HOW UN-CONVENTIONAL!

It's convention season now, which is why I missed writing my blog for the last two weeks, preparing and then recovering from the Anime Expo. Okay, lame excuse. Adam hasn't let me forget for a moment that I've been late with my blog.

Almost on a daily basis, our conversation has been, practically verbatim:

Adam: "Finish your blog yet?"

Me: "Working on it."

Adam: "It's a week late."

Me: "......"


Soooo...it was an excellent convention for us, definitely our best so far.

This was our third Anime Expo in a row, since Seven Seas' inception. This year, it really sank in how much we've grown in the last 3 years. A simple way to measure our growth is in terms of booth space.



In our first year, we only had one measly booth, which we had reserved ahead of time, but the AX convention manager made a big boo boo and forgot about our application and gave our booth space to someone else! When we arrived with all our boxes and equipment - no booth! Luckily, they had an open space somewhere else, right across from Jody Maroni's Sausage Kingdom.

And apparently, among those people who knew about Seven Seas at the time, very few could find us tucked away on the side. But one intrepid fan did find us, a guy who surprised and flattered us by cosplaying as John Parker, from NO MAN'S LAND!



In our second year, we had two booth spaces, with a much better location and lots more books to sell, and lots more fans who were aware of us. Location-wise, we were situated right behind Tokyopop but in front of Del Rey - that is to say, pretty much in the thick of things.



This year, our third year, we had three booth spaces right in front, in prime convention real estate, with tons of posters and lots of great new title for sale such as HE IS MY MASTER, VENUS VERSUS VIRUS, some new yuri titles, and HOLLOW FIELDS, one of the "nobel prize of manga" winners. We were pretty steadily mobbed by fans, and everyone seemed to know AOI HOUSE. (In fact, it was our best selling title at the con!) We sure came a long way since that first year across from the Sausage Kingdom.

Besides our great real estate, we also had a "Japanese living room" set up on the carpet, meaning one of those low Japanese coffee tables surrounded by zabuton (those Japanese cushions you sit on.) The way this came about was purely a mistake. It seems I ordered the wrong table for meetings, so when we arrived at the booth the day before the con, we were forced to improvise. I sent Yayoi out to Maru-kai, a nearby Japanese department store, and $60 later, we had a comfy, homey little Japanese living room in our booth, which Japanese guests and Hollywood folks appreciated when they came by for meetings and sat down cross-legged with us.


We also had our own Japanese maid promoting HE IS MY MASTER, and had more maids stop by to share the love, so to speak.


By the way, in a replay of our first year at AX, we had another cosplayer of one of our original characters show up: Captain Nemo!

Our panel was great fun too. We had the biggest turn-out yet-maybe some of that was run-off from the Viz panel right before us, but there were definitely a lot of Seven Seas fans in the audience. To compensate for my usual mild mannered shyness, we got a little wild and crazy, and encouraged audience participation, gave out gifts, and gave people a sneak peek into my laptop and the new projects that we're working on, plus made a bunch of announcements about new titles. It was a blast, and I can't wait for our next panel.

Which, coincidentally, is coming up at the San Diego Comic-Con on Friday, July 27, 4:30-5:30, Room 10. See you there, or at our booth!

And now for some non-convention, or other un-conventional tidbits...

I'm really excited about this-we got an endorsement for the rear cover of one of our original manga, THE OUTCAST, by none other than amazing actor Samuel L. Jackson! We actually got him to read a copy and agree to endorse it! What really impressed me is, he knew that we were in a hurry to get the book to press, and rushed to read it over the weekend and gave the book a fine endorsement. Nice guy, huh? As far as I know-let me know if I'm wrong here-but I don't believe that any other manga in the US has been endorsed by a Hollywood celeb before (I'm not counting Courtney Love because Princess Ai was supposedly written by her).

Yes, it sure does look like original English-language manga are starting to be taken more seriously. With our own Madeleine Rosca of HOLLOW FIELDS being one of the winners of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's "Nobel Prize" for manga (and we're in talks with various anime companies about making a Hollow Fields anime), and with Fred Gallagher's MegaTokyo getting published by Kodansha, it seems like it's a whole new era for OEL.

Also, I strongly suspect that we will have our first title licensed by a Japanese publisher. We've shown it to a number of major and minor Japanese publishers and they're showing big interest. There's even a Japanese video game company that asked if they could make a game of it. Can you guess which one of our new titles it is, pictured here?

Well, that's it for this week. See you next week for more, plus a new 4-panel strip from Hai, I promise!

Jason DeAngelis
July 12, 2007


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