speach tree

Day 3: Kids' Day Sunday April 20 The NYCC blog (MediumAtLarge.net) reports a preliminary count of more than 64,000 attendees for the weekend. Pretty huge. I only made it to 2 panels today, but I met cool people and swiped a lot of SWAG so it was OK. I went to Harold & Kumar, where Kal Penn (who played Kumar), Neil Patrick Harris (who played Neil Patrick Harris), and the writer/directors sat and talked about making the movie, laughing at racists, and shipping in a woman with "the biggest tits in the world." Very enlightening stuff. Interestingly, the first movie did poorly in theaters but the DVD sales alone made it possible for them to make a sequel. Then I went to the Show Floor, where I met an art teacher in the Bronx. I was initially drawn to his historical/historical-fiction comic Bronx Heroes, calling for accurate representation of the Bronx and also for resistance to gentrification. We talked about lesson plans for students learning the art of comics, where to f...

A relatively small crowd patiently waits for the appearance of a perfectly coiffed Japanese pop legend. T.M. Revolution's fame in the U.S. is owed largely to a certain red-haired anime swordsman... 11:30am Arrive at Javits Center and meander to the events hall. I'm too late to get into whatever movie is being featured in the IGN.COM theater (the main stage) so I float around and eventually settle into Del Rey's panel. The Del Rey team announces its new releases for this year and the coming year. Some highlights: Fairy Tail by the creator of One Piece; a collaboration mystery/fantasy suspense by Dean Koontz and Queenie Chan; and Me and the Devil Blues about a (historical) legendary blues singer who is said to have been so good that he must have made a pact with the devil. 1:00 pm I peek into the "Comics Writers Talk about Writing" panel but it's a bunch of people I don't know and don't care about so I head over to the Show Room on the upper level. The S...

The New York Comic Convention is a 3-day annual pop-culture event attended by 1000s of comic/cartoon/video-game/anime/manga/graphic novel fans from New York and beyond. This is my first time attending, and I'm also chaperoning a group of 5 high school students from my Anime and Japanese after-school clubs. It's interesting to compare the Comic Con to last December's Anime Festival (both held at Jacob Javits Convention Center at 34th & 12th in Manhattan). We arrived at 3pm, in time for General Programs. (The morning activities were only for professionals and industry folks.) I attended bits and pieces of the following panels: America: Through the Eyes of the Graphic Novel a panel of white men talking about America. I (and my students) left after hearing that they were working on a bunch of projects on the "sad events following 9-11," and other projects commissioned by the Department of Defense for the repatriation of Iraq War veterans. I had been excited about...

For those of you just joining this thread, click on the "anime/manga" tag in the column to the right, to find out what I’m talking about. I just wanted to throw up my work in progress, so bear with me as I edit this over the next few days. This is maybe the 3rd major anime convention I have ever attended in my 23 years of life on this planet. The first two times, I went to the Baltimore Otakon 2000 and 2001 (I don’t remember the exact years) with some friends during high school. I find it kind of interesting to mention a few comparisons between Otakon at the turn of the millennium and the New York Anime Festival in 2007. *Disclaimer: This exercise is obviously problematic, since: Baltimore and NYC are totally different cities. Furthermore, Otakon had already become an established event in the DC-metropolitan area by the millennium, whereas NYAF - according to Show Manager Peter Tatara - is only in its first year as such (there has been an annual New York Comic Con for a while...

(10/8/07) I’m actually writing this the day after Day 2 before I head to Day 3 because last night, after the convention, I spent the rest of the afternoon/evening at Party for the People in BK. (It was excellent, but that is a different post entirely.) After P4P (or PftP as it is also known) I spent the night snacking and chatting with my room-mates DW and RL, and DW’s sister and our friend JW, aka Janejane. JW asked a lot of fun questions about my recent (?) interest in anime/manga, since we hadn’t talked in a minute. So I decided to talk here a little bit about what I’m trying to do. This is true of a lot of pop culture media but anime/manga (as most people in the US know it today) is full of the problematic gender/race/class stereotypes that permeate its source society (Japan/USA). A lot of people in the U.S. today think that anime has something to do with crazy big-eyed and impossibly skinny animated characters often involved in either magical/fantasy fighting scenarios or octopus ...

I have been facilitating an after-school Anime Club at two high schools next to Ground Zero, alongside teaching Japanese after school (there is a lot of overlap in the student participants). As I do more and more research on Anime and Manga availability in the U.S., I meet increasing numbers of young people of color from all kinds of backgrounds who are consuming and producing their own anime-related work. Yet the culture of Anime and Manga consumption/production in the U.S. is still dominated by white (and Asian) males, although there seems to be an increasing number of women being recognized on an institutional level. As an artist and teacher who was raised on anime/manga (I learned Japanese by reading and watching) I'm pretty interested in the changing social impact of Japanese/US manga and anime culture. So I decided to hop on NJ Transit bus #129 after work today and attend the 2nd annual MangaNEXT convention (only the second convention devoted exclusively to manga ever held in...