Convention season has arrived and this past weekend, the Hynes Convention Center played host to AnimeBoston for the second year in a row. I was there to document the weekend on behalf of powet.tv and my wallet.
After the first showing of X-Men: The Last Stand got out on Friday, I walked from the Boston Common cinema to the Hynes Convention Center. The lines for registration weren’t too bad since I had waited until after the rush of opening ceremonies to get in there. Thankfully, the line also moved quickly so I did not have to stand near the very large, very hairy, very sweaty man behind me. I laid pretty low since it was the first day. I walked around the dealer room for several hours, sat in a video room for another hour watching Record of the Lodoss War, and spent the rest of the time looking for a place to buy an umbrella. Having been up early that day and gone out and about, I was exhausted and unfortunately the panels I was looking forward to did not start for at least another hour. So I called it a day and headed home in the torrential downpour outside.
Saturday morning was spent getting into costume. Many thanks to Ashley for straightening my hair. I managed to get a ‘before picture‘ prior to shaving the small forest on my face. The ‘after shot‘ was taken at the end of the day after I came back home and was about to take the costume off. I was naturally ready hours before I needed to meet up with Brendan and Thanh at the Hynes. I was fidgeting restlessly in the chair of the living room until I got the call from Brendan that they were heading to the convention center from the movie theater. They went to see X3 beforehand. My roommate, Mike, gave me a ride to the Convention center, which I was pretty greatful for considering I would have had to take the subway in full costume. As much as I like attention, I much prefer it from people who can actually appreciate the reason I’m at the center of it. I got there a bit earlier than them, so I went into the dealer room while they were registering and snapped a few pictures and bought more schwag. When they were done, I waited for them in the entryway. A couple of girls asked to take pictures of me with them. I didn’t think much of it at the time aside from the fact she wanted a hug from me (my character is quite a hit with the ladies :-)), but as it would turn out, she would take the only full body picture of me. I would, later, be furious to realize that everyone who took a picture of me that day failed to get my entire body in the picture. They all focused on my chest and above, so I had absolutely no pictures of me in full costume. I was really disappointed about it. I spent a significant amount of time improving the costume I had last year for this. Fortunately for me, Skids did some searching and found that girl’s picture.
We went to the ‘Creating a successful Webcomic’ panel and I later bought a manga by one of the people who ran it. After another run in the dealer room, we went to the video room and watched the last half of the Kaiju Big Battel dvd followed by Final Fantasy: Advent Children. I’m sure it was good, but I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. Not long after that we called it a day again, mostly because Thanh wanted to leave. As always, he had impeccable timing since a Red Sox game was ending down the street at Fenway Park. Not normally a bad thing, riding a crowded subway is the norm around here, but I was still in full costume. Whatever, I got a picture of Megaman we randomly found on the bridge over the Mass. Pike.
Sunday was a short day that consisted mostly of me taking pictures of cosplayers in the dealer room, buying yet even more schwag, and watching the human cosplay chess, where cosplayers were up on stage on a huge chessboard acting as their character and acting out a chessgame that was being played in the front of the room. The theme was Shonen vs. Shojo. That means boys comics vs. girls comics basically. It was entertaining. Brendan and Thanh went to the charity auction beforehand and apparently Brendan bid and won on a booth in the Artists’ Alley for next year. Maybe I can convince him to put a sign up for Powet.
Ah well on to the pictures…
[Edit – Crazy: Updated gallery plugin. Links fixed accordingly. 2006.06.03]
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