Tokyopop Tour

The Tokyopop tour bus swung by the Books & Co. near my office today, so I stopped over to see what the deal was. I got there about 2:50 and the bus was already parked out front.Inside there were some chairs, tables and a podium set up already where the store often holds signings and whatnot. Conveniently for this event, the store's graphic novel/manga section was right there. The crew, all wearing America’s Greatest Otaku t-shirts, were still setting the tables up with swag of various kinds and Stu Levy was chatting with someone who, even at a glance, appeared to be the store manager. One of the crew members passed out raffle tickets to everyone who had taken a seat, and the store manager then provided a short welcome speech.

After a quick introduction of the "Otaku Six"......Levy talked a bit about Tokyopop's beginnings and answered a number of questions from the audience. Most of them suggested the audience knew little about manga and/or anything about publication in general. There were a few teenage girls in the front row (all cosplaying) who seemed to know their stuff, but I got the sense that most of the audience were folks who happened to be in the bookstore at the time anyway.The Otaku Six then took over the remainder of the program. They plugged a few of Tokyopop's books, some new some older and then raffled off a number of items from t-shirts and hats to DVDs and CDs to manga. They then called up the handful of cosplayers in the audience for some kudos.(I haven't read any of the series these come from, so I can't comment on how 'accurate' they are. Though I will say the girl with the shiny belt buckle above -- cosplaying as Italy from Hetalia -- had on a killer pair of boots, which you obviously can't see very well here because of the heavy backlighting from the windows.) I believe all of these folks got some Tokyopop swag for their efforts.

The Otaku Six (well, two of them) performed a skit of sorts to teach some simple Japanese phrases, and held a trivia contest. The contest was another indicator that the crowd wasn't terribly into manga -- they had to keep resorting to the easiest questions and even some of those didn't get answered by the audience. There was another round of raffles.

That all took about an hour and gave them, in theory, another hour for the crowd to pick up some of the promo materials and get stuff signed by Levy.
The event seemed a little loose, and was largely run by the Otaku Six. Aside from the Q&A, Levy provided little obvious direction. They all seemed pretty enthused, despite having been on the road for over a month (apparently including sleeping in the bus itself) and it was easy to see why those six folks were chosen for this tour.

I think they were thrown off a bit by this particular stop NOT being a part of their America’s Greatest Otaku filming though. I suspect that was a timing issue more than anything, but without a large, dedicated contingent of existing Tokyopop/manga fans, I think they were thrown slightly by what to do with everyone. Still, it was a decent event. Everyone walked away with sampler copies of Deadman Wonderland and Fruits Basket, and I scored Sokora Refugees vol. 2 in one of the raffles. (Which I hadn't heard of before, but the art, at least, looks quite interesting.) Several of the other folks who won items from the raffle seemed genuinely pleased with their loot, and those last two photos show there was a decent crowd who hung around after the main event.

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