When Reed Exhibition announced over a year ago that it was moving New York Comic Con (NYCC) from the spring to the fall and taking all of the space of the Javits Center, it left a lot of questions to be answered .

They had another convention, New York Anime Festival (NYAF), which also ran in the fall and the Javits Center is a large, expensive convention hall.  Many fans were wondering what was going to happen to NYAF with NYCC taking over.  The result was  a massive crowd of fandom all stuffed into one building.

While growth is good,  I don’t think they were prepared for the crowds.  The intent was to use the entire Javits Center, but renovations removed a lot of the available space.  The lines to buy and pick up tickets wrapped around the Javits Center.  NYCC consumed most of the available space. It took up the main exhibition floor and moved all the small industry, artists alley and celebrity signings  into their own hall.

Its not all that surprising that the main floor overflowed with people even on Sunday. The artist alley and small industry hall had a bit more breathing room being separated from the main floor.  But NYAF got condensed into one packed hall downstairs into a corner.  This made it feel like NYAF had been swallowed by NYCC and completely overlooked. Hopefully, next year they’ll be able to get the entire convention center so the crowds will be more manageable and both conventions will have enough space.  Below is a photo of the crowd before closing on Sunday.  Normally exhibitors are already packed and ready to run.

For the most part we kept towards the NYAF side, as the NYCC side was way too crowed to allow for any cosplay coverage.   I wish we were able to cover some of the Comic Con panel but with the crowding and rescheduling of panels, it was difficult to attend anything.

We did make it to the two fashion shows, however.  The first one on Saturday was the Hangy and Angry Fashion show, which also had a showing at AnimeNEXT.  They again brought over the Japanese designer Gashicon. As a bonus, Angry (Rika Ishikawa) from the band that the clothing line took its name from also came over to meet her fans.

Sunday featured “The Never-Ending Closet,” which included designers that incorporated gothic, lolita and neo-Victoriana styles into their clothing.  While the attendance to both events were large, we have to wonder if more of these fashion events will be included outside of the NY/NJ area conventions.

NYAF again brought in a musical guest; this year it was Minori Chihara.   Known for both her voice acting and singing, she had a performance before the masquarade.  Between her fans and the anime crowd they were able to pack the theater to capacity.

The Masquerade with the convention’s Yume prize could have been better.  The organization wasn’t so great and it ran late.  I wish it could have had more contestants, but they were all winners from their regional competitions.

This year they added a walk-on competition.  This led to some confusion, though. Anime conventions usually call this a “hall cosplay” competition.  But  for the walk-on contestants there wasn’t really any prize except for recognition on the stage. In the end the winners of the Yume prize were the Texas-based team cosplaying from Zelda.

Overall,  the combination of NYCC and NYAF was the only way for NYAF to survive in name.  In terms of cosplay, it was apparent to us (since we come mostly from anime conventions) that anime fans are pretty open to things outside of their usual fandoms.  The pure comic fans, in contrast, didn’t seem to like the inclusion of another group into their con.  Maybe next year when the Javits Center gets fixed it won’t be as crowded and the situation will improve. We certainly hope so.

As always our photo coverage of the event is found in our photo section.