Mark Henry Murphy

Right, so at Experience Japan this year I had the pleasure of taking part in a panel with Seán Hand from the Eirtakon committee and two folks from the Nom-Con committee.  We were given pretty short notice of it so had a bit of a rush t put things together.  Eventually we agreed on a format of giving a general overview of anime conventions, from their beginnings in Japan, their emergence in American and the export of the American format over to Europe and recently to Ireland.

Seán is a guy who knows a lot about the makeup of an anime con, having been involved with Eirtakon from the beginning.  He’s also got brains that he often puts to good use and is quite god at public speaking.  So for the majority of the panel we let him lead the way.  Best move really!

We kept things pretty vague and general.  The audience wasn’t that of people knowledgeable of anime conventions, of even people who could give a toss about anime, so we tried not to confuse/bore.  Probably we failed miserably – the subject matter is hardly on how to swallow exploding knives with flaming hilts.  For what it was I think we did a good job and couldn’t have broken it down much further.  There was maybe 15 people there and once you take out a few members of other committees there was maybe 10 spectators to our car crash, which wasn’t too bad considering.

We only had about 20mins for the panel, meaning we had to run through things pretty fast and there was no time for Q&A.  Towards the end more people started turning up but this turned out to be because the next panel was a guy in a full samurai suit!  Far more interesting stuff.

I put together a Powerpoint presentation for the panel and if you’re bored enough to flick through it you can grab it here.  We did a vaguely similar panel at Anime Dublin last weekend but I’ll leave it for another day to wax lyrical about that.