KotoriCon Anime Festival: Reviewing the New Jersey Convention

The first thing I noticed when we got the KotoriCon was that I was woefully under-dressed. When my daughter and I attended the New York Comic Con in October, maybe a third of the people attending were cosplayers dressed as a character.

At Kotoricon, it looked like about 80 percent of everyone attending was dressed as some sort of anime, manga, sci-fi or fantasy creature. There were leprechauns, barbarians, steampunk characters and much more, but unfortunately I am not all that familiar with anime so I can't provide specifics. I do know a number of people dressed as the countries in Hetalia, a cartoon in which each of World War II's participants are given pretty silly personalities.

And because the weather was unseasonably warm, people were able to flit between the three buildings were the activities and panels were happening without having to put coats over their costumes, which made the day a lot more fun for everyone!

There were dozens of panels, including how to make anime, finding a job in the anime world, designing cosplay costumes and a discussion on the British television series Dr. Who. (Someone told me that a participant suggested Justin Bieber as the next Dr. Who. Somehow I don't see that happening!)

There were at least two rooms dedicated to showing anime films, as well as dealers and a video game room.

It's hard to believe that someone hasn't come across anime at some point, considering the worldwide success of Pokemon. Still, people may not be aware that anime is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation." The term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons. The characteristic anime style developed in the 1960s, and became known outside Japan in the 1980s.
For more information on anime, see the Wikipedia entry here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anime

One panel I attended was called ''What is LARP?'' I discovered the answer is ''Live Action Role-Playing,'' in which people dress in costumes and act out characters that they have developed.

The panel was held by members of Seventh Kingdom IGE, a group that runs LARP games in southern New Jersey.

Tara Clapper, a Seventh Kingdom member, explained that there were many types of LARPs, ranging from medieval/fantasy worlds to military and sci-fi. Another panelist said zombie LARPs have become popular recently as well.

What happens at a LARP? The participants will have selected their characters ahead of time and they will arrive at the LARP site to find a world will that has been developed by the organizers. The players participate in quests, battles and other actions, all within character. Clapper, for instance, sometimes likes to play a bard, so spends the LARP singing!

Some groups are as small as seven members, while others can grow to the hundreds, the panels said. They usually rent a private spot to play, as some LARPs have run into too many interruptions when trying to have fun in a public park.

The group also gave two other presentations, on how to make the costumes and weapons used in LARP

For more on LARP, click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LARP

My daughter and I stopped by the video game room several times, and that was a popular gathering place for a good number of people.

With some coaxing, my daughter enticed me to try Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which features several dozen characters from Nintendo games squaring off against each other. I never could get the hang of the game, and my daughter easily whipped me while i was playing Sonic the Hedgehog. Somehow I ended up as Princess Peach but that didn't help either. Finally one of the convention staff members volunteered to take my place and that enabled me to bow out without further harm.

Later, I tried my hand at Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, in which Marvel Comic heroes and villains fight characters from the Capcom series of video games (including Akuma, Firebrand and Dante). My daughter designated me a lawyer named Phoenix Wright, who somehow used legal papers to ward off blows from the Hulk and Captain America. I was able to beat the two Marvel superheroes, which makes me think that my daughter fiddled with the settings to make it easy for me to win.

One of the most enjoyable things about these conventions is meeting people that share your interests, and at 3 p.m. there was a ``meet-up'' of fans of Homestuck, one of the webcomics written and illustrated by Andrew Hussie. His series are considered by many to comprise the longest Web comic ever, with more than 6,000 pages. For the website, see: http://www.mspaintadventures.com/

My daughter was dressed as God Tier John Egbert, as was one other fan. But there were also a variety of trolls, including Gamzees, Karkats, Nepetas and a Terezi. And some humans named Rose and Dave.

I counted about a dozen people dressed as Homestuck characters, and once the convention ended they held a mini-rave out in the parking lot. They were dancing when we drove away that night!

I Love (kanji) Anime by PyroSwardsman
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I stepped away from all the anime to sit in on a writing discussion by CJ Henderson, a writer whose biography says has written some 70 books and hundreds of comics and short stories. He's the creator of the Piers Knight supernatural investigator series and the Teddy London occult detective stories.

To be honest, I had never heard of him, but he did have a stand with some of the books that he had written and they included some stories of Kolchak the Night Stalker from the 1970s television series and The Spider, the old pulp fiction hero.

I figured he'd talk about fantasy or sci-fi, two areas that I'm not particularly interested in.

Instead, he gave what can only be described as an hourlong pep talk to a group of would-be writers, who asked him about chapter breaks, how to describe different worlds, whether agents are worthwhile and much more. It was a very informative talk, and I suspect that a number of the students -- the crowd was mostly college age -- probably went home that night and started plugging away at their computers.

Above is a photo of Henderson at his stand.

While this was our first visit to an anime convention, we did go to the New York Anime Festival in October 2011. The festival runs concurrently with the New York Comic Con, taking over New York City's major convention center for a weekend. You can read about our visit to the anime festival in this lens.

New York Comic Con + Anime Festival: A Comic Book Fan
The New York Comic Book Convention occurred Oct. 13-16, 2011, and coupled with the New York Anime Festival, drew more than 100,000 comic-book fans, video game players and anime fanatics.

Anime Goth
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16 in. x 16 in.
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Anime Zombie by halegrafx
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Dr. Who -...



26 in. x 73 in.

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