Anime Expo, a
Thirteen-Year Retrospective
Part One: the Long
Beach Years
When I came back from Anime Expo 2014, I realized it was my 13th consecutive Anime Expo.
Sigh.
Yes, a sigh, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a sigh of exhaustion from all the
different things I did. It’s a sigh of
both joy and sadness as I saw, but had to say goodbye to, some longtime
friends. It’s also partially a sigh of
some deep thought, since Anime Expo used to be the most exciting thing of the
summer, at some point even more than San Diego Comic Con. Now, it’s not, and not simply because of
SDCC.
The Long Beach Years (2001 -2003)
I first went to Anime Expo in 2001, the summer after my junior
year in high school. These were the
years (2001-2003) that it was at the Long
Beach Convention Center, right after AX was asked to not come back to the
Anaheim Convention Center, for one reason or another. I think it involved cosplayers going to
Disneyland and being mistaken for character workers, and this was the mid
1990s, where cosplay was anything but mainstream.
