Operation Kokkyou Rush! (Country Border Rush!)
EOY (Singapore) ------> Comic Fiesta (KL, Malaysia)
Many people were slightly upset about the clashing dates between the two major year-end events of the year. But that didn’t stop us from visiting the two events under a very tight schedule. (And no, we did not do ninja splits)
Resident artists Jiemi and Ophelia decided to take a short break from booth-rotting the booths and head out to check on the year-end events.
The End-of-Year 2011, 17th December:
The big day for one of Singapore’s longest running cosplay events,
The EOY is back for the 13th year.
And Daiyaku was proud to be one of the supporting entities for the event.
“EOY e yokoso, Goshujin-sama~”
As you step into the grounds of the Republic Cultural Centre, you will be greeted by a row of frilly-sweet maids, which makes you wonder if you’ve come to the right place.
No worries, the theme for this year’s EOY 2011 is one of the trends and popular culture often featured in fanservice and parodies: “Meido”, in conjunction with the coming of the guest artist for this year’s EOY, Hitomi from @Home Cafe, one of the most popular cafes in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan.
"Goshujin-sama, Douzo~"
It's great to see the meido ambassadors in action, something new which we haven't really seen throughout the EOYs. Since this year's EOY theme is on meido, they did a really great job bringing out the essence of the theme. (Photo by Dion, one of the meidos in the picture)
This year’s EOY is pretty much theme-based. Where meido’s rule the main event grounds. But of course there’s your usual dose of great cosplay exchanges at the venue as well as doujin artists and entrepreneurs selling their works of art and products made to tease the temptations of fellow anime fans. Groups such as Collateral Damage Studios, Comix Pandora, METRONOME, Teru teru, Ice*Berry, just to name afew, were there at the booths as well.
The 'Calm before the Storm' shot of the booth area
And as we head towards the EOY merchandise booth, 4 shady figures seem to be playing something…
Nande Kore?! (Photo by C.D.S)
What seem to be a suspected cosplay gambling den turned out to be a demonstration of one of the featured products of this year’s EOY! (To think datenshis are out there saving the world while Garterbelt is here playing cards)
“Project Pimp Butler”
Daiyaku was proud to be one of the collaborating artists involved in this project together with C.D.S, Comix Pandora and Teru-teru. It’s a card-game based on Old Maid, only this time the victim is the Pimp Butler of SGcafe, Blur King and not forgetting his harem of maids featuring mascots of local art groups and communities.
It was an extremely fun and fulfilling experience sweatshopping it out with C.D.S. Do check out how Pimp Butler was born at C.D.S’s Website: “The Making of Project Pimp Butler”
Below are the mascots we drew for Project Pimp Butler.
Eventually, Hitomi did come down from the theatre to grace EOY’s booth with her presence, and even had a hand on trying out the game as well.
Just as planned, Unfortunately for Hitomi, she lost the match and as the rules depicted by 0filia, loser has to cast a Moe Moe Kyun spell on all of the spectators. But either way, to her, it didn’t break a sweat.
Here’s the recording of the showdown as recorded by Ani-Culture’s Tueac:
It was awesome to have a Japanese celebrity meido trying out our game!
And just as EOY draws to a close for the year, we head our way to KL, Malaysia via bus at 11:30pm and slept through the night…
Comic Fiesta 2011, 17th-18th December:
For this write-up, the pictures will be courtesy of Tama-Chan from Ani-Culture.net as apparently our artists at Daiyaku are not exactly that keen on photography.
KL e Yokoso~!
18th December 2011, 6am, MY/SG Time
We finally touched down at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia via bus at the Berjaya Times Square where we set base at Melia, KL Hotel. For some unknown reason, the bus driver forgot to turn down the lights in the bus throughout the trip, which left some of us in a zombie-like state when we reached.
We took a 2 hour break at the hotel before heading up north to KLCC, or better known as the Petronas Twin Towers which was once hailed as the tallest structures in the world. For this year, Comic Fiesta is held at the Convention Centre.
All our Malaysian friends gathering for the second big day.
We reached at about 10am, and we were already greeted with a humongous crowd of our Malaysian counterparts all gearing up for the second day of Comic Fiesta. A long queue was sighted just outside the convention halls, and being the conditioned Singaporeans we are when we equate long queues to free stuff, we happily joined in.
And as we head into the hall….
Finally we're in Comic Fies-- NANI?! OAQ?!
Osu~! We’re finally in Comics Fiesta~! NOT.
The hall you see above is just mainly for ticketing and cosplay photography. As usual, CF restricted cosplay photography inside the main event hall, hence, all cosplayers and cosplay photographers are directed to this area to perform their shoot/pose fest.
The main event hall was supposedly already overcrowded as we heard from some of the peeps there, and immense crowd control was implemented, meaning long queue waiting times. Not that we actually mind, though we were just somewhat puzzled with the huge space rented just for the ticketing and cosplay photography alone.
Aight, so we waited for about 15-20 mins. Thankfully not that long, and we finally got our tickets, End of waiting round 1, now it’s round 2. As we take this time to put on our ‘wrist tickets’, we slowly moved up the queue and towards the main entrance of the main event grounds….
Osu, We're finally IN!!
And finally, we’ve gotten into the event grounds, crowd’s even bigger and feisty in here. Emcees kept announcing on the restrictions of cosplay photography in the area. (Though not exactly enforced, look at the picture above to see if you can spot anyone breaking the rules… =x) Being the geeky artists we are, we set off straight into the booths.
Buu Fu~ Buu fu~
Tons of booths, tons of artists, tons of works to look at.
Apparently Comics Fiesta is more inclined the arts and doujin. Yay for us, though there is abit of a problem. There is some segregation involved, since cosplay photography wasn’t encouraged in the main event hall and redirected to another hall instead so as to have a smooth flow of crowd traffic. Of course there were some unhappy faces in regards to this issue, where even our resident artist, 0filia dissed off a photographer when he stopped in the middle of a narrow booth alley to take pictures of a cosplayer. Not that she can help it by not scolding the guy, we were all pushed forward by a tsunami of crowds wanting to head to the next booth.
From our observation, the enforcing of ‘no cosplay photography’ in the main hall was somewhat, ‘useless’. Apologies for being blunt, we can’t blame the photographers there, a good shot is hard to come by, so of course instincts kick in. And also, we can’t blame the organisers as well, they’re already having their hands full running the event.
Though we somehow suggest is that the event space may want to be enlarged so as to cater to all doujin artists, cosplayers and photographers. Ah well, either ways, as long as everyone else has fun and a great catch up with each other. =)
As we walked through the booths of CF, we saw in awe of the standard of artworks these artists were making and selling. Made the both of us realize we still have a long long way to go. As we moved on, we see more and more fabulous artwork, some even published their own comics to sell. From booth to booth, we see more and more variety of high-standard artwork….
Though there is a problem. If you’ve been reading the above paragraph carefully, there wasn’t anything which enticed us to place our $-moolah-$ upon. We had the cash ready to spend for CF, artworks were top-notch, but thing is, it’s mainly just prints, posters, postcards, bookmarks, artbooks.
Okay, we do give them some consolation, 0filia came to CF just to meet a specific maker of home-made hats, a green color ‘godzillia-lookalike’ creature hat which looks as though it’s gnawing on your head, and find them she did, and immediately bought the hat.
OMNOMNOMNOMNOM~! by RAWR
But nope, we didn’t buy anything else. It isn’t exactly doing much justice to some fans who’re gonna have a huge headache when they look back at the walls in their room thinking: “Which one should i sacrifice for the next poster i’m going to buy at CF?” But of course, there will be customers, but as us fellow artists, we just didn’t find much things interesting other than some hand-made products and also a kick-ass sculptor which we saw at one of the booths.
Me Sculpta~
Either way, we salute the artists of Malaysia. Most probably what we saw at the booths at CF is just the tip of the iceberg. But we have to admit, their art is amazing.
And after an hour or so, we decided to take our leave from the event as the event was getting alittle overcrowded and there wasn’t really much of a reason for us to stay where we don’t really know the people there. For the next 2 days, we hanged around KL exploring the main city area especially Berjaya Times Square trolling around for cheap stuff.
And hence, Operation Kokkyou Rush!! Complete~!
2012 and Beyond…
As we move on to the year 2012,
It’s going to be a brand new year for the group.
We got to meet new people, establish closer bonds with the other doujin groups as well as having fun and a wonderful experience going through events and even doing projects together.
Hopefully we get to see more in 2012.
We have yet to get our line-up of events we’ll be attending, but we’ll definitely be toning down on our appearances as we try to bring Daiyaku further to greater lengths.
Till then, we hope that you guys had a real fulfilling year in 2011 and we hope to see you guys geared up for 2012!
Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year~~
Credits of the photos involved in this post goes out to:
J2meepok, Ani-Culture, C.D.S, RAWR and Dion
