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April 21st 2024, it was finally here! The (closest available Sunday the venue had to the-) 30th birthday of Final Fantasy 6, and the FF6 Prosit! mini-convention at Konohana Hall, Nishikujo, Osaka. As I said in a news update back in September, I planned to do a mini comic for the occasion, and hand it out for free around the event. Unfortunately a bout of food poisoning two weeks before (to say nothing of a bunch of nonsense around my new job) knocked the plans for that back, and it didn't get done. I stayed up until 2 in the morning on the day, scribbling away, but it just wasn't possible, in the end.
It'll be here when it is finished! So, with that not ready, the only thing I took to the con ended up being me, and much coinage so the sellers didn't have to fish out change. The weather was just as terrible as the previous time I went to a Konohana Konvention (Krazy, I know), though of course it had been gloriously sunny the day before.
I got there and it turned out Prosit! was actually a side-show to a "larger" (read: only a little bigger than Yonkoma Komachi) convention called Game Antique, which was mostly dedicated to "doujin soft"; retro-style games either for modern platforms, old consoles or modern hardware emulators that are more easily "hacked". There were also a bunch of people selling their own "doujin merch", keyrings, clear files, posters etc with their fanart on. I got some stickers of FF6 and 7. Oh, and there were comics, too! But not very many.
Prosit! itself was in a smaller side-room. The posters said it had 30 spaces, but only about 10-15 were being used, in the end. Other tables were put together at the side to use as chillout areas, and there was a drinks stand in one corner. Also a shipping service so people could post their purchases home rather than carrying them. You see loads of these tables at big cons in Japan, but it seemed a bit much to have one here!
Now, I'm assuming the real big fans of FF6 to have been people in their tweens and teens when it came out. This puts them in their mid-40's now, and I have to say, it seems like dementia comes early in Japan, or at least it does to people who played that game. Despite selling only a small number of spaces, it was very difficult to move around the room due to the inordinate number of hobbling, wobbling, doddering, slobbering, stammering, staggering fools lurching about the room in random patterns and trying to walk through solid objects. I finally got around all the dunces, dullards, demented dimwits, imbeciles and buffoons, and visited every occupied table, though. Most of them had comics and artbooks, though a few just had their own home-made figurines, clear files etc. One woman was also going a good cosplay as Gogo, one of FF6's more obscure characters, who can mimic whatever was the last thing the party did (double-use of a powerful summon for zero MP cost, anyone?). A few of the tables in the Prosit room were unattended, so it took a few trips, between wanders around the main hall (where I also bought some artbooks and looked at a few doujins) before I got them all. I also talked to one woman about wanting to make a mini, but not finishing it. Not sure she even understood what I was ranting about, to be fair. I bought at least one comic or artbook from every table that had them. And some furigana-free text stories, to boot. One day...
As FF6 is a pretty old game, a number of the books on sale were not newly-made, but rather compilations of older doujinshi that were made piecemeal for other, more general events. One small book (I thought it was just a notebook at first) named "I Found It" is crammed with loads of text stories. Unfortunately none of these compiled stories date back to the Comikets and other such events of the game's popularity, in 1994-5. I think the oldest date I saw in the compliations was from 2004!(It does also mean if I'd finished my mini, it would have been one of the newest things there.)
Doujinshi artists certainly like to give away what Ya Boi Zack likes to call "Tchochkeys" with thier books, so I ended up with innumerable stickers, a glittery postcard and, bizarrely, somebody gave me several sheets of FF6-themed note paper they'd made, with pretty good artwork of Terra! This is pretty old artwork, too. You can tell because the artists have actual websites and not just X pages. Shame those websites no longer exist.
Anyway, despite having looked forward to this event for months, l always knew it would be tiny, and that I'd not spend long there, so after less than two hours, it was time go. Every April or so there's a cheap foreign books sale at a big bookshop in Umeda. They constantly put out new stock for cheap prices, so I use it to catch up on whatever crap the Big Two are up to (I only buy retro stuff, of course). Anyway, the 21st was the second-to-last day and they'd excelled themselves, putting out two big collected books of 50's - 60's US Men's Magazine stories. Check THIS shit out!
So, productive day, all told. Just wish the weather had been better, and I'd finished that mini! |
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