Finishing up our anime con coverage for the year, we recently made the adventure down to New York to check out BAAF, the Big Apple Anime Fest. Otaku Aniverse staffers, Eddie Hicks and Matt Capranos, entered into the depths of New York to see what’s up.

Held at the Marriot Hotel, we were quite surprised to see the size of this place. The con was spanned across 4 floors (Technically 3 since one floor consisted only of one Panel Room.) And packed with over 13,000 people! And it easily shows the amount of people, with the masses of line ups and just people walking around. We arrived late Friday night, due to some timing and budget issues; we were only able to stay for Saturday’s show.

One of the most notable things about this place was the amount of organization present. BAAF has got to be the most organized convention we’ve been to… well ever. Just about everything went according to plan and the staff was quite helpful with questions and what not.  I’m more fond of the Press Room and the handouts such as press releases and press kits they had for members of the press like us. And the brief hook up with the wireless network hasn’t bad either. Matt was able to access what he needed to during the show with our Laptop.

Yeah, this blew my mind when I saw it too.

Matt trying to get a good wireless signal

Jih-Roh

Just a small bit of the 13,000 attendees

And a nice restaurant to relax at

The con’s man focus seemed to be manga, since there were so many panels dedicated to it. A lot of them were quite good and informative.  Of course the major panel would be Tokyopop, since they revealed a few interesting bits of info that wasn’t known.

Tokyopop Panel

Much of the panel consisted of a round up of the company's already revealed 2004 line up, followed by a give away of some prizes mostly mangas and a few DVDs. However what was revealed was that they had the rights to RG Veda, Tokyo Babylon from CLAMP, Crest of the Stars and Comic Party. Actually they mentioned that the news wasn’t supposed to leave the room. Not sure if it was a joke or not, but since every other site has this info… what the hell.

The other interesting bit was their Marmalade Boy Plans, which can be found here. http://www.otakuaniverse.com/cgi-bin/news/viewnews.cgi?id=1062550873

Outside of the Panels, my only major gripe was the 2^nd floor of the con, being the one with the Exhibitor Room… it was hard to get around there. There was always a huge line up in front to get in. This is normal for most cons I’ve been to, but normally that line up vanishes later on during the day. But here? It went on for quite awhile; I know they likely limited the amount of people in the room for safety reasons but still… Further more, once you step foot on that floor, someone from the staff was asking us to move right away. Apparently we couldn’t even stop briefly to work on the laptop or take pictures.  Oh well.

Once everything was said and done, we had to make our way back to Toronto. Despite only being able to spend one day here, we had quite a bit of fun. I could only imagine how much more we could have had if we stayed for the entire event.  I’m certainly looking forward to next year’s showing. Out of all the cons I’ve been to in August, this was the one I’ll remember for awhile.
 

-- Eddie Hicks, Otaku Aniverse