I’ve attended Anime NYC before as a regular guest while I was in college, and as an artist in the Artist’s Alley back in 2019, but this is the first time I’ve been able to attend with a fancy little press badge around my neck! So I was pretty excited.
Even before the convention started, I was impressed by the pre-registration lottery system for attending popular panels that ensured any interested fan had a fair shot at getting a seat at one of those special panels. I was lucky enough to win the lottery for several of those, and my two days at the con ended up being almost entirely filled by attending panels with a quick skim of the show floor in between. (Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend on Friday at all due to work.) But here’s how Saturday and Sunday went for me!
Saturday
When I got to the convention I got to use a special entrance for Press/Pros/Accessibility and skip the long line, which was amazingly convenient. Check-in went fairly smoothly and I was also impressed by the diligence of the health check process and insistence on masking: there were a lot of reminders of masks being mandatory up around the con center and I’d put the average rate of people masking at around 60-70%? This is very high compared to the last con I attended, CXC in Ohio, where masks were optional and maybe a quarter of attendees wore them.
I made a beeline for one specific table in the Artist’s Alley that was selling enamel pins based on classic Vocaloid songs, which I saw on Twitter months ago and have been waiting to purchase ever since. I stuffed my surprisingly expensive small items into my bag and ran through the rest of AA, not really in a mood to shop but more to see what people were selling and what was trending these days. Enamel pins were still going strong, riso prints, hot pink tote bags. A lot of Chainsaw Man fanart, unsurprisingly, and a decent amount of Spy x Family stuff. Less Mob Psycho than I expected. And then I had to go try to catch my first panel of the day: the Yen Press Industry panel!
I had to leave early to make the Spy x Family panel and screening, but! I did see most of it! Yen Press announced several new licenses (including the manga adaptation of Thai drama Manner of Death, an announcement that was extremely exciting for me but literally no one else in the room), and introduced TurtleMe, the creator of Tapas web serial novel The Beginning After the End. Other exciting announcements include a sketch collection from Kaoru Mori (of Emma and Bride Story fame), Higurashi reprints, a new series called Magical Girl Incident about a salaryman who turns into a magical girl, and a box set of Toilet-bound Hanako-kun shaped like the toilet stall Hanako is bound to. They were about to announce stuff for their Ize imprint focused on Korean comics when I had to duck out and get in line for Spy x Family!
SpyFam was underwhelming. The panel was supposed to go from 2:00 to 3:00, but it ended at 2:30, leaving a room full of fans to exclaim “What? That’s it?” The Q+A portion with George Wada of WIT Studio was also frustrating as he wouldn’t give direct answers to simple questions, responding to “What’s it like collaborating with CloverWorks on Spy x Family?” with “Collaboration helps us bring you high-quality animation faster!” Panel attendees got to see the first half of next week’s episode 8 a full week early, which was exciting, but I was expecting more.
The reserve ticket lottery system did make waiting for this panel to start much more convenient and orderly than I’d been expecting a con panel line to be, and other than this panel ending so much earlier than expected, I didn’t find myself frustrated with the waiting times for panels. Although I did keep getting lost trying to find panel rooms. That one’s probably on me and my terrible sense of direction, though.
Luckily, the panel ending early gave me a bit of time to wolf down a ridiculously overpriced lunch and buy a sweater from the Kinwa Monster booth in the exhibitor’s hall before heading to the Dark Horse industry panel. Which was very different from the Yen Press industry panel, focusing more on the history of Dark Horse Manga as an imprint and manga and comics publishing in the US and Japan in general. Carl Horn was presenting with translator Zack Davisson, and the two of them had a lot of interesting anecdotes about the history of the company and their work with manga in it. I learned the creator of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt drew Umbrella Academy doujinshi, for example! I got the sense that DHM’s lineup is very thoughtfully curated to fit their company vibe and aesthetic, which is how they have so many interesting, offbeat titles like Mob Psycho 100 and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! New releases announced include Innocent by Shin’ichi Sakamoto and an omnibus edition of Corpse Delivery Service which I had not previously heard of but looks extremely cool. And then I had to leave early again, this time for Kaguya-sama: Love is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends- !
The Kaguya-sama panel was awesome. No other words for it. Aoi Koga, voice of Kaguya Shinomiya herself, made an appearance, as did producers Tatsuya Ishikawa and Yuichiro Kikuchi. The rest of the main cast and the original manga creator Aka Akasaka all sent in video messages answering questions about the new movie, the series as a whole, and what they hoped their costar was enjoying in NYC. Everyone seemed excited to be there and talk about the show. The Aniplex rep moderating the panel presented Aoi Koga with a Stanford sweatshirt to represent her character’s decision to go to Stanford at the end of the last season. And the sneak peek we got of the movie was, like the rest of the series, dramatic, romantic, and hilarious. I’m probably going to watch it in theaters.
Sunday
My Sunday was much less packed: I went to the Mob Psycho 100 panel at noon and the WIT Studio 10th Anniversary panel and live drawing at 2 and then left because the con closed at 4.
The Mob Psycho 100 panel with voice actor Setsuo Ito was pretty interesting: I learned Setsuo Ito is a fascinating man of many talents, including drawing, figure sculpting, and rhythm game playing, and that I should really catch up on the new season because I am a few episodes behind. Setsuo Ito is also an anime fan himself! When asked how any anime he’s seen, Ito replied, in English, “How many? Many many,” and held up his hands to indicate a very large amount. I still haven’t seen a statement from Crunchyroll addressing the replacement of Mob’s English dub voice actor Kyle McCarley over a disagreement regarding union contracts. I was kind of hoping they’d mention that during the panel, but nope. Unfortunately, this panel overlapped with the Kodansha industry panel so I had to skip that one and then slide in at the end to talk to their marketing rep about adding WWAC to Kodansha’s press list. And after that, WIT Studio!
The special panel for WIT’s 10th anniversary also had one of their frequent collaborators, Syo5, come to do a live coloring of a drawing of Anya and Bond as the Statue of Liberty. I was surprised to realize I am actually familiar with Syo5’s work. At the start of the panel they screened his music video for Minami’s Waiting for Rain, which I’ve watched before! I like Minami’s music. Syo5 talked about how he got his start making animated music videos for up-and-coming Japanese independent musicians, and how artists like Eve, Zutomayo and Yoasobi popularized the animated music video in recent years. The interpreter chose not to translate that literally because “you guys probably haven’t heard of Eve” and then the audience loudly protested that yes, we love Eve. I wished I’d worn my Eve sweatshirt on Sunday instead of Saturday.
Anyway, the panel discussed WIT’s work, past present and future, and even allowed audience questions for some of it! I did not get to ask a question, but there was a life-size Anya cosplayer whose dad held her up to the microphone so she could ask George Wada what his favorite anime was. He said Spy x Family and gave her a WIT Studio art book. There was also a Shinji Ikari cosplayer who asked an incredibly specific technical question about doing low-angle pans in animation, and I just really appreciated that on a conceptual level. The panel ended with a sneak peek at the trailer for Moonrise, coming out on Netflix in 2024 and featuring character designs and story development by Hiromu Arakawa herself (of Fullmetal Alchemist fame). I am definitely curious about that one!
Overall, I had a pretty nice time.
