The Washington DC area is blessed to have not one, but two anime conventions every year. The bigger one by far, of course, is Otakon, which is held in Baltimore every summer, and which I’ve attended twice. (See my report and pictures of last summer’s convention here, here, and here.) But there’s a smaller, more local convention which is held in Arlington, right off the Crystal City Metro, called Katsucon. I haven’t been to this one, even though I’d been meaning to go some time ever since I became an anime fan in 2000. Now that my weekends are relatively free, I decided to stop by Katsucon just for this afternoon and take a look, and take a few pictures.

Unfortunately, I’m still not such a great photographer, and moreover, my camera batteries began to die early on in my visit. So I don’t have that many pictures, and what I do have are not of the greatest quality. Still gotta learn how to use my digital camera effectively . . .

When I stepped off the Metro at the Crystal City station, it took a while before I began to see the characteristic signs of an anime con–cosplayers(1). Having never been to the Crystal City underground mall before, I got somewhat lost before I headed aboveground to the Marriott Gateway Hotel, where the con was being held. Once inside and registered, the sights were very familiar to me as someone who’s been through two Otakons.

Here’s a shot of the Artist Alley, which was actually the first area that I came to when I entered the con. You can see that the accomodations were much more cramped than they were at Otakon, which had the entire Baltimore Convention Center to itself. So while there were far fewer people than at Otakon, it still felt very crowded, and no doubt given anime’s booming popularity in the United States, it’s simply going to get more and more crowded every year.

Here’s a terrible shot of one of the artist booths. The most well-known comic artists present at the con were Ian and Matt from Mac Hall, who are locals. I’ve seen them in person at every anime con I’ve ever been to. The guys from Applegeeks were here too, but I didn’t get a chance to see them.

The main reason I had come to Katsucon was to visit the dealer room, where all the merchants and anime vendors come to hawk their wares. At Otakon, after the dealer room opens, you’re allowed to go in at anytime, as you basically have this gigantic convention floor to roam with dozens of merchants big and small offering everything anime and manga related you can think of. It was not so at Katsucon. They had the entire Grand Ballroom for the dealer room, but that’s much smaller than a convention floor. They would only allow a certain number of people in at a time, and so I had to wait about 15 minutes in line before I was allowed inside.

The dealer room was far smaller than Otakon’s, as I mentioned before. I could browse every booth in about 30 minutes. One thing I definitely noticed that was different about this con was the much higher proportion of fangirls–in fact I would even say the majority of the attendees in the dealer room were female. 75% of the manga being sold was shojo manga(2) and there was a lot more yaoi(3) being openly sold than at Otakon. The anime/manga fan community is becoming quite different from the rest of the nerd/sci-fi fan community in that regard, in that it can no longer be said to be entirely male dominated or oriented. I suppose for lonely geeks that’s an encouraging thought.

I hung out in the dealer room for as long as I could, since there was a wait to enter the room. Originally, I wanted to buy some manga (not anime), and maybe some artbooks, but I couldn’t find any manga that interested me and any artbooks that were worth their high price tags. So I ended up buying the Onegai Teacher! DVD box set, for a nice $40, which is a great price for a 13 episode series. (I also considered getting all of Last Exile, but that box set cost $175, far above what I was willing to pay. I’ll just wait until a discount box set comes out like it did for Onegai Teacher and Serial Experiments: Lain.)

After I finally exhausted the possibilities of the dealer room, I went to the one and only event that looked interesting in the con–the Anime Music Video contest. It was held in the main auditorium of the hotel, and there was quite a large crowd there by the time the contest started. The entries were pleasing, but in my opinion, unremarkable. I had been hoping to see anything by Studio Sokodei (the makers of the hilarious Evangelion: Redeath fandub/parody). But it was a decent way to pass about an hour and a half, and it concluded with some surprisingly good fan-drawn animation. This is what the room looked like right before the Music Video showing started.

That pretty much wrapped up my brief visit to Katsucon. Since I’ll be headed to school in the fall, and Otakon is scheduled a lot later than it usually is (in late August), I probably won’t be able to go to Otakon this year. So this was probably the last anime con I’ll go to until I leave for school, and it was nice to be in the topsy-turvy, weird world of fandom for a few hours before returning to the sane universe.

Notes for the Non-Otaku (ie, the Sane)

(1) Cosplay: short for “costume play.” It’s the name given by the Japanese for the act of dressing up as your favorite anime, manga, or video game character. Most fans in America make their own costumes by hand; in Japan, there are entire costume shops that sell professionally-made costumes to the discerning anime fan.

Cosplaying is considered a fanatical act of devotion on both sides of the Pacific and is a sign of impending nerddom.

(2) Shojo manga: lit. “girl’s comics.” Manga that is aimed at young females. Examples include Sailor Moon, Fushigi Yugi, Marmalade Boy, and, in fact, most of the manga catalog of Tokyopop. Often features very effiminate, lanky male characters known as bishounen. At its best, shojo manga and anime contains excellent character development and real understanding of human relationships (see His and Her Circumstances). At its worst, it is fluffy, melodramatic, and hopelessly moony and over-the-top (see Fushigi Yugi).

(3) Yaoi: a subgenre of shojo manga, which features lanky bishounen getting it on with one another (ie, gay sexual relationships done by very handsome men, but whose depiction is not aimed not at gay men but at straight women). There have been many theories advanced as to why straight women in Japan and increasingly here in the West have an interest in seeing two gay men having sex. It must be for the same kinds of reasons why straight men are turned on by the thought of two lesbians.