Whew!
Sorry for the lack of updates this past Monday. I had an AMAZING and Super Busy weekend at the Middle Tennessee Anime Convention in downtown Nashville, TN with my wife Betsy of the ever increasingly popular comic FRUIT! and caught the dreaded “Con Crud” after the show so I’ve been pretty doped up on cold medicine for the last few days.

In lieu of a comic, please enjoy this awesome collection of photos from various cosplay dudes and dudettes while I give you a recap of the weekend.

Friday:

I was very nervous about MTAC because I’m obviously not an ANIME comic. For that matter, I can’t draw in an anime style to save my life. Be that as it may, I’m a huge fan of their sister con GMX (The Geek Media Expo) so I wanted to give this one a go. It’s got a huge (10K plus attendees) turnout so I figured we could make a buck or two and pick up some new readers.

We got to the show around 9:30 Friday morning and after playing a little parking lot roulette we got set up in the artist alley on the second floor. We were seated in a pretty good spot next to the fabulous deviantartist Tenor who brought a lot of prints of her amazing works and was taking on site omissions as well. Her and her friends were very cool and helped us fit in and she explained the inner storyline to the Castlevania line of games that I never knew existed.

This year MTAC moved to the Nashville Convention Center and there was definitely a positive feel to all the new space. The Dealer Room and Exhibitor Hall were located on the first floor and they were sharing space with the Full Moon Tattoo and Horror convention which was an odd combination to say the least, but the ability to buy a shared pass to both shows definitely helped sales and floor traffic.

Friday, like any first day of a convention, was pretty horrible for us business wise. No one really buys anything the first day, and since we weren’t anime, we had little more than the occasional table traffic while people waited to get into panels. There was a small handful of interested peoples who came to see our goods and I hoped my famous sales pitch would plant the seeds for future sales over the weekend. We stuck it out until around 7:00 that night and called it a day. Paul from Aradani Studios was nice enough to let us store our stuff in their booth overnight so we wouldn’t have to cart it back with us and set up again Saturday, so a special thanks to them for that serious favor.

Saturday:

Business picked up a little on Saturday. We sold a few Trouble Ticket books and a T-Shirt or two and gave out some buttons to people with exceptional costumes. Later on that afternoon I went downstairs to say high to my friend Scott Sava who does the amazing comic The Dreamland Chronicles. While I was down there, Marcus AKA the Dealer Room God let us move into one of the exhibitor tables that went unclaimed so we packed up shop and headed to the promised land where sales definitely improved. We stuck around after closing to check out the Kaiju wrestling (where dudes wear big monster costumes and battle over a small fake city like in the old movies) and then watched Crossfire Wrestling put on a good exhibition show. By that point we were pretty beat so we loaded up the cart and took the long drive home to get a good nights sleep for the Sunday rush.

Sunday:

Sunday was definitely our biggest day. Even though some people were confused after we moved downstairs, most of them ended up finding us and bought some merchandise. We got to see Jason David Frank (the Green Ranger and guest of honor) do a karate lesson and he seemed like a cool dude. Around 3:00 they started shutting down the show so we said our goodbyes to old friends and left for the house once again. All in all it was a good show.

Pros:

- Great show with a VERY reasonably priced Artist Alley, lots of turnout, good for beginners and experienced dealers, great enthusiastic crowd, a lot of panels and extra activities, good location, LOTS of space to work, and a fantastic staff.

Cons:

- Parking can be a nightmare downtown, the food was ridiculously priced (so bring your own if you want to make money), slight growing pains from moving to a new location.

Anyway, I hope all of you that came out to see us had a fantastic time. We’re off the con schedule for a little while until October so we’ll be focused on the online store and I’ll be focused on a better update schedule. See you next Monday.

~Johnathon (Chuck)