The second annual New York Anime Festival, held this past weekend at the Javits Convention Center, began slowly with a small group of fans on the floor during Friday’s professional day but their numbers swelled considerably by the evening. By Saturday the exhibition floor was jammed with fans. NYAF show manager Lance Fensterman said the show’s unofficial attendance was 18,399 a 24% increase over the 14,000 fans that attended the show last year.
Next year’s show will again be held at the end of the September, despite conflicts with several conventions, among them Anime Weekend in Atlanta and San Francisco’s Yaoi-con. Reed Exhibitions, the organizer of the show (and sister company to PW), moved the NYAF to September from December to avoid bad weather and conflicts with school and university schedules. Nevertheless, some publishers were missing. Viz Media once again did not attend and Tokyopop, which has cut back its exhibition schedule in the wake of a financial reorganization, also did not exhibit after having had a major presence at last year’s show.
Nevertheless, the show featured a number of celebrity guests like artist Yoshitaka Amano, novelist Hideyuki Kikuchi, and celebrity chef Masahru Morimota from the TV show Iron Chef, was a big crowd pleaser. And despite the absence of some exhibitors, publishers like Vertical Inc., Del Rey, Yen Press and Media Blasters were on hand to announce new projects and sell books to eager fans.
At the show, Del Rey announced a new deal with the Cartoon Network to publish print comics for a number of the network's animated series. Yen Press showed off advance copies of the much anticipated manga series, the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and announced, Hero Tales, a new series by Hiromu Arakawa, creator of the bestselling Fullmetal Alchemist series. And Vertical was pushing and selling copies of a new hardcover edition of Black Jack, the classic medical manga series by the late acclaimed manga creator Osamu Tezuka.
Publishers contacted by PW during the show seemed happy with this year’s festival and were optimistic about the future of the U.S. manga market. At a panel on the State of the Manga industry featuring Michael Gombos of Dark Horse Comics, Kurt Hassler of Yen Press and Ali Kokmen from Del Rey, the group all agreed that despite the cutbacks at Tokyopop and at the Borders bookstore chain, they all expected the manga market to continue to grow. “The rate of growth has slowed,” said Kokmen, “but this is still an exciting time for manga.”
