This past Saturday I accompanied my buddy Tas to the 2010 New York ComicCon / New York Anime Festival. Geek mecca, basically, drawing in geeks, nerds, otaku, cosplayers, and dorks alike for hundreds of miles. Tas would be interviewing a couple of music acts that were in town (for the New York Anime Festival half of the combo), and asked me to come out to shoot the interviews. I met up with him and Will, another friend of ours, at the Kitano Hotel in Midtown for the first of the interviews.
Puffy AmiYumi are a somewhat well-known J-Punk band among the nerd crowd, mostly due to the fact that they sang the Teen Titans theme song and had their own eponymous show on Cartoon Central for a while. As it turned out, Tas was actually tag-teaming the interview. First up would be Amanda from Funimation, who interviewed the team in English. After she was done, Tas would jump in with his own Japanese interview. It was a dynamic that worked well.
After the interview we made our way to the convention center, though I didn’t take too many photos there. I’ve never really been one for con photos, mostly because a good 90% of them tend to be either photos taken of costumes on the con floor, or blurry/far away shots of celebrity appearances. In short, most con photography tends to smack of snapshotism, which is something I try to avoid.
Though I did see this really cool Steampunk Iron Man that I couldn’t resist taking a snap of:
After wandering the floor a fair bit, we made our way to the second and last interview for the day, Boom Boom Satellites, another J-Rock duo, though skewing more to the electronica side of things (or so Wiki tells me, I had no idea who these guys were). The interview went much like the first one, with Amanda opening and Tas switching in to close it out.
All in all not a bad way to spend a Saturday, though even a mere few hours on the floor was enough for me to contract the dreaded con plague, from which I’m only now (a week later) starting to recover. Next time I’m going in a full HAZMAT suit.
