Well, hello everyone. As I hinted a few times earlier this year, I decided to forego my usual convention coverages from the past few years in favor of making a two-part overview covering my thoughts on each event in a condensed paragraph. If you missed the reasonings from either past blog entries this year or my Bluesky posts, it mostly comes down to this blog being very niche and only a small number of people I know being interested enough in my trips to want to give these blog entries a read. In addition, I began to lose interest in writing the blog entries since aside from completely new events it mostly just boiled down to re-treading old ground and comparing each event to the same event from the past year.
- For an event of its scale, NJIT MiniCon was great for being the perfect warm-up event for the rest of the year, helped by it being a very in-expensive event to attend. The Artist Alley managed to expand with an additional row of tables, providing more chances to get in as an artist and a wider selection of goods to buy as an attendee. Even for a one-day event, there were a healthy number of panels to check out across three event rooms. If there was one thing I had to say about it, I couldn’t tell you if there were any full-scale game tournaments at the event despite there being a tournament room (I can conform there were games played, but no full tournaments). The event also managed to score a new mascot character for this year after some time sticking with theming based on other anime/game franchises, and I hope she sticks for NJIT Minion 2027.
- Castle Point Anime Convention always manages to be a fun time, even when opportunities to take cosplay shots are squandered by the presence of bad weather. This year was very much one of those instances, forcing everyone indoors for the entire day. The event was very compatible to 2025’s event, minus a slightly smaller gaming area to make room for other features. Visiting the Artist’s alley to meet, chat with, and commission artists remained one of my primary objectives of the event, and it was here, alongside 2025’s event, where I noticed a growing trend of Love and Deepspace merchandise at the artists’ booths. Once again, the only panel I would visit during this show was The Dad Panel, but I also ended up attending the Q&A session for Lotus Juice, a musician famous for his work on the Persona franchise who I had previously missed a chance to meet at AnimeNJ++ 2024. Thus, I set out to correct that mistake at this event and got to chat with the man himself for a short period at his guest booth before I resumed my trek through the event, eventually wrapping up and making the long drive home after a successful visit.
- Cradle Con was good, even if it was mostly un-changed from last year. Vendors on one floor, artists on another. Since it was the first event to take place outside of New Jersey, It was my first true opportunity to catch up with some of my buddies from the local Long Island convention scene this year after having not seen them for quite some time, which made it worth attending for that reason alone. The main highlight for me was an artist from Brazil, who I met at last year’s event and spent quite a bit of time socializing with during my visit to Cradle Con, and this was going to be one of his last shows for the year before returning back home. The other artists and comic authors were all fun to interact with and buy stuff from, especially since, as you’ll see later in this blog entry, this would become my only chance to really interact with some of the artists from Long Island itself. Overall it was a very good time, and once again an easy event to fit into the schedule since it’s a local event that doesn’t run too long into the day.
- After taking 2025 off, I ended up returning to Brooklyn Comic Con for the 2026 convention season. The results were, well, not what I was expecting. Sometime before the event began, there was word that due to unfortunate circumstances, the event would be shifting to a “block party” format with outdoor vendors/artists on two streets in Brooklyn. Since I very much still wanted to support the local convention scene in the area, I went on the trip anyways despite my suspicions. In the end, I did enjoy the trip overall, but the summer heat did make the opening hours of the event extremely uncomfortable, combined with the lack of shading and options for food and drink (only two or three food trucks were present at the event). All of that led to me nearly passing out from heat exhaustion once we got our badges and entered the main body of the event (and given the lack of seating options trying to get any form of rest was difficult. Thankfully, I did manage to get a good break session in partway through the day and resumed interacting with artists and snapping cosplay pictures. As for the event itself, the vendors and artists were near unanimously all artists, which was a point others have put against this event but I didn’t mind at all since I live and breathe Artist’s Alley at these events. There was also a big rave room with gaming competitions and some indie games lined up to play, and this was the only portion of the event to take place indoors. Surprisingly, the event was only booked for a single day, which was fine with me because I typically don’t go to events for more than a single day (and the first day ended with a pretty bad rainstorm).
- Long Island Retro Gaming Expo 2026 was probably the one summer event this year that I was anticipating the most, as it still currently remains the only gaming-focused event I have been able to make it out to for the longest time. As with last year, I went both Friday and Saturday, and this year was the big celebration for the Nintendo 64’s 30th Anniversary, up to and including a big section dedicated to the 64-bit machine. Other highlights for the event this year included a booth full of authentic Japanese Keitai cell phones with games loaded onto each one (including a Super Monkey Ball game that remains un-emulated to this day), and another booth featuring a downscaled re-creation of Nintendo’s very early arcade game Wild Gunman (which I somehow forgot to take any pictures or videos of at the event). The event’s vendors included more artists and content creators than before, including legacy artists that worked with big names in the industry. One of these artists worked on various early 90’s magazine covers featuring Sonic the Hedgehog, and another was an artist that worked on Bally Midway’s arcade games throughout the 80’s and even was one of the artists behind the original Mortal Kombat games. The remainder of the event was mostly the same as 2025 (game shuffling aside for all the sections outside of the Museum), with some smart rearrangements of existing set pieces—such as moving the console timeline exhibit downstairs into the freeplay section, filling up the rest of the PC Museum with playable machines, and opening a small passageway in the main body of the vendors’ hall to dilute crowds were very welcome changes. If there was anything I wish was handled better, I think maybe the Tournaments section could have been modified to allow for more spectators to watch games (they cut off crowds once enough people gather in, but in all fairness there is only so much you can do with a museum that wasn’t originally intended to be a venue for big conventions). I didn’t spend as much money here as I was planning to, since I was saving up for AnimeNYC in two weeks, but I still came home with some swag from various booths.
- AnimeNYC was still pretty hotly anticipated from myself, especially with its enormous size. Unfortunately, I ended up visiting the event on its second shortest day, not noticing the hours for Thursday were only seven hours long instead of Friday and Saturday’s nine hours. With two less hours on the docket, I was forced to make rapid pace through the Artist’s Alley, scooping up every commission that I could get that was affordable with my current budget. In the end, even with only seven hours to spare, I still managed to end the day with over ten commissions and a big stock of cosplay shots, plus enough money to get some smaller bits of merch from a few artist booths before departing the event. A few artists that couldn’t fit into the main body of artists in the vendors area ended up in the gaming area, where tons of indie, arcade, and fighting games resided. I briefly play-tested two of the games in the gaming section, including a 2D side-scrolling brawler from an artist I started following on Facebook, but unfortunately I didn’t have much time to play any of the other games in the gaming area. Since there were no options for hamburgers at the Javits Center’s cafe, I ended up settling for a Korean veggie burger which was much more delocious than it had any right to be. In posting all the commissions to my Bluesky, I did end up almost crediting the wrong artist for one of them, since it was a last-minute acquisition, but thankfully their business card was in the sleeve for the art (which I prefer so I know who made what!). In conclusion, AnimeNYC 2026 was probably my favorite event of the year so far.
- EternalCon was supposed to take place in mid-July, only for it to get pushed back to September where it would end up getting canceled and merged with a different event sometime later in the year due to unforeseen circumstances.
If you’re wondering where the cosplay shots and commission scans are; I decided to post-pone them for the time being, since I still have a wide assortment of commissions from the second half of 2025’s events to scan in and trying to go through my cosplay shots is a very long time commitment that I currently decided to give to a different project that I’m currently working on. I cannot make any promises for the time being, but perhaps I will begin scouting for a good opening in my weekly scheduling to start going through the backlog of un-scanned commissioned arts and start uploading those cosplay photo galleries now that all these Summer events (including a very, very busy August) have come and gone. As for what's next, there's still a few more events left before the end of 2026, so keep an eye out for my thoughts on the rest of the year sometime in late December or early January, whenever I get around to finishing up the summary.
