Cosplay in America

From Kevin Lillard's AWA 2000 con report:

These conventions are special because of the people who attend them, and nothing drove that point home more than when the author took a Sunday evening stroll through the area where Anime Weekend Atlanta had been held. In place where crowds of fans had gathered were now empty tables, blank spaces and bins full of trash. All of the life that had been generated over the weekend was gone; it was a lonely feeling to see the area after it had been drained of the convention's energy.

That feeling didn't last long, though. A chance meeting with a costumer in the lobby who wanted to see this page's pictures led to a nighttime dinner trip with a group of friends from the U.S. and Japan. That fellowship over food brought back the point that anime fandom grows and anime conventions thrive because of the wonderful people who attend these events. The videos and dealer rooms help to make the show, but the conventions would be nothing without the enthusiasm of thousands of fans. There's always a huge difference between the animosity and anger often seen online, and the joy expressed by the people who climb from behind their keyboards and travel to the events. The worst thing about the conventions is that they have to end and the real world beckons, all too soon.

1993-1994: Birth of a Convention
by Mitch Hagmaier

It all began when the Penn State Science Fiction Society sent a contingent of fans to I-Con on Long Island in the spring of 1993 to attend a mini-con that had been organized by various elements of New Jersey and New York fandom called Chibicon. Some of the contingent thought the con, while fun, could have been a lot better, Dave Asher & Todd Dissinger among them. On the 5-hour drive back to State College, PA, they uttered the words from which OTAKON was born: "We can do better than that!"

Dave and Todd came back from Long Island with delusions of competency. While I, personally, didn't take them seriously until September of that year, by June they had announced the con on rec.arts.anime, and I figured it was time somebody got to work. I had been in Pittsburgh during the summer, so I wasn't in on the planning until I moved into Quest Labs in August of ‘93. For the uninitiated, Quest Labs was a fan haven, a space for people to "play otaku like a pan flute". I remember a lot of long looong loooooong bull sessions that we called 'OTAKON Meetings': guys scattered across a townhouse living room, reclining on a variable number of chairs and decrepit sofas rescued from their certain fate as landfill. There were, on average, six people at these meetings: Dave, Todd, Bill Johnston, and me--the Founding Four as Dave calls it--as well as a couple of our other early staffers: Andy Popovic in harsh Goth black, 'Crazy' Kevin Chen, Chris Napoleon, or John 'Nadz' Nadzam.

In those long meetings, we hashed out a number of principles. First and foremost was that we were poor college students, and we were not in a situation to lose a lot of money, as so many cons do. We figured we could get at least 100 people, so we set a preliminary budget of $2400. We decided that we couldn't afford to get Japanese guests our first year. We wouldn't go for more than the one GoH we already had. OTAKON would be a fan con--no pretensions to industry leadership or any such nonsense. Bill had this utopian vision of a 'big picnic', where everybody contributed their part to the party, even if it was just to pay their membership dues. Thus, OTAKON never had attendees--we've always had members.

It was decided we would run in State College proper. After all, we lived here, and it was relatively central to a number of concentrations of fans: Pittsburgh, New York/New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC were all about a 3-3.5 hour drive. The Penn State Science Fiction Society was to have nothing organizationally to do with the con. Bill and Doug Beck remembered well enough what had happened the last time that PSSFS had run a convention. Everyone conveniently ignored the fact that the staff was composed entirely and exclusively of PSSFS officers, members, and alumni. After all, they were the only ones who heard of OTAKON back then. Besides, if you can’t exploit your friends, who can you exploit? ^_^

Bill was made con chair, because he dealt with the hotel. He had gotten a really solid deal with the Days Inn Penn State: free facilities if we filled out a modest room block. Bill had known of the hotel from when PSSFS had used it for their disastrous SF convention in 1987, Hostigos. We had a collection of discussion-calibre guests--nobody high-maintenance, just hard talkers, story-tellers, people who were fans, people who were CHEAP. We organized a music video contest, and Bill programmed a brilliant two-track video schedule, fed out of three years accumulation of the finest of the early fansubtitles, and the best of the professional subs available in 1994. As I remember, we were sent the first, rather ill-received Bubblegum Crisis dub at the last minute by AnimEigo. That first year, we established our video-room personality: carefully scheduled material, so that the equipment was not overstressed and there was sufficient buffer space between blocks so that technical problems did not result in cascading schedule disasters. Matt Pyson ran video ops at the convention proper--and did a proper level-headed job of it. Our game show was ruthlessly underequipped: no fancy computerized nonsense that broke down and bungled the schedule, just a buzzer system, file cards, and Todd supplied the bombastic persona necessary for a good game show host.

The Days Inn Penn State had an almost perfect layout for a small first-year convention. A large atrium fronted a modest ballroom, easily divided into four rooms. Registration, Ops, and everything else was run from a set of tables facing the doorways that led to the con suite, while the rest of the panel space, video gaming, and the artshow stretched down a hallway across from the hotel front desk. You could see the entire con from ops/registration. We ran video ops out of a box. We were determined to run our convention on time and under budget.

There one department with which there were endless problems was dealers (my department), as State College had ancient, creaking, anachronistic vendor statutes that strongly discouraged all the dealers we approached. It certainly didn't help matters that the louts would rather prefer to go to an established west-coast convention like Anime America '94 (which we ran the same weekend as us that year). How were they to know that our little hillbilly con in the depths of Appalachia would someday grow to be the monster that it is today? Planet Anime guessed. So did JAM Group (although JAM Group's prescience didn't keep them from closing their doors in 1996). Unfortunately, neither of them showed up as the time came to open the dealers room, and with a half hour to open the doors, I found that I couldn't get through the crush of otaku waiting patiently before the dealers room doors. The line now seems small in comparison with the great pulsing hordes of later years - but in that small space, a constricted foyer between the dealers room and the entrance to the con suite, fifty seemed to be a multitude. As the time ticked down, I must admit I broke and ran, dashing down to the Borough office to file some last-minute paperwork for the two missing dealers (would you believe that the local police insisted each vendor file mug shots of themselves?). The scheduled time came and we opened, with only the local comix dealer present and ready to go. Two of the three dealers weren't there! doors opened on schedule, and the tidal wave swept into what later became known as "The Dealers' Closet". Just before the first otaku could complain, "this is it?" and thus begin the lynching, JAM Group arrived! So I slammed a table across the front of the dealers' closet, penning the excited otaku inside like cattle in a stall, while dealers, dealers' assistants, and our security goons swiftly lugged JAM Group's merchandise into the overheated little room. Saved! Everybody agreed that though the closet was small, at least there was something for everyone--including more manga for sale than would be seen at an East Coast con for another two years.

During planning gaming had grown from a typical SF-style board-gaming room into a small video-gaming room, complete with a few, well-chosen anime-style SNES games. It went over impressively--that tiny little room, smaller than the dealers' closet by half, was crowded wall-to-wall throughout the weekend. Naoki Hirata, the video gaming drone, quickly grew tired of the stench of too many otaku in too tight a place. He made us swear that he would never have to do *that* again. Art show was respectable for the size of crowd that we got - Crystal Gronnestad sent some material from Alaska, and a bunch of members brought stuff, or mailed it in. It opened ON SCHEDULE! even though we had to throw half the available staff at it, drilling and screwing together the art flats borrowed from Disclave via Balticon. Andy Popovic ran Art Show at the convention, although Bill managed things beforehand. The music video contest was probably the best success of the con - full house, and every single one of them cheering the dozen or so videos we had got in. Tom McMullan, an old Balticon hand, never ceased muttering dazedly that a fan convention just did not run in the black, it's first year out.

The con had been a financial success - we had budgeted for 150 members, and planned for 400. We got roughly 360. The one miscalculation was that our estimate of the expected food consumption rates of your garden-variety otaku was off-base--we ended up with about thirty cases soda and about a dozen crates of discounted chips left over after the convention. The con had more than paid for itself--that scary rental fee for the video equipment (almost 25% of the con’s budget) that had frightened me so much was a drop in the barrel--no sweat! God, were we ecstatic in the aftermath of that con weekend. We had told each other so many horrible stories of the last con in State College that the reality had been sweet relief! After the con, the staff and some hangers-on went to eat dinner at a local Chinese restaurant -- now a tired, horribly bloated tradition.

We BS’ed that sweltering summer night away, sitting out on the porch, guzzling leftover sodapop and getting a little high on the fumes billowing out of Quest Labs, which had been painted while we were running the convention. We wanted to do this again, dammit! Dave at this point had developed serious ambitions--he wanted OTAKON to become the largest con in the country! He had AnimeExpo in his sights! I knew in my guts that we could do this thing again--it had been a gas, a continuous adrenaline high from the week before the convention, slaving over the last-minute administrative details and purchasing, to the constant running during the con itself. I had arranged a cheaper ticket for Planet Anime to fly into Harrisburg rather than State College proper--and then promised to come pick them up on the evening of the Friday of the convention. This was a two-hour drive, both ways, while the convention was running. I loved it! OTAKON'94 was like a deathly addictive drug--and we were all hooked.

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The article was posted online in 2000 on Otakon's website accessible throw web.archive.org. There is an article for each year of the first 5 years. https://web.archive.org/web/19990423144302/http://otakon.com/history.html