Umapyoi! Umapyoi! (Horse joy! Horse joy!)
Time to lace up the track shoes. It’s Fourth of July weekend, which means three things: backyard barbecues, fireworks, and Anime Expo. And while the peak of summer uma racing bursts from the gate on July 3 at Saratoga, the starting bell rings one day earlier in downtown Los Angeles for North America’s premier anime convention.
From July 2–5, Anime Expo once again takes over DTLA, sprawling across the Los Angeles Convention Center, L.A. LIVE, major theaters, arena spaces, hotel ballrooms, outdoor plazas, parking structures… just about every available patch of convention-ready racing pavement.
The next four days won’t be a sprint. We’ll be running a full marathon of coverage: major announcements, world premieres, industry insights, floor reports, cosplay sightings, and whatever other surprises come charging down the final stretch.
After last year’s success, we’re bringing back our “Daily Dispatches” format, serving up a steady stream of bite-sized content carrots throughout the event. Some updates will be quick. Some may go long. All of them will come straight from the AX track.
Ready? Steady! Start!
Days
Wednesday (Day 0) Photos // Thursday (Day 1) // Friday (Day 2) • Photos // Saturday (Day 3) • Photos // Sunday (Day 4)
Events
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 (World Premiere) // Full Review • Let’s Make a Deal • Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi (World Premiere) • To You in the Beyond (World Premiere) // Full Review
Photo Log (Day 0)
Let’s go!!
Day 1: Bakushin! Bakushin!
“Can you get me an M.Rage windbreaker?”
“I’d like a Haniel deck box.”
“Our store can’t get One Piece TCG. Can you snag us some?”
How hard could all that be?
Prior to leaving for Anime Expo, I asked my local tabletop play group if anyone wanted anything from the convention. The list was short. Reasonable, even.
Holy moly. The queues.
My Uber driver said 400,000 people were expected for this year’s event. I thought that had to be a mistake, but after seeing the morning rush, I was no longer so sure. As soon as the doors opened to West Hall, a massive line ten people wide broke out of the starting gate and surged forward, with a huge wave headed directly for the One Piece TCG booth.
Stamina. Guts. Wit.
If you are training an uma to “win” at Anime Expo, those are the stats to focus on. At the One Piece booth, attendees had to figure out which line to stand in so they could get a ticket to stand in another line, but not before standing in the promo line. Confused yet?
So was everyone else.
In the end, I spent about two and a half hours in line for One Piece and came away with a mere six packs. Not nearly enough to help my local game store in any meaningful way. A disappointing start to Anime Expo, to say the least.
Fortunately, the next two tasks went far better. The Grand Archive TCG booth was smooth sailing, which was a pleasant surprise despite its prime location at the very front of South Hall. Their cosplayer Dungeon Guide was friendly, welcoming, and impressively sewn. Haniel deck box secured.
The M.Rage windbreaker queue wasn’t such a breeze as the deckbox, but after a reasonable wait, I was able to get one of the last of the 2XL sizes.
By 2 p.m., I was already walking past a sprawled-out Tohru, completely passed out against a safety rail, her meticulously detailed tail practically begging for a photograph.
But as the saying goes: Let sleeping dragons lie.
Let’s Make a Deal
For my first panel at Anime Expo, I chose “From Japan to the US: How Manga is Acquired and What Breaks Through,” a discussion featuring Ben Applegate of Kodansha, Hope Donovan of VIZ, Leyla Aker of Square Enix, Rebecca Taylor of Inklore, and Whitney Leopard of Ink Pop.
The panel focused on what determines which manga titles are picked up for print publication and how creators can make their work more attractive to publishers.
Some of the advice was tried and true: Readers respond to gorgeous art, compelling characters, and stories with enough intelligence and emotional pull to keep them invested. But other advice felt new. According to the panelists, social media followings are no longer considered a reliable predictor of print sales. Instead, publishers are looking more closely at what they describe as “fan density,” signs that a series has a deeply engaged audience, not just a large one.
Such density can include fans writing their own fanfiction, cosplaying as characters, building series-specific Discord communities, or otherwise creating activity around a work beyond simply liking or sharing posts. The stronger and more concentrated the fan response, the easier it becomes for publishers to see that a title may have commercial potential.
The panelists also noted that creators can benefit from developing broader media support around their series, such as anime shorts or original soundtracks. These additional pieces can help demonstrate that a work has room to grow beyond the page.
For creators looking for a place to post their work, the old model of hosting comics on a personal website is no longer the strongest path. Instead, the panelists encouraged creators to use third-party platforms such as Webtoon, where follower counts, total reads, and other engagement metrics such as likes and comments are visible and trackable. That data gives publishers something concrete to evaluate when determining which series may be ready for print and which still need more time to cook.
The panel also included a warning against chasing trends. By the time a trend is obvious enough to imitate, it may already be too late. Creators are encouraged to be daring, to make the work only they can make, and to read outside their usual preferences. The panelists recommended engaging with unfamiliar genres and audiences as a way to build empathy and strengthen the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, a trait that everyone could benefit from improving upon.
Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi (World Premiere)
The first series under the Star Wars: Visions Presents banner, The Ninth Jedi, continues the story of Lah Kara from Star Wars: Visions Volume 1 and Volume 3, directly following the events of “The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope.” As a quick refresher, Kara was previously tasked with delivering lightsabers crafted by her legendary sabersmith father to Margrave Juro, who hopes to revive the Jedi Order. With her father kidnapped, Kara joins forces with Juro on a mission to rescue him.
Episode 1 of this eight-episode series wastes no time getting started. The viewer is thrown directly into the action, with Juro’s freighter-class starship fleeing the much larger capital-class warship of General Nawaan. With a tracker embedded on board the heroes’ ship, they are unable to shake Nawaan until a daring maneuver leaves his vessel trapped near the event horizon of a black hole. Kara’s team then escapes to an independent planet in search of help, only for Nawaan to catch up and launch a droid assault on the city in an effort to flush her out.
While I found the episode generally entertaining, portions of the plot felt recycled and contrived. The idea of all the droids being controlled by a single slave system immediately recalls The Phantom Menace, and the fact that General Nawaan apparently had no non-droid personnel aboard his own ship to prevent it from crashing felt difficult to accept. That becomes even harder to buy once the episode later reveals that he has an entire army of humans and aliens at his disposal.
Nawaan is clearly meant to be a powerful villain. He is strong enough in the Force to survive what should be a fatal encounter with a black hole, yet Kara still faces him one-on-one in the very first episode. She is badly overpowered, but Nawaan ultimately withdraws once his ship begins to crash. It is an exciting sequence, but it also makes the episode feel compressed. With eight episodes totaling roughly two and a half to three hours of runtime, the pacing still feels as if the production team is scripting for a short rather than a full series. That is unfortunate because some of the episode’s ideas deserved more room to breathe. The black hole escape sequence was visually beautiful and one of the episode’s most striking moments. I would have liked to see the series linger there a little longer. Production I.G’s animation is smooth and energetic, but the use of 3D CGI vehicles against 2D environments and characters was occasionally distracting.
Still, The Ninth Jedi remains an intriguing expansion of one of the strongest shorts from Star Wars: Visions. The fact that the directors emphasized this as the first series under the Visions Presents banner also suggests that other Visions stories may receive similar expansions in the future.
All eight episodes of Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi will be available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu beginning August 5.
Day 2
To You in the Beyond (World Premiere)
We joined a screening of an early look at To You in the Beyond, the anime adaptation of a popular novel by Akiko Abe. Director Junichi Wada, producer Koichiro Mukai, and the voice of Nanao, Anna Nagase, were all present for a special guest panel accompanying the premiere.
How was it? Was the film as moving as indicated? Did our reviewer cry? Find out in T.R.’s full review.
Photo Log (Day 2)
Day 3
First Impression: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 (World Premiere)
The first episode of the new season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners premiered here at Anime Expo in a panel featuring series writer, Bartosz Sztybor. How does it hold up to the tragic story of season one, which has become a modern anime classic? Time will tell, but we found episode one to be full of intriguing questions (and insane animation)—check out T.R.’s full review.
