The layout of Artist’s Alley at ACen is perhaps the exact opposite of any other convention I’ve been to.  Most conventions, it’s the exhibitors, vendors, and media booths at the front and Artist’s Alley is in the back.  At ACen, it’s Artist’s Alley at the front and everything else in the back.  So we artists got the fans just as they were walking in, with me personally being in one of the main avenues by the entrance.

You’d think this’d be a huge boon, but a fan’s instinct is to walk in and immediately check everything out before they start throwing their money around, which makes them hold off a bit on Artist’s Alley and thus makes them inclined to spend more on the vendor items in the back rather than the artwork.  This pretty much painted the picture of my Friday at Anime Central.  It got to the point where if I heard someone say “I’ll come back tomorrow” one more time, I was gonna puke.

"How can we buy art? We already spent way too much on our costumes!"

I tried to shake it off though.  Friday is always the slowest sales day at conventions, and if nothing else I made enough to cover my parking, gas, and food for the weekend.  And it’s not like I didn’t drum up interest in the people who stopped by my table.

"We are very interested."

Easily the highlight of Friday was getting to meet Martin “Little Kuriboh” Billany (Creator of “Yugioh Abridged”), who was selling T-shirts at the Shark Robot booth with his wife.  I can scarcely describe how much I enjoy “Yugioh Abridged“, and his role as Freeza on “Dragonball Abridged”, so it was a pleasure to meet him.  Because the last Abridged movie he did involved time travel and directly referenced the “Doctor Who” opening during the credits, I made sure to get him one of my “Doctor Who” prints and a copy of “Eddie Van Helsing” on Sunday, receiving a Seto Kaiba keychain in return.  I then immediately left before I was tempted to rattle off all the lines from his various videos (lord knows how much of that he gets).

Super special awesome!

"I'm Seto Kaiba. And the size of this keychain is the same size as the amount of respect I have for you."

Worn out from the slow sales, I ran over to Dusty Jack‘s booth and told her I needed to do something before heading home, otherwise I was going to be a wreck the entire weekend.  We hooked up with my former co-worker Kat (who had been cosplaying as Mephisto) all day and had some Goose Island 312 in her room at the Hyatt while talking about the old days at work.

This is the most low key "How Do We Kill Superman" meeting I've ever been to.

This just shows how ignorant I still was about how things work at Anime Central, because the Hyatt is clearly where the party really was!  Almost everywhere you looked in the lobby, there were wall-to-wall nerds, at least half in costume.  We saw a huge line walking in, I’m assuming it was for the Rave.  I kept joking it was the line for Johnny Yong Bosch‘s band Eyeshine, which (wishing no offense to the man) I’m sure would surprise even him.

"Guys, thank you, but seriously, we're not that good."

Dusty and I hooked up with some of her friends and shared Calamari in the hotel bar.  Before leaving I made sure to contribute a piece to the ACen art collection, drawing up a quick sketch of Koriko for them.  To better days!

Gotta leave your mark somehow.

"Don't bother me. I'm busy drawing and spoiling the ending to 'Twilight Princess'."