For the first time in four years—I attended Anime Expo in Los Angeles.
My last AX was in 2015. I was feeling burned out and not connected to the anime community the way I used to be, so I took a break to focus on writing fiction.
Last year, I came back to the world of anime and manga and all that it is... and could be. More on that later.
Day 0
Wednesday, July 3, was Day 0 this year. Anime Expo is getting so crowded with events that the convention actually begins on Day 0 at 6:00 p.m. Major publishers such as Dark Horse held their industry panels that evening.
The Day 0 evening is a bit eerie. The banners are up in the L.A. Convention Center hallways and the J.W. Marriott hotel, an official AX convention site, but the masses of attendees aren’t here yet.
My reason for being there on Day 0 was to catch up with eigoMANGA at their industry panel.
I interviewed Austin Osueke, eigoMANGA’s founder, nine years ago on this blog. I wanted to see what Austin has been up to and where he’s taken his company since then.
EigoMANGA publishes manga, comic books and games, some originally from Japan and others created here in the U.S.
For 15 years, the company has sponsored a workshop at AX called How to Draw Manga. The teacher/presenter is Mino Miyabi, and it’s one of the most popular workshops at the convention.
This year, eigoMANGA presented an anime film, First Squad: Moment of Truth, on Day 1. The preview looked good and I wanted to attend the screening, but unfortunately it conflicted with something else on my schedule.
If you get a chance, I think it’s worth seeing.
EigoMANGA is known among other titles for Vanguard Princess, a 2D fighting game that has now been adapted to comics as well. The company collaborates with Korean studios to produce webtoons, and has also produced a comics app, Comic Climax, that features many of the company’s properties.
There aren’t many non-Asian POC owners in this industry. Osueke has successfully run eigoMANGA for twenty years now. I look forward to seeing what he has in store for eigoMANGA’s next twenty years.
The Entertainment Hall at Anime Expo is where video and tabletop gaming takes place... along with a special feature I really like.
After watching anime for a while, one begins to notice that certain settings keep showing up. At AX, they actually built sets so fans could photograph themselves as if they were in these typical anime locations.
For example, think of all the scenes that take place while the characters are on the train.
Then of course, there’s the school rooftop.
And the traditional home with the low table and the screen door that looks out onto the garden.
The temple gate with blooming sakura trees...
And a post-apocalyptic scene for those end-of-the-world series.
I have my issues with AX and how it’s run in some ways, but these settings are awesome. :-)
Day 1
Day 1 began, for me anyway, with the Viz Media Industry Panel.
Photographs and video were forbidden, so I have no photos. The panel was held in Petree Hall, probably the largest panel venue in the convention center, and it was nearly full with several thousand fans in the audience.
There was a heavy emphasis on Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind, Sailor Moon and My Hero Academia—and almost nothing was said at all about Boruto. In fact, when a photo of Boruto was briefly shown on the screen I actually heard scattered boos.
I’ll be the first to admit as a longtime Naruto fan that Boruto hasn’t reached the level of its parent series yet in terms of drama and excitement. But give it time! With all the legacy characters and its fully fleshed-out ninja universe, it can’t fail. Its substantive story arcs have been good so far and there’s obviously room for the series to grow.
Some of Viz’s manga announcements made me sit up and take notice. In 2020, they’re releasing Prince Freya, about a girl who has to impersonate a prince to save her kingdom, and Blue Flag, an LGBTQ story about a four-way romance quadrangle. Both looked very good and I’ve put them on my list to look out for next year.
The title that made me and everyone else in Petree Hall laugh was The Way of the Househusband.
The Way of the Househusband is about a yakuza who decides to give up that way of life and become a househusband instead. It’s a premise that could almost write itself, really—think about it. ;-) Not only is it a hysterical concept, but the pages from the manga they showed on the big screen elicited howls of laughter from the audience. The story just looks like a lot of fun. The book is scheduled for release this fall.
The Yen Press panel was halfway across the convention center and started just as the Viz panel ended, so I ran out of the Viz panel early to get a seat for Yen Press.
Surprisingly, though Yen Press has a lot of titles and made a lot of announcements, I only found two that caught my attention.
Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina is a Kino’s Journey type of story. The second was one of those weird light novel titles that seem in vogue these days: The Penetrated Battlefield Should Disappear There: Bullet Witchcraft & Ghost Program.
The art is pretty and the premise sounds interesting. A soldier discovers that the magic bullets he uses on the battlefield will eliminate the men he shoots as if they’d never existed.
I was looking forward to The State of Manga panel later that afternoon, and it did not disappoint.
Dallas Middaugh is an industry veteran, having worked at Del Rey Manga, Random House and most recently for Crunchyroll Manga. He’s not only a fixture in this industry, but also a keen observer of trends and keeper of metrics on manga book sales.
Middaugh was instrumental in reviving the manga industry in 2012. I’ve written before in this blog about how Attack on Titan brought anime and manga back from the brink in the U.S. While he was at Random House, Middaugh approved the first print run of the Attack on Titan manga in 2012. In 2013, the anime series took off, and he ordered multiple printings ahead of the demand—which only kept increasing—resulting in the manga series being a huge success that symbiotically supported the anime series and vice-versa. The manga series and anime series became a two-headed phenomenon that spurred other publishers to start taking a chance on manga again.
In my opinion, when Crunchyroll turned legit and started streaming Naruto and Bleach around 2008-09... that was the first turning point in growing the industry in the U.S. But the success of Attack on Titan in 2013 was the second turning point. Its manga sales grew the manga aisle at bookstores from where it had dwindled down to a few shelves after the recession, to where it is today—an entire aisle filled with manga.
Middaugh presented slide after slide on manga sales. He stated that anime is a big driver of manga sales, but only if the anime series is a successful one. Shonen is a huge category, and Viz Media basically dominates the U.S. manga market.
When I visit the manga aisle at Barnes & Noble, the publisher logo I see on the most manga books is Viz’s logo. Second would be a tie between Yen Press and Seven Seas, with other publishers coming after that. Kodansha, surprisingly, seems to have few available titles for sale on the shelves despite being a big name publisher. But those are just my personal observations of a number of Barnes & Noble bookstores, and it may be different in other areas of the U.S.
Day 2
Day 2 was the unofficial Mamoru Miyano Day at AX. =)
The first of three events featuring Miyano was the North American premiere screening of the anime feature film, Human Lost.
Photos and video-taking were strictly prohibited... but fortunately Funimation took photos!
Miyano and a few production people appeared before the screening and spoke to the audience. Miyano’s speaking voice is higher and lighter in tone than most of his anime roles. The closest role to his real voice is Tamaki from Ouran High School Host Club. I think he pitches his voice lower and deeper for his more serious roles, like in Human Lost.
Human Lost is a dark dystopian tale about a society where humans live longer—to age 120 or so—but at the cost of working longer as well. Except, of course, for the elite who don’t have to work at all, courtesy of the masses who do.
The movie engaged me as I watched it—I was never bored—but it didn’t resonate with me on a deeper level, aside from a few emotion-charged moments towards the end.
Following Human Lost, Miyano also had the premieres of Uta no Prince-sama: Magi Love Kingdom and the new In/Spectre anime series, so it was a wall-to-wall Miyano experience for his fans in attendance. ;-) But I had publisher panels to attend.
For me, Tokyopop’s Diversity in Manga panel was the greatest surprise of the whole convention.
Back in the day, I freelanced for Tokyopop as a copy editor and proofreader, working on over 40 manga books. My contact there was the managing editor, Vy Nguyen.
How Tokyopop wound down its North American office is already well-known, so I won’t go into it here. I recall hearing a few years ago that Tokyopop was publishing manga again, but even so, I wasn’t expecting what I saw at their panel.
The title of their panel, “Diversity in Manga,” comes from their International Women of Manga initiative. Tokyopop is now publishing OEL manga created by women writers and artists from around the world. And a lot of it is female gaze—stories about what women and girls want to see, told from the female point of view.
Editors Janae Young and Lena Atanassova, along with marketing director Kae Winters, presented the IWM titles with a lot of enthusiasm. Their love for these books came across right away. Books coming from the female perspective will do that to you. ;-) So fewer are published than male perspective/male gaze stories that there’s a great hunger for them.
Publishers who ignore women and their purchasing power are... extremely short-sighted, in my opinion. =D
Back to Tokyopop... not only are the stories diverse, but there’s a major yaoi/yuri and LGBTQ vibe to not only the IWM initiative but also Tokyopop’s current existing inventory of titles. They’re already publishing BL stories like Hanger and yuri stories like Yuri Bear Storm, and more queer-friendly titles are in the pipeline.
The IWM title that really intrigued me was Sword Princess Amaltea, written and illustrated by a Swedish mangaka named Natalia Batista.
In a civilization where women rule by magic, and society has been formed into queendoms, Amaltea is the second-born princess in the Galateas Queendom. She’s ordered by her mother the Queen to rescue a prince and marry him, in order to seize half of that prince’s queendom.
The women in this series are the major players and persons with agency—all the way. They fight battles, drink and carouse (leaving their menfolk at home to wait for them ;-)), wreak havoc, are knights and soldiers and highway bandits, plotters and schemers, both the good and the bad “guys.”
What about the male characters? Well, they kind of don’t do very much. ;-) They’re passive and wait to be rescued, and nobody pays attention to their opinions because they have no power anyways and are secondary to women who are the doers, movers and shakers in this world.
Batista leavens the acid touch of this role reversal with a lot of humor, so it would be hard to call this story man-hating—though I’m sure some will anyway. If you’re female though, you know how tedious it is to see characters of your gender always being passive, secondary, powerless... uninteresting. All kinds of female-centric stories are needed to break through the hold of male-centric storytelling, and Sword Princess Amaltea is a good, fun manga that fits the bill as well as anything.
I know all this about this series, because as soon as the Tokyopop panel let out I ran to the Exhibit Hall to buy all three volumes of Sword Princess Amaltea. I was so excited to talk to the editors and buy their books that I forgot I had the Square Enix panel on my schedule and missed it entirely. ;-) It was the kind of moment you actually want to have happen at conventions—that unexpected spark of the new in the midst of the familiar, something that really gets you going.
I don’t discuss my fiction much on this anime blog, saving it instead for my writing blog Atypical Romance, but as you might know I’m five books into a seven-book series about a future matriarchy where women rule society and civilization is composed of... queendoms. Like in Amaltea, my characters are multicultural, and as women have most of the agency, my protagonist is a mixed-race bisexual young man, Anming Lee, who chafes at the restrictions he lives under in the Queendom of Califia.
The first thought I had when the editors described Sword Princess Amaltea was: I’m not alone. I see so few female-superior, female-forward stories out there that it feels like a mirage at first when I finally stumble across one.
Much more on this topic later.
Seven Seas held their panel on Day 2.
Seven Seas had five panelists at their panel, including founder and owner Jason DeAngelis. When DeAngelis introduced himself, a small ripple of surprise went through the audience. I’m going to guess that he doesn’t do a lot of convention appearances, because it felt to me like everyone was startled to see him there.
Something I learned at this panel is that Seven Seas is a volume publisher—seriously. They publish hundreds of titles a year.
Since that’s the case, one can see why they publish everything from shonen manga to BL novels to hentai to tabletop games and, and... they really are a full-service publisher in all senses of the term. Their properties range from fan-servicy to literary and everything in between.
Some upcoming titles I found of interest: Ghostly Things, The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese, SCP File, My Androgynous Boyfriend and Metamorphose no Engawa.
In the Q&A session, someone asked DeAngelis how he came up with the name Seven Seas for his company. Interestingly, he said that he first imagined that he would be exporting manga in English all over the world—and so, “our ship would carry it everywhere”—hence the nautical-based name. Now, thirteen years later, DeAngelis feels it’s become a reality, happily enough.
Day 3
Day Three began with the Shonen Jump panel.
The Shonen Jump panel had the same feel as the Viz panel on Day 1, with a heavy concentration on Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind. I watched some of the earlier Jojo series years ago, and found it kind of extreme and off-putting... nevertheless, I know it has a big following.
Viz showed a video of Jojo’s creator, Hirohiko Araki, who thanked everyone for attending the panel and being a fan of his series. My main shock was seeing how completely normal Araki-sensei looks, compared with his wild and outrageous characters. He looked like a salaryman, even wearing a business suit(!).
The combined Kodansha and Vertical panel was in the afternoon. Though Ben Applegate’s panels are always a pleasure to attend, given his intelligence and humor—I found I wasn’t too interested in their offerings this time around.
Two announcements caught my attention. The first was Perfect World, a manga series in which a female interior designer meets up with her first crush from high school, who is now disabled and uses a wheelchair.
The second announcement was that Kodansha has license-rescued the Saiyuki manga series from Tokyopop. Saiyuki was one of the first series that brought me into anime/manga fandom back in the day and holds a lot of nostalgia for me. Kodansha will be releasing the series in hardcover with a new translation.
Anime Expo has had an Industry Lounge for a number of years now. The last time I attended in 2015, I recall it being a sad room upstairs from the Exhibit Hall that had a few tables and chairs and a water dispenser and nothing else.
This time around, there were desk stations with wi-fi access so people could plug in and work, and nice couches, so there’s been improvement. ;-)
The best thing about the lounge, aside from it being one of the few quiet places where you can catch your breath at the convention, is its location. It’s situated above the Exhibit Hall, with windows so you can look out upon the football field-sized space.
It’s hard to get the perspective from the photos, since I was angling to try to get the view all around—but hopefully you can get a sense of just how huge the hall was.
Speaking of the Exhibit Hall, it was while walking through there that I first saw a certain kind of bag... everywhere.
These bags had a plastic panel where you could stuff pins, keychains, plushies and other items to display your love for a particular anime series or character.
I finally asked someone what they were. They’re called “Ita Bags.”
I had a sudden insane urge to own one of these bags, seeing a use finally for all the weird little things I’ve collected at conventions over the years. I found the bags on Amazon, and will get one before I attend my next convention.
I don’t take cosplay photos anymore—I got tired of doing it—but I make an exception for one character.
If a cosplayer is game enough to try the Medicine Seller costume from Mononoke, I will gladly take a picture of her or him. ;-)
For reference, here’s Kusuri-uri:
Crunchyroll had a lounge of its own, offsite at L.A. Live.
I realize that it looks like no one’s there, but that’s only because I went early in the afternoon. There was a cash bar and a nice nightclub atmosphere, so I’m sure it got lively in the evening. I actually intended to go back that night, but got waylaid by going to dinner with J-Novel Club after their panel.
J-Novel Club’s founder and owner Sam Pinansky presented the panel, along with managing editor Aimee Zink.
JNC had many announcements. Like with the other publisher panels I attended, I’m only going to talk about the announcements that personally interest me. (For the rundown of all the publishers and their announcements, Anime News Network did a great breakdown which you can read here.)
Last and First Idol has been released in print! This hard sci-fi/Japanese pop culture crossover novel was one of my favorite reads of last year - and I highly recommend it.
JNC is now releasing many of their light novel and manga series in print. I think this is a great development for them, as the market for light novels in English is only getting bigger and better.
Two of their upcoming releases that intrigued me are Animeta, about a woman who, inspired by anime, decides to become an animator; and Marginal Operation, about an otaku who loses his job and becomes a mercenary.
One of the company’s biggest announcements was that there will be a Kickstarter campaign, the company’s first, for an omnibus print run of Invaders of the Rokujouma!?, a favorite of JNC readers. The campaign will begin in fall 2019.
Sam, Aimee and a number of JNC translators and editors went to dinner after the panel. After Uber-ing to Little Tokyo, a few miles across downtown LA, we waited for two hours to be served at a trendoid Japanese noodle shop.
I’d intended to go to the History of Fujoshi and Boys Love panel that was scheduled for 10 p.m. A few of us hastily Uber-ed back to the convention center after dinner, arriving at around 9:50 p.m.
I reached the theater-like room where the panel was held, only to be told there were no seats left. If there’d been even one seat, my industry badge would’ve gotten me in, but alas... it was not to be.
If anyone reading this attended the panel that evening, please leave a comment and let me know how it went... I’m really sorry I missed it. :-(
Day 4
Sunday, July 7, was Day 4 of Anime Expo.
The last day of AX is when you realize just how exhausted you are. I’m always impressed by cosplayers who make the effort to dress up on the last day. It was enough for me to get myself to two panels before going home.
“The Environment of Foreign Nationals Working in Japan” panel wins the convention prize for the most deceptively-named panel.
It was basically 90 minutes all about one Japanese gaming company, Cyber Connect 2, that is recruiting thirty foreign nationals to work at their Fukuoka headquarters. From the panel’s name, I’d expected a more general talk about working in Japan and what it’s like.
Instead, it was an hour of VP Taichiro Miyazaki extoling the benefits of working at Cyber Connect 2 and the beauty of Fukuoka, including its fine weather and great cuisine, complete with slides showing Miyazaki-san eating bowls of ramen in local restaurants with great gusto... followed by thirty minutes of what living in Fukuoka is like and details of the positions the company was looking to fill.
To be fair, Cyber Connect 2, from his description, sounded like a good place for foreigners to work. The company provides translators on the job and free Japanese lessons, along with visas to work in Japan. I just wish they’d named the panel “Cyber Connect 2 Is Recruiting Employees from Overseas” and been done with it. -_-
My final panel of the convention was Global Stories: Netflix Anime. And it was then when everything came together for me—my thoughts about female-centric stories and our place in anime, manga and other books, and filmed entertainment.
I took the above photo before the panel began, since no photos or videos were allowed during the panel. It was a huge ballroom and looks empty, but it eventually filled to about one-third capacity. The last day of AX is always like that. People are checking out of hotels, dashing to the Exhibit Hall for a final shopping trip, and the like. And if I recall correctly, Netflix’s panel was a late addition to AX’s schedule, so that didn’t help the attendance either.
So not too many people were there, but it was still a respectful and interested audience for the creators of Cannon Busters, Trese, and Seis Manos.
Cannon Busters, an animated series directed and written by LeSean Thomas, is about a droid, a robot and a fugitive on a journey through a dangerous world. Trese is set in a dark, gritty Manila, and is based on an award-winning Filipino comic book series. Seis Manos, set in Mexico, is a violent martial arts revenge tale from the creators of Netflix’s Castlevania anime series.
“Dangerous... dark... gritty... violent...” I think I see a trend here. =(
Don’t get me wrong. I looked at the panel and saw three talented men of color, already successful names in the business, who were getting their chance at an even wider audience through Netflix and its global anime push.
And I have no issue with dark, gritty and/or violent stories. There’s darkness and violence in my own fiction.
So what bothered me about the Netflix panel? It wasn’t the Netflix panel specifically, or I should say solely. It was my sense from the entire convention that half of us are still not being seen, heard or catered to, despite our equal purchasing power, in an art form we love as much as anyone.
At some point during the panel, a thought came to me. If we don’t get our stories out there, nothing is going to change.
What do I mean by “our stories”? I think that’s still being defined by all of us who are creators of female-centric stories, whether it be OEL manga, cartoons, web comics, novels or animations.
One of the problems we face is that we’ve all grown up and been inundated with male-centric stories, myself included. When I discovered anime in 2005, it was shonen stories I fell in love with. The anime industry has done shonen stories for so long now that they’ve got it down to a science, and so they are excellent entertainment.
So it’s natural that some of our work is imitative or reactive to what already exists—it can’t be helped.
As women and girl creators, generally speaking, we have yet to discover our own kind of stories—our voices. What we would produce without being imitative or reactive to male-centric stories.
There are already great female creators out there, but more are needed, and that will only come about when there’s a critical mass of female-centric products in the marketplace. So in a sense, quantity will drive quality.
This is where the Internet comes in. There’s never been a better time in history for women to use the tools in place to get their work out before the public. As more and more of us do this, new standards of excellence will emerge and female-centric stories, female gaze stories will become part of the landscape—as they always should have been.
Not only in the anime and manga space, but throughout the art and entertainment world.
When my novel Kaminishi was published by Dreamspinner Press, I discovered the joy of being a producer. As I write these words, Comic Con is going on in San Diego, and over 100,000 fans are having a great time going to panels, shopping in the Exhibit Hall and meeting the creators of their favorite movies, TV series and comic books.
That’s a wonderful thing. It’s fun being a fan of something. I’ve been a fan, a consumer of a lot of movies and TV series, anime series, books, etc., for decades.
But there’s nothing like the feeling when you become a producer of creative work. No matter how small your audience, your readership may be—the creation of a story in whatever form means you’re now in a different space. You’ve brought a story idea to life, into being, and shared it with the world.
If you’re thinking about telling the stories that are in your head, I urge you to do it. Just do it. Because I need them and the world needs them, and if you do—the anime and manga, films and TV and books we all love will never be the same again.
