Feb 24-26th

The Sheraton Meadowland Hotel & Convention Center in East Rutherford, New Jersey was the site of MangaNext 2012. It was held the weekend following Maryland’s Katsucon 18 and pulled in a relatively low attendance. Our photographer/head of conpics.ws completely missed the press deadline and only I (Chris) could make it as I was going to run a panel.   The hotel layout did not boost MangaNext’s “attendee flow” either. While a beautiful hotel with excellent customer service, its convention rooms were on the second floor and down a dark hallway. Several con attendees were witnessed asking Con Staff where the Dealer’s Room and Artist Alley were located.  The hotel’s location, on a service road next to a major highway, was not within walking distance of any food sources. Cheap and fast food was a ten to fifteen minute drive away.

At 10am on the morning of February 25^th, I ran my first convention panel. After walking all over the convention center, I finally found my panel room and began to set up. The panel was titled “Martial Arts Anime and Manga” and I was pretty nervous and excited to present it. As the title would suggest, my presentation was about martial arts related anime and manga. The material covered more comical anime such as “Mightiest Disciple Kenichi” to more serious manga like the mixed martial arts influenced “All Rounder Meguru”.  At the end of the hour long presentation, I was asked a lot of questions. I had the answers to most of them, but there were some that I could not answer. These questions made me want to do more research on martial arts related anime and manga.

I very much enjoyed running a panel and I would like to continue running the martial arts panel and branch out into other “obscure” areas of Japanese culture found in manga that English speaking readers were unaware of. I believe I did a good job speaking in front of and presenting to a crowd because I hope to teach English in Japan after I graduate college.

I do hope that MangaNext continues to exist in the coming years, despite having a low attendance this year. It is one of the few conventions that focus solely on the comic portion of the fandom. Manga is a part of Japanese culture that I find very interesting and I am definitely more of a “manga” fan than an “anime” fan at conventions. I believe manga conventions would also help boost the struggling American manga industry.