Recently, I wrote a comment to a column in
The Oregonian which was written by Steve Duin and regarded Portland Comic Con / Wizard World Portland. But I mentioned Kumoricon in my comment so I thought I'd post it here:
Comment on Steve Duin blog: Closing thoughts on Wizard World Portland 2014 - OregonLive.com.
If you don't want to bother following the hyperlink, the text of my comment is here below. Thanks for reading!
Saturday, February 01, 2014 12:20 PM
Flyvapnet wrote:
I had a good time at the convention; and that's probably because (a) it's the first such convention I'd ever attended, (b) the costume players I met were charming and (c) a kindly gentleman gave me the gift of a ticket. I know Mr. Duin is a serious collector of Golden Age super-hero comic books, hence his criticisms regarding the dearth of comic-book industry representation are well taken. I, on the other hand, am an aficionado of the anime and manga genres which arrived here from the Orient several decades ago.
One of the anime and manga traditions which latterly came to our shores is costume playing a.k.a. cosplay. It's a popular-culture phenomenon, the appeal and magnitude of which is either denigrated or ignored (or both) by most corporate mainstream journalistic media of communication outlets. Alas! Yet there's a huge cosplay convention held right here in the Portland metropolitan area every year: Kumoricon, a term derived from the Japanese word for cloudy. Kumoricon was created by an anime club at my alma mater, the University of Oregon.
Ideally, Kumoricon's venue would be located in Portland proper; but the downtown business community's crusade to make ours a flyover city culminated in 2009, when Hilton Portland & Executive Tower bosses took the cosplayers' money and then treated those paying customers quite shabbily. Performance art based upon fictional characters is apparently not something the lodging industry in downtown Portland recognizes, even as it gladly takes artists' money. So now Kumoricon is held in Vancouver, just across the Columbia River, a place which is apparently less infested with Calvinistic/neo-Puritan corporate executives.
Here's hoping Portland Comic Con / Wizard World Portland gets its act together in future, heeding Mr. Duin's valid criticisms. For the ticket price, attendees deserve a lot more professional comics-industry representation--Occidental super heroes and Oriental anime/manga alike--whilst the organizers need to spend less on big-noise guests and direct those savings to areas in need of improvement. Also, more cosplayers! (That's so "The Oregonian"'s photographers can't avoid seeing them and its photo editor might eschew the political-correctness mandate which forbids images of attractive young women.)
