COMICS CULTURE SHRAPNEL from CBEM 329

Conventions and My Finances

I woke up feeling incredibly nauseous this morning, due to the fact that tonight I will board a bus to Baltimore to attend this year's Otakon. I'm not nervous about the convention itself, but rather the insane amounts of money I'm spending on it. At least it's only a bus ride away, rather than me spending money on a plane ticket to Chicago or San Diego. That's the dream for next year, hopefully enabled by generous graduation gifts.

I'm not a major anime freak. I don't really own any fansubs, with the exception of a set of Fushigi Yugi tapes handed down from a friend who bought the DVD's. I don't even have that many commercial videos, except for Serial Experiments Lain. So maybe I'm a bigger fan than I'd like to admit. I have a complete set of Battle Angel manga and am currently working on getting all the Eagle books. And I'm sure that at the convention, a good chunk of my funds will be whittled away by all the doujinshi I'm going to buy.

Because that's the only thing I need to buy, since I live in New York. I don't need to buy toys or videos or manga because I can just buy them here in the city. Stores across the country really need to expand their selection and carry more anime and manga. That, or all of you Nippon fans should just move here. Price gouging is an ugly thing that so many fans become victim to at cons. But the dealer's room is the reason many fans go to cons.

Maybe that's yet another reason they don't have conventions here in NYC. The organizers can't make a killing on the dealer's room when the con-goers could just walk a few blocks and get the same items at a much better price. That's just an additional stumbling block, because the main reason you won't find conventions in the city is because con space is too damn expensive. So move to Brooklyn, I say. Space is cheaper and my commute would be much easier.

Supposedly Anime Expo is going to expand its operations to New York, but general consensus is that they will fail miserably. The AX management failed to get reasonable hotel rates, a sure-fire way to kill a convention in a genre largely populated by high school and college students. This is not a group known for their massive wealth.

I know this personally, having yet one more year to go toward my bachelor's degree. I can't afford to even go to this con. But I am going, because I'm sick of being controlled by my finances. Am I stupid? Yes. Am I a fan? Yeah.

(Next week's column should be an Otakon report, assuming I don't go screaming from the Port Authority just as I'm about to board the bus.)