Conventions of 2023: AnimeNYC + Yearly Convention Wrap-Up

Aka “Superjustinbros Goes to New York City: Part 2”.

After only five weeks since the conclusion of New York Comic Con, the Javits Center in Manhattan would once again fill up with crowds of people as the sixth ever AnimeNYC would commence for the entire weekend, from Friday to Sunday. It was an event that I was highly anticipating since around the end of AnimeNext five months prior, and when the time came to attend it, it was an event that satisfied me with a great selection of artists, cosplays, and panels to check out, but at the same time it also left me with conflicting thoughts, and now that I’ve had the time to recover from the event I think I’m in a good place to discuss how AnimeNYC 2023 went as a whole and how it compares to both prior iterations of the event, as well as other conventions I’ve attended this year.

Before the first day of the event, AnimeNYC’s social media accounts announced some big changes that would go into the event effective the next year: The event would be ditching its mid-November timeslot that it’s held onto since 2017 in favor of moving the event to August, allowing it to use the entirety of the event space like New York Conic Con does. As an event that has only grown and become bigger over time, I’d say it needs the increased amount of space, and one look at my thoughts of this year’s event may clue you in as to why. That said, while I am confident that the shift in schedule will result in bigger and better things for AnimeNYC, this means the event lands in the middle of an already packed month (or perhaps, an already packed season) when it comes to conventions, including Otakon and the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo, compared to its former home of November where it could stand out on its own as one of the last conventions of the fall season in a time where not many of them occur with the approaching holidays and such.

Anyways, the event.

If you’ve attended AnimeNYC in 2022, then the layout should be very familiar: The vendors and artists all combined into one exhibition hall, panel rooms down in the lowest floors, and hangout/dining areas all in the central lobby. The weather was rather cloudy at first as a rainstorm had passed through very early in the morning, but as the con went on, the sun would slowly emerge before finally setting in the afternoon. After 10am, the lobby was filled with attendees and cosplayers flooding in from a waiting queue outside, and the place was filled very quickly. The resulting crowds were thankfully manageable and I could walk around without worry of bumping into too many people, but the Artist’s Alley ended up with a few big crowds during the time I spent in there. Thankfully, it never got to the level of NYCC 2022 unbearable, but it still made trying to navigate through the artist’s alley to find artists a hassle, and by the end I spent more time in there than I was willing to admit from having to brave crowds, chat with artists, and acquire some swag from their booths. By the point 6:00 pm rolled around, right as the big crowds through Artist’s Alley faded, I was finished with the section, said my goodbyes, and left, without even bothering to hold further chats with certain artists I had known for years since my first foray into attending conventions. Still, I had a great time meeting and supporting everyone in the Artist’s Alley and I exited the event with a nice haul of commissions, even if some had to be saved till after the event as they couldn’t be done on time.

The Vendors’ Hall was, in direct contrast, another story. Unlike last year, there weren’t really much in the way of giant set pieces save for a few booths in the front, with most of them instead at NYCC the past month to grace that event’s vendors. No big inflatable Goku or Luffy, no giant set of Bandai Namco shops, no IntI Creates store, and no dedicated space for Gundam. Instead we got… a booth for the US military(?)… and GFuel…(???) …Yeah, I’ll kindly decline. Even miHoYo, which had a booth for Genshin Impact last year and currently has their IP’s all over artist alleys thanks to their loving fan base didn’t return this year with a booth to promote Honkai: Star Rail. Then again I’m not one to gush over gacha games, and thus the Fate and NIKKI booths, which were featured pretty prominently in announcements, completely passed me by. The former was doing their annual live shows in front of the entrance gate and the latter had a shootout attraction with plastic replica guns. Viz Media and a few streaming services had booths to advertise and sell their products and I did manage to get some… rather silly pics at the Jojo World booth and a photo-op for Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun a floor higher. Other than that, there’s not much else to say about the vendors; it’s realistically as good as a vendor’s hall could get at an anime convention without going overboard on the budget like at New York Comic Con, but when you compare it to other anime conventions, it’s probably one of, if not the best vendor’s hall of the anime conventions I attend each year (although that feels unfair for Castle Point Anime Convention, given its limited event space in comparison).

Panels and cosplays, a trademark of every good convention, were also a big part of this event. You’ll have to take the words of others on how good the panels were, as I got too preoccupied with touring the event space (especially the artist’s alley) to go and attend one. I did eye up the Gurren Lagann + Kill la Kill Anniversary Event, especially the news that Gurren Lagann would be coming to theaters in the US early next year for a limited time. There was also a very big Undead Unluck panel, but it was one of the year’s panels that required a reservation to attend so I didn’t exactly consider it. And then there was the cosplays. Just… wow; the cosplayers here COOKED with their cosplays of choice and I couldn’t have been any happier. Seeing the likes of Jet Set Radio and Guilty Gear in the sea of miHoYo cosplays and the continued popularity of One Piece and Jojo characters being represented in cosplay form was a pleasant delight. It was perhaps the best part of the event next to the artist’s alley and what made me end up pulling off a 17k walking marathon through the Javits center. I’m glad I was able to snap so many and that the artist’s alley didn’t have AnimeNext’s super-strict policies against photos in the artist’s alley, but I think going forward for future anime cons there won’t be as large of a gallery of cosplay photos as there ended up being this time, considering that by the closure of the vendors and artists I was just snapping away at whatever cosplays I could. I wouldn’t call it my number 1 focus of the event, but I guess after my last set of cosplay photos from five months ago, I was hungry to see more, especially in an area as large as New York City.

Anyways, the trends:

• I didn’t seem to notice as many Genshin Impact cosplays as I did in 2022, with most of the franchise’s representation being in Artist Alley. It still had a strong showing in representation in cosplays, but I think with so many conventions with it as the “top dog” across last year and earlier this year, I noticed a small drop-off in Genshin cosplayers. The franchise still had an iron grip on the Artist’s Alley
• Bleach continued to rise steadily in cosplay representation, certainly thanks to the return of the anime to finally adapt the Thousand Year Blood War Arc.
• The rest of the big names in cosplay came from other Shonen Jump properties, with One Piece and My Hero Academia still being very prominent amongst the cosplays. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure was also everywhere— I saw several DIO on the show floor and a few Jolene’s
• Speaking of Shonen Jump, Demon Slayer, Chainsaw Man, and Jujutsu Kaisen were not too far off, and even Naruto got a few solid cosplays out on the show floor. Even One Punch Man got a couple.
• I of course mentioned the group of Jet Set Radio cosplayers in the previous paragraph, but there were also some Guilty Gear cosplayers I ran into in the Artist’s Alley. Being able to see fighting games in an environment where they once weren’t commonplace, especially when one of them was a Potemkin cosplay. It’s not so much of a trend as it is an honorable mention. There were even a few artist booths dedicated to, or otherwise mostly featuring, fighting games.
• Another honorable mention was Fairy Tail, with a few Natsus and Erzas. Of course pink hair is very hard to pull off so the cosplayers stuck with magenta/burgundy hair.
• While I pointed it out when I covered AnimeNext, the biggest surprise of the event’s cosplays was Trigun rising out from the ashes. There were multiple cosplays of Vash the Stampede plus some of its other major characters; and in the Artist’s Alley there were enough artists with merchandise of the series that they had a Trigun stamp rally.

After getting home and going through my gallery of cosplay snaps, followed by signaling out all the duplicates I took in order to pick the best choices, the final tally was 199 cosplay photos. The number caught me by surprise since it was the same exact number of photos I had accumulated at last year’s AnimeNYC. Will the number ever be topped? Honestly I’m not sure—as much as I love cosplays at anime conventions I’d rather not let them consume my entire trip there, since I attend anime conventions for the artist’s alleys, the social experiences, and (occasionally) the panels, alongside the cosplays. Plus, the anime conventions have always given me the kinds of cosplay selections I enjoy since I started snapping cosplay pics at AnimeNext 2016, so it’s hard to ignore them.

Aside from the quintessential convention features; there was also an arcade in the back left corner of the vendors. Being an anime convention, it was loaded with the common selections of rhythm arcade games you expect at other anime-themed events, but thanks to the support of Psychic Drive, there were a healthy selection of non-rhythm games housed in candy cabinets to pick from as well, with fighting games and head-to-head puzzle games serving as their lineup. And incase you’re curious; there were no console games present, and much like AnimeNext, the game room closed along.

After nine hours, the vendors and artists closed, and after sticking around for an extra hour and a half to grab some last minute cosplays, I returned to my car and left, pondering about how the journey went and reflecting on the past several months of conventions since all the way back in Spring as I drove home. There was a lot that came on the mind but I’ll start with my final versify of AnimeNYC. In short, while I still think AnimeNYC 2019 and 2022 were my favorite years of the event (in spite of 2019 also having severe congestion in the artist’s alley, possibly mores than this year), this came very close to how 2022 went, with my only real regret for the event being the inability to tour the entire artist’s alley at a quicker pace while still finding time for other things at the event. Aside from that, it was a fun time, and I look forward to seeing how the event changes next year now that it’ll have access to more of the Javits Center to fit in everything in a convention that steadily gets bigger and bigger each year.

And that concludes my coverage on AnimeNYC, and by extension, the 2023 season of conventions. The convention commissions for AnimeNYC will be a bit late, but you can check out the cosplay gallery I’ve assembled at this link. And since this is the last event for a good while, I wanted to spend some extra time and chat about how the year went as an attendee for various conventions of different categories. To keep a long story short, this was honestly a very strong year and all the events have had their share of strengths and weaknesses. Of course, not all of them were big winners in the enjoyment factor but I came out of every event I attended this year with something to appreciate. Unfortunately, the fourth and final side event I had planned to attend, the Festival of Games, was dropped by the organizers for this year, though I heard there are plans to have a smaller swap meet until they try to have the event again in full for December 2024.

And for this year, I thought it’d be fun to rank each of the events I made a presence at, both on how I feel each event was handled given their scale and what I feel they could improve on, and how much I enjoyed them on a personal level. And so, without further hesitation, here’s where I stand on the con rankings of the main lineup based on their quality relative to the scale and budget they were given to work, and what they had to offer for that scale:

1. New York Comic Con 2023
2. AnimeNYC 2023
3. Long Island Retro Gaming Expo 2023
4. Castle Point Anime Convention 2023
5. EternalCon 2023
6. AnimeNext 2023

And here is where I would rate each event based on my own enjoyment factor and how much they kept me wanting for more:

1. Long Island Retro Gaming Expo 2023
2. AnimeNYC 2023
3. Castle Point Anime Convention 2023
4. New York Comic Con 2023
5. AnimeNext 2023
6. EternalCon 2023

I should point out that all of the entires on this list are very close to one another in terms of quality/enjoyment; and you may be surprised at how AnimeNext made the bottom of the list for the con rankings. While most of the conventions have had smaller issues and accidents, the move to a new venue really did a toll on AnimeNext and the decision to split the event into two separate venues only interconnected through a shuttle bus did not do it any favors. And while I loved going to EternalCon and it perhaps had the least hectic artist’s alley of all the main events, it suffered the most from having no seating opportunities unless you went out of your way and it’s something I want to see make stronger use of the venue it’s given, especially with the vendors’ hall. When it came to the side events, CradleCon, having access to a bigger venue, was the essential side event of the three that were able to take place in my home turf of Long Island. That’s not to say that EMCon and LITropicCon weren’t enjoyable; EMCon was still the perfect warmup event before Castle Point Anime Convention, and LITropicCon was a great way to socialize and catch up with several artists in the Artist’s Alley as there would be no other notable events on Long Island to attend due to the cancelation of Festival of Games.

So where do we go from here? Well, there’s a honest chance that 2024 will be more of the same, but with the schedule shift AnimeNYC will be going through starting next year, I may introduce some new events into my schedule, provided they can fit in and I’m able to withstand being on my feet for a few hours that day.

The first and most obvious choice is DerpyCon. I attended the event once in 2016 to a rather mixed result, and since then I’ve contemplated attending the event again but found it difficult to do so with two big mammoth conventions (NYCC and AnimeNYC) sandwiching it. Now with AnimeNYC moved up to August, it would be much easier to slot in Derpy Con as a new side event for the convention journey before the holidays start. On that merit, Cradle Con would likely get promoted to main event, since it had as much to do for a comic and art fan as LI Retro did for retro game fans, combined with its size and scale and how many commissions I were able to haul up from that event, with a total tally very close to the other, bigger comic and anime conventions I attend.

In terms of other comic and general pop culture events, Thy Geekdom Con and Brooklyn Comic Con come to mind, as I tried attending the former in 2022 following the cancelation of that year’s AnimeNext only to wind up not opting into the event at all, and since then it’s been on the mind whenever the beginning of the year drops. The latter only entered my mind after a friend of mine that I saw for the first time in years at AnimeNYC this year in the Artist’s Alley mentioned they were applying to be part of that event’s alley. However, both of them are very close to other events I already attend— Thy Geekdom is the week after Cradle Con, and Brooklyn Comic Con will likely end up the week before AnimeNext, if the dates of previous AnimeNext’s is any indication. There’s also Wintercon, though its stronger adult theming (including being set in a casino) and being much further disconnected from anime than NYCC draws me further away from possibly attending the event. If either of these events become a possibility, I would likely not stay for the full duration of a single day at each event since I do want to be able to rest and take a breather (and give my wallet a chance to recover).

I’ll wait till early next year before I come up with a concrete schedule on what I plan to attend (spoilers, it’ll mostly be a repeat of this year’s events). In the meantime, I’ll get up and on outta here since this blogpost has gone long enough. Thank you all for sticking with the convention coverages this year—the one convention per post format has really let me go all out on describing the events that bring me immense joy each year. I have a lot of things in the planning for 2024, since this year did not work out with all the leftover projects still hanging. Understandably, many of them will bleed into 2024, and once I’m all reeled back from the holiday prep, my goal will be to power through most of these leftover projects and venture out of the comfort zone for a change of scenery. While I’ve dropped hints of my plans in the past and on social media, I think I’ll leave it mostly up in the air from here on out.

I’ll likely have one more blogpost to close out the year, but until then, See You, Space Cowboys.