I had a few observations about this year's Yaoi Con that I never really got to address in our posts, so I thought I'd throw them together in a column, which serves the double purpose of proving that we do still occasionally do columns. Yay!

So first off: the people who were there weren't terribly surprising, but it seemed like there were a lot of people who should have been there who weren't. Here's a little list...

(6) Discuss on the forums.

1. Be Beautiful is the most obvious example of a company that should have been around and wasn't-- even if there was just a single rep who ran a quickie panel and didn't have a booth, that would have been enough. People want to know what's going on with Be Beautiful and whether they'll be able to put out the rest of the books they need to, or whether they'll fizzle and die before then. Of course, Be Beautiful has never exactly been the most communicative of publishers, but I gather that BB is the only aspect of Central Park Media that's making any money for the company-- so it should be getting the company's entire attention. (Of course, I've also heard that CPM is down to only 3 or 4 staffers, but I don't know if that's true or just a hyperbole-- take it with the appropriate grain of salt). It could also be that BB simply doesn't know what's going to happen yet, but I think ANY kind of attendance at Yaoi-Con would have assured people that they were working things out. As it is, it's hard to remain optimistic.

2. Seven Seas. The company announced that it was starting a yaoi line at Anime Expo this year, with Yonezou Nekota's In God's Arms as their first title. But they had no presence at Yaoi Con and have really never followed up on anything yaoi-related (though there is a tentative July 2008 release date for the first volume of In God's Arms). On the forums, president Adam Arnold notes that the company is more focused on their yuri line than yaoi because there's more room for growth, but I wonder how seriously they're even taking the yaoi line? I mean, the company is based in Southern California-- getting someone up to San Francisco isn't that much of a hardship compared to Be Beautiful, who is based in New York. I currently have an e-mail out to Seven Seas asking if they have any updates on their yaoi line, so if I hear back I can ask a few more questions about it.

3. Iris Print is a western boys love company that shows a lot of promise (I'm specially excited about their new magazine, BL Twist, which I just ordered the first volume of). They were at Yaoi Con last year, but they were absent from the panel schedule, and I don't remember seeing them in the dealer room either (it's possible that they shared a booth with someone and I missed it). They did say on their website that they'd be at the con, but I'm surprised that they didn't run a panel, especially since the first volume of BL Twist is out this October.

4. Yen Press was our surprise yaoi licensor this year, announcing over the weekend that they had licensed three Lily Hoshino titles. But they didn't announce them at the convention...then again, maybe they just didn't want to give away the surprise too early. (I can't say I think it was a great tactic, though; their licenses are kind of lost in the big Yaoi-Con list. I would have waited until a week or two after the con, or maybe a week or two before.)

5. Go Comi and their Wendy Pini project, a slashy retelling of Poe's The Masque of Red Death, was also absent from the festivities-- which is funny considering how heavily they've been pushing the series elsewhere.

6. Whoever passed out those Lynn Flewellyn books in the swag bags. Seriously, there were these random Bantam TPBs by Lynn Flewellyn in the bags with the schedules and stuff, and we have no idea why. I mean, I know there's a gay couple in the book, but who gives out free swag without actually advertising themselves? It was a little weird.

So yeah, there were a few faces missing amongst the crowd. It was nice to see newcomer Deux have such a presence, though; we weren't expecting a full 10 titles to be announced. Nor were we expecting them to have two editors from Japan on-hand to answer all sorts of questions! Deux, next year, send out a press release about these things, aight? Then you won't have to be sad about having a small crowd!

Juné's whopping 30+ title announcement was a little daunting, especially since most of the titles were ones we weren't especially familiar with (thank god for that list for the press). All in all I'd say there weren't a lot of truly exciting announcements, but then, as the market continues to grow, the number of high-profile titles that haven't already been picked up gets smaller (as does the number of Yoshinaga books to be licensed). A few books and authors remain fairly unlicensed-- another Mika Sadahiro title that WASN'T Under Grand Hotel was picked up; Pathos is to be released by Juné. I'm always surprised that there aren't more Naono Bohra licenses-- Drama Queen is the only one who has any of her books. Jordan continues to pine for Tori Maia. I realized that while 801 Media certainly has the first five books of Love is Like a Hurricane, they may not have the sixth volume (labeled "Plus"), which was released by a different publisher than the others (1-5 are Kousai Shobou, + is by Ohkura Shuppan). I have an e-mail out to them to confirm. I'd like to see other Shimazaki titles licensed too. 801 plans to announce a big batch of licenses in their Christmas newsletter, so I guess we'll see. ♥

Then there's the issue of the hotel. Now, we didn't stay at the hotel proper-- my parents live 40 minutes away from the location --and while it's easy enough to get to and all, we weren't big fans of the hotel. It's rather labyrinthine to get around to anything, especially the Verfuhren Cafe, which was tucked away in the randomest of spots and virtually impossible to just stumble upon (and hard to find intentionally too). Smaller panels were held in converted guest rooms, and they got ridiculously hot sometimes-- when we went to the Yaoi Press panel it was absolutely steamy in there from whatever went on before, and that's not steamy in the GOOD sense. Blech. Also, I was really unsatisfied with the WiFi setup-- you can't just pay for a day at a time if you're not staying at the hotel; the convention has to actually pay for con access to the 'net (and it's like $150 a day). Now, I'm perfectly happy to pay $10 or $12 a day for Internet access when and where I need it, and that should be accessible to people who aren't actually staying at the hotel. I was able to get the access I needed, but it would have been nice to have it more accessible-- then we could have, for example, run a chat room while we were in panels for you guys to sit in on and get real-time updates. But instead, we couldn't access the Internet in the main panel room. Blah!

Jordan didn't like the dealer room setup, where it was split into sort of a main room, then a smaller room, and then a bunch of fan market rooms. I wasn't particularly opposed to that except for the crowds that gathered in the halls, it was actually kind of fun to always have a new place to pop into and check out...but the main dealer room where the corporate vendors were got waaaaay too crowded. Also, the swap meet was outside, and it was super windy (and besides, what would they have done had it rained?).

The staff at the hotel was really quite nice, though, particularly handling my frazzled complaints about the Internet and allowing us to take over the public section of their business center for our interview with Takanaga-sensei and the like.

I've confirmed that the con will be at the same hotel next year, but hopefully some of these issues will get fixed up. And on the other hand, the Bishounen Auction room was pretty good, complete with a little stage, though I wish the lighting had been a bit better for photo-taking.

And finally, I wanted to chat just a liiiittle while about manhwa. We thoroughly expected to see some BL manhwa from Korea to pop up at the con, and it didn't-- NETCOMICS wasn't even there (though since they share booths with Yaoi Press, who they are also partnered with for YP's online manga distro, I guess we could say they kind of were?). I keep hearing that more and more BL manhwa is coming out in Korea and that some of it is fantastic, but we only see a few books make it stateside. Then again, maybe we'll see what happens with that FreeManhwa.com site, which Ice Kunion's site now forwards to (not that they did BL before, but they could in the future). Okay, now I'm just rambling, I think.

All in all we definitely had a blast at YC07; the events were really fun as were the panels and seeing all the industry and blogging people we knew (as well as a fair few YaoiSuki readers!). The 801 Media party was also awesome, and we heard that Takanaga-sensei liked our donut penis, which gives me all sorts of warm fuzzies in my heart. Someday we'll have things like money and time and we'll throw some kind of post-Yaoi Con room party and invite everyone. It'll be awesome. SOMEDAY!