolerant? Or blissfully ignorant? I adjust and overlook things easily and sometimes have a hard time seeing just how problematic and serious a given issue is. I’ve been to smaller conventions, conventions with poor traffic flow and management, conventions with lacking security, with organization issues, with staff drama, with a lack of signage, etc, etc. But I guess none of those other conventions had all of these issues at the same time, and other problems to boot.

Cauldrons were a festive “solution” to the leaky roof problem. (Photo by Umeiwa)

Everyone likes lists, right?

Summary of Problems at Aki Con (Before and At the Convention)

• Cost: I mentioned it at the beginning. The cost of tabling at Aki Con is grossly high for a con its size.
• Table Size: Dear conventions everywhere, any table smaller than 2.5′x6′ is unacceptable. Period.
• Location: The best part of the parking garage story is that apparently, Aki Con has done this before. In 2009, artists were also put in a parking garage. I don’t think it was in the same hotel, Aki Con faced a lot of criticism for it, only to sweep the whole thing under the rug. A few people have mentioned that other conventions have actually used garages for space before, including Kumoricon, but really the issue was less that it was a garage and more that it was a really, really shitty garage. Give me a garage with clean floors, proper heating, no mold, and no leaks, and I assure you there would have been far fewer complaints.
  • Temperature: It was freezing in the garage all of Friday and Saturday. Things were a little better Sunday. There was heat being pumped in intermittently, but it was not very effective.
  • Wetness, Mold, & Humidity: Several artists complained of allergic reactions and illness triggered by the mold in the garage. The general wetness was also just…gross. People were stepping in (and slipping in) puddles, their product was getting dripped on, and more than once, one of the buckets on the ceiling overflowed and dumped a gallon or two of dirty water on someone. Yes, really. The humidity also warped prints and reduced the effectiveness of tape (which meant my print wall came down a lot). Honestly, the garage wasn’t even a place I wanted to keep my car, much less hang out in for three days. That the Hilton even keeps the place around in such a condition is surprising enough; that Aki Con deemed it fit to put people in here for long periods of time is bewildering, to say the least.
  • Odor?: A lot of people complained that the garage was smelly, but I have a pretty crappy sense of smell, especially in the cold, so I can’t comment here.
  • Placement: There is a wide open driveway between where registration is in the hotel and the entrance of the “Exhibition Hall.” Standing safely inside the hotel, it’s hard to see that there’s anything going on way over there in the other building. And when it’s raining outside, why would anyone bother to look twice? Also: being a parking garage, there is no bathroom there. The nearest bathroom is across the drive to the hotel and upstairs in the hall opposite the lobby. That is a long walk, man.
• Signage: There were no signs in the main hotel lobby directing anyone to anything. There were no signs from main areas of the convention inside the hotel to direct people across the driveway to the “Exhibition Hall.” There were no signs within the “Exhibition Hall” pointing to Artist Alley, which was difficult to see from the entrance. As a result, quite a few attendees claimed not to know that we even existed.
• Security: Badge checking at the entrance of the “Exhibition Hall” happened maybe 25% of the time that I saw. Because there was no bathroom in the garage, and because I was guzzling coffee like nobody’s business, I left a lot to hike upstairs in the hotel to use the restroom. Only rarely did someone check for my badge upon my return. Part of the problem was definitely that there were like six doors along the glass wall of the garage and if there was anyone checking badges at all, they were always on the far end of the wall, making it pretty easy for people to sneak in the other side. It seemed like they really needed more staff in general though. I read later that friends sharing badges and/or simply not paying admission at Aki Con was a very common thing.
• Safety: Yeahhhh…
  • Electricity: Remember how the arcade was also in the parking garage? And arcades run on electricity, yeah? So there was a big mess of power strips, cords and plugs in the middle of that area, sitting around in drippy puddle water. I wish someone had gotten a picture of it. It looked baaaaad. I don’t know how it didn’t explode. Artists and dealers were also allowed power on a first come, first serve basis, but apparently there were some issues with this and no one in DR or AA had power most of Saturday or Sunday. I don’t use electricity at the table personally though, so I don’t know the details here.
  • Food: I really have no idea how Aki Con got away with serving food in the garage. I don’t know how the food vendors could have set up in there and not thought “Wow, this is a pretty shitty idea.”
  • Other/Health: See sections above regarding mold and coldness. I’ve also heard that Aki Con has quite the underage drinking problem; I didn’t really see any of this myself, but I took off pretty early every day.

• Staff Presence: Or lack thereof. It’s sometimes hard making the distinction between con staff and volunteers, especially since at many (non-profit) conventions, all of the staff are essentially volunteers. Few get paid for their time. Aki Con is a for-profit convention, so let’s make the distinction here: henceforth when I say “staff,” I mean “people who run the convention and get paid.” When I say “volunteer,” I mean “people not getting paid, but who help out at the convention.”

  The thing about Aki Con was that it was woefully obvious that there wasn’t anyone with authority around. The confusion at registration/artist check-in proved as much. All of them were volunteers and no one there knew what was going on. Who was calling the shots? Where was the actual staff? And why hadn’t they informed these poor volunteers of what they were supposed to be doing? Saturday morning, PK had her table moved by volunteers because her stuff was getting dripped on, so there’s that. You could always find volunteers hanging out at registration, but it was difficult to spot them in the crowd because the only thing marking them as volunteers were tiny labels on their badges. And staff? I don’t think I saw a staff person all weekend.

  On the tail end of Saturday, I remember a girl going around to a few of the tables to check up on artists. This was probably the Artist Alley head, though I get the feeling she was probably also a volunteer, rather than a paid staff member, just from the complete…lack of authority she exuded. We didn’t speak, but other artists’ reports confirm as much: this girl had no power. I didn’t approach her at the convention ’cause honestly…I don’t know what I could have said.

  There was little that could have been done to fix anything at the actual convention, after all. It was way too late to, you know, decide not to put everyone in a parking garage. Could I have asked for a refund? There was no refund clause in the joke of a contract. For all the shittiness of the situation, and ignoring probable safety violations and a bland lack of professionalism, were they actual violating any written terms? I dunno. It’s hard to think in these terms while still at the con. But even if I had spoken to this Artist Alley head, it probably would have accomplished nothing other than making her feel bad.

• General Lack of Professionalism: You know, in recent years, I’ve made an effort to not be as pedantic about grammar and spelling, but surely I can’t be wrong to expect such things to be used properly by a business? I know Japanese cartoon conventions aren’t the most classy organizations in the world, but we can still have some standards, right? We can still run contracts through a grammar check or something, right? I don’t think I’m asking a lot here. A business needs to at least make an effort to look like it cares about its customers. Answer questions in a forthcoming manner, elaborate, keep everyone in the loop. It does not instill confidence in anyone to have a correspondence with a representative of an organization wherein answers to questions are vague and few things are capitalized or punctuated.

GarageCon 2012. (Photo by Umeiwa)

I was not impressed with Aki Con or how anything was planned or handled there, but I ended up doing okay overall, and I had a good time bonding with other artists in our collective misery. I’m really happy to have been able to hang out with Tori, to have been able to do an art trade with PK, and to have been able to speak with so many others. The cosplayers and attendees in general at Aki Con were great, and there’s no denying that the multitude of props were awesome. It’s not hard to see that Aki Con has the potential to be a pretty awesome convention.

So truthfully, even with the amazing number of problems I experienced and witnessed over the weekend, I was pretty ready to just let the whole thing go. On Sunday, most of me believed that surely, surely Aki Con would be able to learn from its mistakes here. I didn’t know that I’d want to come back, but I had not written off the possibility yet.

But the way the staff handled the fallout after the convention had me make up my mind pretty fast.

As long as Aki Con remains under the same management, I will not go back. And I hope other vendor will do well to avoid it and to spread the word to avoid it. I hope attendees will make an effort to read up on the convention’s bad practices and make educated decisions about whether they want to support such an organization. I’m cynical enough to believe that the latter will not happen, but I’m just callous enough to hope that Aki Con gets what it deserves, eventually.

FALLOUT

(or, “how to escalate a shitstorm”)

Aki Con posted a thread soliciting feedback on its forums at 1:10pm Sunday afternoon. Within hours, it had ballooned to a dozen pages. Many new issues came to light as vendors and attendees alike came forward with various horror stories and bad experiences. Roughly two days later, there were 24 pages (~200 comments) of negative responses ranging from disappointed to indignant to completely outraged accompanied by a handful of very poor attempts by staff at damage control, if it could be called that. Rather than acknowledge that there were any problems, staff  backpeddled, contradicted themselves, accused artists of inventing tales, and generally acted dismissive, defensive and immature.

In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, the entire forum was locked down and access barred. A feedback survey is left in its place.

Everyone expected this to happen though.

The first 20 pages of the feedback thread were screencapped and are archived here. All 24 pages, sans the staff’s final reply, is archived in HTML format here. The complete 24 pages of the feedback thread, along with other related forum threads like the Artist Alley-specific feedback thread, are also downloadable in PDF format here. None of these make for very comfortable reading, but if you’re interested in trucking through the mess, the whole thing is kind of entertaining in that “I can’t believe this actually happened” sort of way.

It’s Tumblrrrr.

Post-Convention Addendum to the Summary of Problems

It’s really unfortunate that neither Tumblr nor Facebook‘s formats are very conducive to sequential reading. Both became useful rallying points for artists after the lockdown of the forum, and there is a wealth of information and testimonials gathered on both. Issues brought up or revealed in the days following the convention that I have not already mentioned in my aforementioned personal observations include:

• After 9pm, all the lights went out in the parking garage to facilitate the Haunted House. This was mentioned in the email Aki Con sent to (most) artists, but is still pretty ridiculous regardless. Forcing vendors to provide their own light source will always be an absurd notion to me.
• There was basically no staff/volunteer coordination and delegation of power was a joke. One volunteer reports:
  

  I was there at opening on friday and for the first several hours I didn’t even know where the AA was, so when people asked I had to apologize and show them the map. The only thing I knew about AA was that someone should be there checking badges- which I did for a while- and that was about it. The best I could do for complaints was send them to the Registration desk but they frequently had people who weren’t high enough up to help or do anything.

  Another says:

  I personally was volunteering and even I had a hard time finding staff to ask questions, ask to have someone give me a break and the like. On top of that- and I don’t know if this was only me or what- but as a volunteer I would have thought that they’d have told me about some rules to uphold, where things are, how to handle things. I got pretty much nothing.

  A friend of the AA head reports:

  My coworker was the one “coordinating” the AA and the vendors and we talked about this mess yesterday. They kind of just tossed her in and then didn’t really help her in any way and wouldn’t let her actually help people. Supposedly the head of Akicon wanted everything to go through her first but then she wouldn’t even respond to my coworker’s phone calls or texts.

• Someone called the Hilton, which confirmed that Aki Con is no longer welcomed at the hotel for subsequent events.
• Kerosene heat was (allegedly) being used to (attempt to) heat the parking garage. Kerosene heat comes with fun gases like carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, and the garage was not very well ventilated.
• Aki Con purposefully withheld information from artists regarding the location of Artist Alley.
• Yeah, all of this happened in 2009, too.
• Manga Kissaten, LLC., the company that runs Aki Con, was allegedly banned from Sakura-Con for selling bootlegs.
• It is illegal in Washington state for for-profit business to employ volunteers. Whoops.

There were other, more basic complaints that were less shocking and less unique to Aki Con, though because it was Aki Con, they added more fuel to the fire. A lot of attendees felt the con in general was very disorganized. Panels were never on time, if they happened at all; traffic chokepoints in the hotel were chaotic, and that the Haunted House cost an additional fee on top of con admission annoyed a lot of people. The lack of badge checking came up a lot, as well as general security, and the difficulty of reaching actual staff during the convention.

The purposeful withholding of information caused a few artists to demand refunds, or at least comped tables for next year. They accused Aki Con of fraud, deception, and willful negligence. But really, most people, and I among them, were just looking for an admission of mistakes, someone taking responsibility, and a sincere apology. We just wanted assurance that things wouldn’t happen again the way they did. It is really…not hard to see how powerful a heartfelt “sorry” is in a situation like this.

In fact, a convention organizer from a different con in a different part of the country chimed in and apologized on behalf of conventions everywhere. A few other con organizers threw in their support of artists/vendors on the matter of Aki Con as well. Meanwhile, Aki Con staff made fools of themselves in the feedback thread.

Artist Alley.

Staff Responses

Here are some of the responses we got, quoted verbatim from the feedback thread. The attitude behind these comments are what pissed me off the most. It’s hard to tell if Aki Con staff is just completely delusional and incapable of accepting responsibility, or if they’re just playing dumb in an effort to make themselves appear the victim.

Regarding the general state of the parking garage:

the hotel assured us it would be clean. they didnt follow thru and yes thats on us for trusting them.

As far as the look of the space we wanted it to look like a haunted creep area…

Regarding the parking garage being a fire hazard:

weasked the fire marshal to come by and he said it was a safe location and gave us props for installing extra smoke alarms out of pocket. my dads a fire fighter and i take that very seriously so dont say stuff you dont know about.

the electrical boxes where water proof out door models.

And another was worried about the cords and drips. I expressed to her that the power boxes and cords were made for outdoor use. Then went to double check. Though those power boxes do look scare and strange they are very safe.

Other general commentary, including blatant lies regarding tables being under buckets and the temperature of the garage:

Sadly it seems we are in a no win situation with artists as they hated the halls, and complained heavily about noise, ppl congregating, ppl bumping them. So we gave aa an entire area, we made sure no tables were in drip zones, brought in heater ( it was warmer in the exhibition hall then the main building)

There were no tables below buckets if you look at the pictures you can see that those a empty area we didn’t sell because we were worried about drips on vendor or AA tables.

The forums were only the only venue where we were able to get responses from staff. @replies to their Twitter were ignored, and comments to Aki Con’s Facebook page were swiftly deleted. A few artists emailed in directly, but the replies they got were canned and mostly reiterated what was said on the forums. The illegal volunteer thing didn’t come to light until after the forums were locked down, so unfortunately, there has been no staff response on that matter whatsoever.

“Aki Con Feedback Team”

Two days after the forums are locked, it is on 4chan of all places that we see Aki Con’s first somewhat professional response. Ed Altorfer introduces himself in an /egl/ thread about Aki Con as a member of the “Aki Con Feedback Team,” which formed that day. The Aki Con thread is archived here in full, but the relevant portion is in this subthread.

Immediately, artists and attendees write him off as some poor PR guy hired to take over damage control after the actual con staff failed so miserably. While Altorfer denies that he’s just “damage control,” he does admit to having only been on the job for “a few hours.” He confirms that Aki Con is for-profit. Altorfer also apparently made a deviantART account to post a single comment on an artist’s con report. He directs people to a service called UserVoice to submit their feedback. Artists comply and are very direct with what they want to see happen. The guy hangs out in the 4chan thread for a few hours, then is never heard from again.

Several artists, including myself, email him at the newly provided email address. As far as I know though, none of us have yet gotten a response.

Aki Con staff spends all year building props. These props are, admittedly, very cool, but they are not as essential to the convention as, say, organization, communication, and common sense.

Artist Retaliation

With the radio silence from Aki Con staff and the “PR guy,” artist attempt to retaliate in a variety of ways.

Some contact the local media, some file complaints via the BBB, some open Paypal disputes, and some threaten legal action. The media is unresponsive, and the BBB efforts are mostly fruitless.  Artists do manage to put their Paypal account on hold, but this doesn’t seem to have been as impactful as we might have hoped.

There were at least two artists who seemed pretty serious about their want of pursuing legal action, but there haven’t been any updates on that that I’ve heard. Some thought the illegal volunteers thing would surely get Aki Con shut down, but that isn’t that easy either. The problem, of course, is that legal action takes a lot of time, money, and effort, and for all our frustrations, it’s far easier to just accept our losses and move on from it. This about sums it up.

We made a big stink, we spread the word to as many other artists as we can, we decide amongst ourselves to boycott Aki Con, but in the end… our noise is just noise. Aki Con staff has made it more than clear that our concerns mean nothing to them, that they will admit to doing nothing wrong, and that are completely uninterested in bettering their convention based on others’ feedback. This will be swept under the rug, like their 2009 problems were, and there will still be enough people ignorant of the whole ordeal to buy tickets to the next Aki Con.

Three Months Later

Aki Con recently relaunched their site for 2013. They’re moving from Bellevue to Seatac, and have apparently decided to include a weekend badge with AA table purchases. Other than that, nothing really seems to have changed. There has been no word from staff since November. They want to pretend that everything was fine, and the fallout was just a bunch of liars and trolls, a bunch of ungrateful artists who are never happy, and who can’t be satisfied. They don’t need artists. It’s whatever to them.

The new hotel this year probably means there will not be a parking garage involved. This will automatically address a lot of the problems with Aki Con in 2012, but as there’s no indication that staff has actually learned its lesson, who’s to say some other disaster isn’t waiting to happen?

I’m really hoping that artists will stick to their guns and decide not to go. I’m really hoping that dealers also remember well their crappy experience and decide not to go too. Dealers were, unsurprisingly, a lot less vocal online, but they did just as poorly as we, and are surely just as irritated about the whole ordeal? I know many dealers talk to each other and share information the way we artists try to do, so here’s to hoping. Artist Alley is treated like an incidental bonus thing at most conventions; no one comes looking for us, though they enjoy it when we’re there. The Dealer’s Room, however, is a main attraction. Dealers deciding to boycott would hurt Aki Con far more than artists. Here’s to hoping, but who knows.

Loki, to end this report with a nice picture at least.

So yeah, that was Aki Con. It was poorly organized convention run by some very immature people. I will not be going back, and I hope you won’t ever go either. I maintain that the con could very easily be a good one, but staff’s attitude has to do a complete 180 for that to happen.

As one artist said,

I wasn’t even angry after the con. If they had just said, “Sorry, our bad, this was really a dumb idea. We’ll make sure things are different next year”, I’d have let it go at that.

But that’s not how they chose to handle it, and with the publication of this report, I am 100% done with this awful con.

Kinokuniya has test pens you can play around with for most of the pens and pencils they sell, so I knew after a few lines that neither of these are really suited for drawing. Aside from my random stints in typography and lettering, which these pens are also not especially suited for, I don’t do a lot of actual pen-on-paper writing… I think the only stuff I write on a regular basis is to-do lists, and I have a dozen cheap Bic pens that are more than suitable for that.

But fountain pens look and feel so neat. And…I-I really can’t think of another excuse. I knew I didn’t need these pens, and I  knew they would be cheaper on Jetpens even if I did, but will power and logic only get you so far when you’re already holding the thing in your hands.

You can tell from the nib that these aren’t for drawing. No flexibility for line widths.

The Pilot Varsity is a “disposable” fountain pen — it doesn’t give you access to the ink reservoir and there’s no capacity for refilling. Kind of kills the customization aspect of fountain pens, but hey, it’s three bucks — real fountain pens will run you $30+ easy. I love my office supplies, and my pen addiction is getting progressively worse, but I am still far from being any sort of pen expert, so my first impression of the Varsity is that it is a pretty ordinary-looking pen. The fatness and slickness of design gives it away as something more than your average ballpoint, but it’s still a pen that someone wouldn’t think twice about swiping off your desk at the office.

The Platinum Preppy, meanwhile, is a fountain pen refillable with ink cartridges, similar to the Pentel and Kuretake brush pens, but it still manages to be pretty cheap (Kinokuniya had them for $4.25, but Jetpens has them for $3.30). The see-through body and cap means you can’t mistake it for a ballpoint or gel pen, but the plastic is so light-weight and cheap-feeling that it also doesn’t seem especially fancy either. In fact, several of the reviews on Jetpens complain that the Preppy’s body is so fragile, it won’t last more than a few months. For me, that remains to be seen, but I don’t think I’ve ever been rough enough on any of my pens that their bodies break… o_o

Truthfully, the whole fountain pen thing feels a little pretentious to me (personally) right now since I’ve always been kind of utilitarian about my supplies; why do I need fancy pens if all I’m gonna do with them is write to-do lists? But neither of these pens is a status symbol, that’s for sure. They’re far too cheap! But let’s see how they write.

Black is Pilot Varsity; blue is Platinum Preppy. Obviously.

The Pilot Varsity is pretty awesome. Writing with it makes me feel fancy. The way the ink collects and looks darker on certain parts of my words and letters makes me feel fancy. The ink flow is good, and while the ink is pretty wet, it dries quickly enough that smudging isn’t really an issue. I forgot to test for it until after I already scanned these writing samples, but the ink in the Varsity is Copic-proof and doesn’t smear at when colored over by markers. However, it is not waterproof and runs like a river if painted over in watercolors.

The Preppy has a scratchier nib and it seems to take a little while to get the ink flowing initially — “a while” is usually a word or two, but a few times it took long enough that I was worried the ink was clogged or something. Once the ink gets going though, the flow is pretty good. I got this pen with blue ink, but even considering that, the ink seems to be lighter and more washed out and transparent. This makes the ink-pooling effect on writing more obvious in the scan above, but it also adds to making the pen feel cheaply put together. On the bright side though, in addition to being Copic-proof, the Preppy’s ink is kind of waterproof. Once the ink dries, it doesn’t smear much when faced with water.

After letting the writing sample sit for a good half hour, I let a huge droplet of water sit on the paper for about five minutes. While the Varsity’s writing looked like it had been half-erased by the water, the Preppy’s kind of just…faded a little. But the words were still in place. No runs. I did the test again with less than a minute of drying time for the ink and the Preppy’s sample smeared a lot more then, but it was still better than the Varsity, which had its writing all but erased.

Additional writing samples. (I think these lyrics are inaccurate; I was quoting from memory.)

All in all, I think these are both pretty nice pens for a first foray into fountain pens. The Varsity gets the fancy feeling of fountain pens down nicely while the Preppy gets the refillable part, and they’re both still around the same price as lot of “ordinary” ballpoint or gel pens. We’ll see if the budding want for fanciness and refillableness together in one pen gets me to spring for a nicer fountain pen in the future…

I am most curious about fountain pens with nibs more suitable for drawing/inking though. I had a Copic Drawing Pen that I used for a little while before misplacing it somewhere in the whirlwind of summer conventions. I remember liking it, but it still didn’t have the amount of line variation necessary for me to consider it as useful as actual crow quills. I also had a Tachikawa fountain pen, which was technically my first fountain pen, but the ink flow issues in that thing rendered it useless pretty quickly. I am also interested in playing around with pens more suitable for calligraphy…hmm.

Pens, man. They are awesome and I want more.

So I guess this is my new most successful year ever, trumping last year’s awesome. I wrote 50% more than usual, I still finished roughly two days ahead of time, and for once, I actually finished the story — I didn’t just meet the word goal! And this was my fifth win in ten years of NaNoWriMo, making my win rate a nice, even 50%. Not bad. Not bad at all. I should feel good about this year, and I do, but somehow this still feels like a muted victory.

I think mostly I’m just tired. It has been a long last couple of months and I was already feeling pretty burnt out at the end of October. But skipping NaNoWriMo is never an option, and I had decided months ago that I was gonna gun for 75k this year, so it was a done deal. @mefloraine agreed to go for 75k with me, but I got destroyed in our second annual ~*Death Match*~.

That’s a downer too, but I’m not mad because despite obvious differences in free time and motivation this year, the rivalry still helped spur me to write, and there were plenty of days where I’m pretty sure the only reason I wrote at all was in indignant attempts to catch up. It never happened though. Because of time zone differences, Mef had a three hour head start on the 1st, got ahead, and stayed well ahead all month. But she was a really good sport about kicking my ass — better than I’d have been if our positions were reversed, lol, so there’s nothing to be mad about. I’ll get her back next year when I hope she gets assigned more homework during November because clearly she doesn’t have enough to do!

I think another reason this year’s victory feels a little subdued is because I’m already have about a billion doubts about what I just wrote. Usually the triumph of actually hitting the word goal is enough to eclipse this, but after four previous wins, I knew I could hit at least 50,000 words, work schedule be damned, and after writing 10k words over the weekend, I knew I would be able to hit 75,000, too. So with the quantitative aspect no longer personally impressive, it comes back down to quality…

For one reason or another, I decided to tackle another slice of the old Lehelle project this year. It’s one of those cumbersome stories you make up in high school and can’t seem to ever let go of, even ten years later. You might remember that something with the same title was my 2010 NaNoWriMo project. But everything I wrote in 2010 is no longer canon! Whoops. I have actually thought and worked a lot on the project since 2010, though none of it involved actually ever finishing or editing my manuscript. Instead, I’ve been rearranging world elements, rethinking plots, and restructuring things in general. Again. I basically end up doing this every few years, but I think I’ve been getting more obsessive about it lately… <_< 2011′s NaNoWriMo was my attempt to flesh out more of the same world without fixating on the same characters, but I went back to them this year.

I recently realized that the project is probably a trilogy, and what I wrote in 2010 was the third part. This year, I wrote the second part. For ease of discussion, it’s been arbitrarily titled Here Comes the Rain. Since the project and characters are so old, I had a ton of reference material for the story, including a brand new thousand word outline. But still, November got off to a rough start. Biggest downside of (re)writing a story that is ten years old, but which changes every year, and which you’ve technically written and rewritten about four times already? Overthinking absolutely everything. And all the insecurities that led to ten years of rewrites in the first place are compounded.

Generated by Wordle.net.

And yet, I was still compulsive enough to derail completely from the outline around 20k words. I rewrote the middle part of the outline to account for this. Then I deviated from that. I amended the outline a second time, only to immediately disregarded that too. And then I just kind of gave up trying to plan anything because I don’t even know anymore, man. This story has never listened to me, really.

But I kept writing.

And for the first time, I kept a list of things I wanted to change later. Why I never did this, I have no idea, but it made me feel a lot better about moving forward because I knew I would come back to fix things later. And I will. I say every year that I’m going to finish my stupid manuscript post-NaNo and edit it, and then I never do, but this year I’ve finished the damn story already and I have a (very long and intimidating) list of things to add/change/edit, and goddammit, I will have some kind of rewrite/edited draft before next November. I will.

I hit 50k on the 22nd, the same day I hit it last year, so I guess that’s a thing now? I bought my winner’s shirt. It’s the first new NaNo shirt I’ve gotten since 2009. I didn’t win in 2010, and I really kind of hated 2011′s shirt(s). It’s also the first time I’ve gotten the actual winner’s shirt instead of the generic year shirt. I just liked the design better this time. :O

The next ~20k words were a lot easier for some reason. Mef hit 75k on Monday, the 26th. My story was finished around 72.5k words, and I thought about just stopping, but then I wrote some random drabbles and something maybe resembling an epilogue except not really because it should really just segway into the last part of the trilogy. At 4am on the 29th, my final word count was 75013. And I think the manuscript should still be around 75k even when I go back through it; while there are a lot of bits that’ll likely get axed, there are an equal number of scenes that I’ll probably end up adding. We’ll see.

But yeah! Goal met. Story done. Bloody tired and feeling all kinds of mehhhh about what I’ve written, but whatever! I’m going shelve the draft until January, but I doubt I’ll be able to stop thinking about it regardless. I mean, I draw the characters from it all the damn time and have been for forever. u_u Next year, I will edit this thing.

REALLY. I WILL. ;___;

Art commissioned from Deborah.

Spoiler: Turns out the scene depicted above doesn’t actually happen.

For now.

<_<

I spent most of August totally burnt out from Otakon and most of September was a fervor of unreasonable work deadlines, so other than some half-hearted recounting/verification of inventory, I did pretty much nothing to prepare for JCCS. I really didn’t know what to expect anyway. Other than what’s on their website, I couldn’t find much about the show online. I actually thought it was a first-year show because of the lack of general information, but 2012 is apparently JCCS’s third year. No details (especially regarding attendance) is usually a cause for concern for worryworts like me, but JCCS was such a low-risk venture as a local (especially coming on the heels of Otakon) that I really didn’t think much on it.

It’s whatever! Let’s just go and have fun or something, geez.

Shockingly, I did not see a single Loki cosplayer this entire show.

This report is a relatively manageable 1,853 words.

The show’s public hours are from 10am to 6pm, exactly an eight hour day, though exhibitor setup started at 7am. My roommate was nice enough to drive and drop me off at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall at roughly 7:45am. The show occupied what I guess could be considered the basement level of the building, though because of the hill, the lower level was not actually underground. There were two wide flights of stairs leading down from the street level, but thankfully, the entrance was also handicap accessible so I could roll my two suitcases down a crazy spiral ramp to get to the doors. There were 3-4 staffers at a table checking people in. Check in was a very quick and painless process, though it always kind of makes me nervous when they don’t ask for ID. <_< I could be anyone, man! My Artist Alley table came with two badges and two lanyards, but no event program (sigh).

Probably half the exhibitors were there when I arrived, but there were only a handful of other artists. The single-room show floor was almost entirely vendor booths and tables. I think there were panel rooms at the top of a staircase, but I never actually went to look. It took me over an hour to set up, mostly because of the eight foot table, but I’m not complaining. Chatted with a few artists in that time, but while more and more dealers were showing up and setting up, most artists seemed to be taking their damn sweet time? A shame, as I’m usually more inclined to browse artist stuff.

I love eight foot tables.

I had less than an hour between finishing setup and the doors opening, but it was a small enough space that I got to make my way through the dealers’ area several times. At least two people mistook the parody tokidoki/Loki shirt I made for myself as a real one, including a dealer selling actual tokidoki shirts. :O In talking with a movie poster vendor, I found out that the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin apparently commissions artists to make these really freakin’ awesome limited edition posters for various movies they screen… why did I never know about this? I wish I’d gone to the Drafthouse more when I had the chance. The guy had Iron Man 2 and Akira posters, among other things, but being out-of-print and enormous, they were pretty pricey.

In the final minutes before show time, I snagged Funko Pop vinyl figures of Batman and Iron Man ’cause hey, two for $10! That is a fine deal, I say, and that might have been the most exciting part of the day for me.

Dealers setting up

The morning was slow. A glance across the room at any given time showed far more vendors milling around than actual attendees. It was easy to tell when they came up to my table because only vendors had badges — since it’s a one day show, all attendees just got wrist bands. It was almost an hour before I made my first sale (to another artist). Because sitting idly always makes me sleepy, I kept myself entertained by doodling and wrestling with the terrible cell reception, which was, shockingly, even worse than it was at the Baltimore Convention Center. It was so bad I couldn’t even send or receive text messages, much less think about doing anything fancy like checking email or getting Square to work. T-mobile really isn’t the best of carriers to begin with but come on — we’re in the middle of downtown Seattle and we’re not underground — what’s the deal? :|

Hawkeye~

As with most comic cons I’ve attended, the percentage of people cosplaying was much lower than at anime cons, and with JCCS’s sparse attendance, that meant not very many cosplayers at all. Most were kids under ten in store-bought costumes (I’m getting the impression that there isn’t an officially licensed kid-sized Loki costume — WHY NOT??), but here and there there were still some pretty impressive ones, like that Hawkeye. :O And this Phoenix.

You know, I don’t actually know that much about Phoenix outside of the crappy X-men film trilogy finale. I am a bad comics grad.

The very small and sad-looking platform which was to serve as the stage for JCCS’s two costume contests was right in front of my table, and watching them more or less confirmed the small overall attendance of the show with a very tiny number of contest participants. The first contest was a general one, I think, and I’m not really sure if anyone actually won or if it was just a chance for everyone to take pictures?? The second one was steampunk-themed, and surprisingly, I think there were more entrants to that show? Never really knew what was going on though.

People watching one of two very small costume contests.

In the afternoon, things picked up ever so slightly and I got to do a small handful of commissions, including a pony OC for Jer from SICAGA, who was running a group booth in the dealer’s area. Also did three commissions, including another pony OC, for a really sweet cosplayer, though I wasn’t familiar with the character she was cosplaying. I’ve lost count of how many ponies I’ve drawn between A-kon and now, but they’re still stupidly fun and I’m far from being sick of them. <3 Bring me all your pony OCs, guys. I want to draw all of themmmm. (Season three starts soon, wee~!)

Those commissions were really the only exciting part of the afternoon though. By 4pm, with still two hours to go, it was painfully obvious that there really wasn’t much going on. About half the people wandering around were vendors, and the other half were attendees that had been there most of the day and who were clearly done shopping. And so, I eventually just got up to make my own rounds of the Artist Alley — this hasn’t happened in a long, long time. I was able to keep my table in my line of sight most of the time to keep an eye on it, but for the most part, I was confident my neighbors and fellow vendors weren’t gonna steal my prints, and there seriously weren’t many attendees around at all.

Everypony I’ll soon control, every stallion, mare, and foal~. :O

Honestly, it’s a damn shame that there weren’t many attendees at JCCS because there were a lot of nice artists and vendors. Claire Hummel (Shoomlah), Natalie Nourigat, and Erika Moen were there. There was a good mix of artists who’ve done work-for-hire gigs for large companies, indie artists and webcomic artists with nice-looking books, and illustrators and general artists. Everyone was pleasant to talk to and the consensus across the board was that the show was well-attended by vendors, but not so much for anyone else… was it a lack of advertising or what? I suppose word on a new show travels faster amongst convention vendors than amongst the general populace? But if JCCS is in its third year already, how were the previous years? Were they better attended? At the very least, they can’t have gone too poorly. No word on a con is much better than a negative word for sure.

I traded a colored chibi Hulk to this guy for a nifty ink drawing of Loki, picked up an ACEO of the Tenth Doctor from the guy manning the Comicsmith’s Guild table, got a neat poster from Mark Monlux, grabbed a handful of business cards, and then it was pretty much time to go. A pretty muted ending to the day, but I guess it’s good I got to chat with some people instead of being tied down to the table the whole time.

And not a single weeaboo item to be found. :O

I don’t really think I’m disappointed with how JCCS went, but it was still kind of frustrating? It wasn’t a bad show at all, but it definitely has the potential to be better. I liked the location a lot; the layout of things was good; the staff were all really nice, and the whole thing was well put together… there just weren’t many people there, which is really pretty surprising as a one day show in the middle of a large city. The only numbers I could find are from JCCS 2010, which had a “projected” attendance of 2000, but I don’t believe that for a minute. Presumably, JCCS did not shrink between 2010 and 2012 because when was the last time you heard of any show shrinking? And there definitely weren’t 2000 people at JCCS 2012.

My perception of numbers isn’t usually that great, but I have a lot of other conventions to compare to. EXPCon 2009 was a painfully slow three-day anime con in St. Augustine, FL — they had an official attendance of 2,200. Anime Overload 2 and 3 had ~800 and ~1000 attendees respectively and both shows were pretty casual/relaxed. The slowest convention I’ve ever been to was Delta H Con 2010, which had an astounding 285 attendees over three days. There was also STAPLE! 2011, which is probably the closest to JCCS genre-wise, and they had roughly 300 people over two days? I’d peg JCCS’s activity levels as better than both Delta H and STAPLE!, but lower than EXPCon and AO, so I think ~500 is probably a reasonable attendance guesstimate. And ~500 isn’t bad for a show that was definitely very comics-focused and low-key. It seems that most attendees enjoyed this and benefited from the lack of crowds and chaos.

In any case, I’ll definitely be back. Even if it could probably do with some more advertising, the show was well-organized, the staff was responsive, and the atmosphere was positive. Also: I really like one-day shows and think there should be more of them in general. Besides, JCCS is so damn close and convenient, I can’t really think of a reason not to go back. If it’s slow again on the attendee side, I think that just means I need to spend more time actually talking to other artists and making friends or something. <_< I’m still pretty bad at that.