Judging by the Anime Expo just gone by, it's getting harder to stand by my opinion that the market for anime, manga and Japanese pop culture in general has crested. According to the SPJA press release bragging of the success of AX 2013, the convention drew a record 61,000 unique visitors — certainly an impressive figure. To put in in perspective, that's no better than half the number of uniques that San Diego Comic Con will draw this coming week, but about half again as many as GenCon draws at its very best. I'm too lazy at the moment to go through my past posts on AX, but my sense of stagnation in the anime and manga business goes back at least several years, when the big publishers that served the North American market started to disappear from the exhibit hall. I go back far enough with AX to remember the anime boom of the last decade, when the likes of ADV, Geneon, Bandai and Tokyo Pop dominated the hall with huge booths that loomed like fortresses over the smaller vendors hawking cells, art books and UFO Catcher plushies. Then the big publishers stopped taking out those huge booths, and then they started going out of business all together. When Bandai America closed up shop last year, that left Viz and Funimation as the only survivors among the colossi of those earlier, headier days. in which Right Stuf CEO Shawne Kleckner enthusiastically ran through their planned releases for the coming year, including a remastered version of the Osamu Tezuka classic, "Princess Knight." Aniplex (which seems to have liberated the distribution rights to "Rurouni Kenshin" from Media Blasters) and Sentai Filmworks both had large booths in high-profile positions at the front of the hall. So, we are not seeing a decline in anime publishing so much as a changing of the guard, with new publishers (and streaming services like Crunchyroll) stepping up where the older ones have faltered. Now, if someone would only grab the English rights to "Lucky Star" (the complete series is selling for as high as $225 now that it's out of print) and "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya", both of which were orphaned when Bandai America folded…. However, the music component was of less interest to me (frankly, if it ain't Hatsune Miku, I'm probably not listening) than the explosion in tabletop gaming activity at this year's con. I haven't seen analog games take such a high profile at AX ever, not even during the heyday of the Naruto CCG, or the Inuyasha TCG, or even when Wizards of the Coast tried to push its Maplestory TCG. Somehow, someone managed to scrape together enough people for a "Settlers of Catan" tournament on the first day. But relatively new two publishers drove the bulk of the activity. One was Japanime Games, which has had a bit of a sleeper hit on its hands with Arclight's maid-moe deck-building game, "Tanto Cuore." They had booth staff dressed as French maids running demos of "Tanto Cuore" at their booth throughout the show. The other was Bushiroad, the insurgent CCG publisher who has done a gutsy and skillful job over the last few years of taking a hunk out of the market dominated by Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh with Cardfight Vanguard and, more recently, Weiss-Schwarz. Bushiroad is now doubling down on the North American market (they'll be at GenCon this year, too), as they have just started printing an English edition of Weiss-Schwarz. They had geeky-looking guys in t-shirts running demos of both games at their booth. I will have more to say about Weiss-Schwarz in a follow-up post; for now, I'll just say that I sat in on a demo and find the game intriguing in various ways. Once the con began, I had, generally speaking, an easier time navigating the public spaces than I thought I would, even on Saturday. It probably helped that AX set up a dedicated area in the West Hall for cosplay photography, and left the Concourse Hall open for similar activity. I suspect that just enough people made use of these expedients (rather than block traffic in the Concourse and shut down aisles in the exhibit hall) to make a difference in the traffic flow. The Viz-sponsored manga library also allowed a decent number of people to take a load off in a dedicated room rather than constrict the Concourse and other hallways. These were smart strategic-level arrangements, and I hope that, if anything, they are expanded at next year's con. will notice. Such was the case with one clan, in which the father came as the Ice King and the mother as Beemo. I saw several very creditable Ice Kings on Saturday alone, including one gentlemen waiting in line for Kazuhiko Inoue's session who dressed as Ice King's Simon Petrokoff incarnation. What this means for the future of Anime Expo cosplay, I cannot say, except that it suggests to me that the audience for anime in America is dynamic, always changing and growing and mutating, like the largest convention that caters to it. |
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