It’s Been a Rough Year for Dallas Anime Cons

In case you haven’t heard, anime cons in Oklahoma are cursed. Some (but certainly not all) of them have taken some baby steps in a better direction, and we—yes, you read that correctly: we. I was forged in the fire that was OK anime cons. Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written—have some good non-anime cons (such as SoonerCon). However, in the past few years our more anime-focused offerings seem unable to do anything but attract widespread criticism, whether it’s due to the con’s (lack of) organization, things that took place at the con, or otherwise. But it wasn’t always this way.

Once upon a time (during the 2000s and early/mid 2010s), OK anime cons were, broadly speaking, okay. Which isn’t to say nothing bad ever happened at any of them, or that nobody had any gripes/criticisms of them whatsoever (“them” referring primarily to Ronin Con, Izumicon, and Tokyo in Tulsa. Two of these three cons no longer exist, while the third—Tokyko in Tulsa—has since rebranded to Tokyo, OK). But rarely did these issues become major even amongst locals when they did happen. Yet even during what you could call the heyday of OK anime cons, it was impossible to deny that even the state’s largest cons weren’t exactly huge. In more ways than one, they weren’t Texas-sized, and while small/medium-sized cons can still be really fun, some people just want to experience larger cons with more people, more guests, more artists/vendors, etc (and to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that).

The Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) area—home to the much bigger likes of A-Kon, AnimeFest, and more—is just a three hour drive or four hour Amtrak ride away from Oklahoma City. This is all to say that even in their best days, “Go to the Dallas cons” was something of a mantra amongst OK’s anime con-goers. And it only became louder, stronger, and repeated more often in the late 2010s, when the curse upon OK’s anime cons began its initial descent. But what happens when the Dallas cons experience their own turbulence—when the futures of the region’s flagship cons become uncertain, and it’s hard to take the temperature of the only one that remains?

@weebwitched

#oklahoma is just little #texas #weeb #animecon #animecons #weebs #weebo #anime #animefan

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First, a recap

Historically speaking, Texas—DFW especially—has been one of the hubs of the North American anime fandom and industry. To talk in-depth about the history of anime fandom in the area would completely derail this article. So to offer a highlight reel:

• While it wasn’t the first anime convention to happen in North America, A-Kon was still among the first, with its inaugural event happening in Richardson, TX in 1990.
• AnimeFest, whose first event was in Dallas in 1992, wasn’t too far behind. That any region could have two anime conventions during a time where most states, including several with major cities, didn’t even have one was a huge deal.
• The same year as that first AnimeFest, Houston-based ADV was founded.
• Funimation was founded two years later in Silicon Valley, but moved to North Richland Hills, TX at some early point (and then to Flower Mound in 2007).
• Because two of the largest players in the North American anime industry were local, Texas cons simply had much more access to voice actors and industry members, thereby allowing them to have bigger and better guest lists and the additional attendance that came with that.
• Add to the fact that Texas is enormous and has several (large) event spaces, and it’s easy to understand how cons like A-Kon and AnimeFest were able to grow and thrive.

For larger cons, it’s pretty common to have at least the days and venue of the following year’s event publicly available pretty soon after the present year’s event wraps up; within a few months, if not more or less immediately. So, entering 2024, it was pretty noticeable that A-Kon—which is usually a May/June con—still had none of this, or any other, information about their next event available. Confusion and speculation were rampant until February 2024, when the con announced its postponement. To summarize, the con said that the issues stem from the con’s own unique challenges (it doesn’t clarify what those are) as well as ripple effects from the pandemic—in particular, relating to finances. When this announcement was made, A-Kon LLC was listed as in forfeiture by the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, but later that same month, that would no longer be the case.

A few months later in June, AnimeFest announced that AnimeFest 2024, which would take place at the end of July, would be the World Fandom Organization’s (the nonprofit that runs AnimeFest) last large-scale event, and that moving forward, they were going to shift their focus to smaller events. These announcements have rendered Anime Frontier, which is run by LeftField Media (the same group that runs Anime NYC) and is “powered by Crunchyroll”, as the only major anime-centric con in the DFW area whose future doesn’t seem to be hanging in the balance as of time of writing.

So, why is this happening?

AnimeFest vice chair of convention command leadership and director of marketing, Joe Lummus, told Yatta-Tachi that the decision to scale AnimeFest back has been cooking for some time now—even before A-Kon’s announcement—and that there were a number of factors that led to it. The biggest factors, however, were lingering effects from the pandemic, venue-related difficulties, a lack of new blood within the con’s leadership, and declining attendance.

It goes without saying that the COVID-19 pandemic upended more or less every facet of life, let alone congoing, especially at its height in 2020 and 2021. AnimeFest is far from the only con that’s still dealing with issues that were brought on by it, which can often take many forms and affect attendance both directly and indirectly. And on the topic of attendance-related issues, from 2012–19 and 2021–23, AnimeFest was housed in the Sheraton Dallas Hotel—a sprawling, Texas-sized event space attached to a food court that also housed A-Kon for a while. But Lummus shared with Yatta-Tachi that this came with a number of challenges. Setting aside the fact that, like several other hotels, it was already an expensive enough venue as-is, there can often be several additional payments that need to be made for things such as (but not limited to) not hitting certain metrics before a deadline. These payments add up, and can easily reach five-digit figures. Frustratingly, however, all the money the convention was giving to the venue was contrasted by things like locks and bathrooms consistently not working and never being repaired.

Then there’s the matter of the convention’s leadership. AnimeFest, like many other anime conventions (especially older ones), is completely nonprofit. In other words, nobody who runs AnimeFest gets paid to do so. In a time when many people are struggling to pay their rent, an unpaid commitment which can often have full-time hours, especially when the con gets nearer, can be a tough sell. And simply put, the con’s old guard is getting, well, older.

“There’s not a group of younger folks coming along to fill those spaces [leadership positions], because it’s not just taking the job,” said Lummus. “It’s overwhelming how much of your life this can take up. And it’s one thing if it’s your job and you’re getting paid for it, it’s another thing when—much like myself—I’m at my job, and I’m doing this interview [laughs] while I’m supposed to be working. But that’s virtually everyone. My manager of social media, she’s working two jobs and making multiple posts every day for us, on multiple platforms. So you couple the workload with the lack of people coming in to take over older positions, and the fact that they’ve been at it so long that we can’t maintain the pace because the larger you get—I mean, it kinda goes without saying—the more there is to deal with.”

Finally, there’s the matter of attendance. Per Lummus, AnimeFest’s attendance has mostly floated around ~10,000 people, with the most attended AnimeFest having been 2017 aka the year the con got a number of Yuri!!! on Ice’s main staff. Per the con’s Instagram account, that year’s attendance reached “over 12,000 people.” Incidentally, among those ~12k people was Yatta-Tachi owner and editor-in-chief, Katy Castillo, who covered that year’s event for Yatta-Tachi. But since the pandemic, con attendance has been steadily declining.

Since resuming in-person events after the height of the pandemic, Lummus tells Yatta-Tachi that the con’s attendance has been closer to ~7–8,000 people. This wasn’t as steep of a drop as the con expected, Lummus admitted, but it’s still a significant drop all the same. Lummus went on to discuss how he believes this decline is in large part due to the lasting effects of the peak of the pandemic, and the con’s guest list. More specifically, Lummus noted how the con previously put a lot of focus on flying in Japanese guests, but since resuming in-person events, the con hasn’t been able to due to a mixture of travel restrictions and the con losing access to their contacts that previously helped them do this.

Yatta-Tachi tried reaching out to A-Kon to hear from them about what caused the postponement, but unfortunately, A-Kon didn’t send a reply. Even so, based on publicly available information, one can make some solid guesses about what the con’s foremost issues are: their venue, funding, and management.

Starting with venue-related issues, in the past 10 years alone, A-Kon has been housed in four different venues: the Hilton Anatole Dallas (2013–16), the Fort Worth Convention Center (2017–18), Fair Park (2019), and the Irving Convention Center at Las Colinas/Toyota Music Factory (2022–23). If this isn’t the most times an anime convention of this size has moved around in a 10-year period, it’s certainly at least in the top five. The move to the Fort Worth Convention Center, in particular, proved to be disastrous for the con, who would later attribute their financial woes to this move.

A-Kon’s finances have reportedly been in free fall since 2017, when their move to the Fort Worth Convention Center caused the con to take, “a substantial loss. The loss was large enough that not only did it drain A-Kon’s capital reserves, it also drained the owner’s personal reserves with plenty of leftover debt to go.” This ultimately resulted in the con (messily) changing hands from Phoenix Entertainment to eventPower President Frank Powell in 2019, and then to, “a group of investors that teamed up during the pandemic to support the event and keep it afloat during that time.” As mentioned earlier, at the time of their postponement announcement, the con was in forfeiture. Per Popverse, this was, “for failure to file a franchise tax report and/or pay franchise taxes.” And although the con is no longer in forfeiture, as of time of writing the con has still yet to issue refunds for attendees who had already purchased badges for the 2024 event.

Who, specifically, the “investors that teamed up” are doesn’t seem to be immediately clear to the general public. Searching for a readily accessible list doesn’t yield any results, and the registered owner of A-Kon LLC is currently listed as being A-Kon founder and longtime chair Meri Davis. Additionally, there’s no list of board and/or staff members posted anywhere on the con’s site—although it does still offer a different, but nonetheless interesting potential glimpse into the con’s internal state. On May 26 of this year, A-Kon’s site went down for a while. When it came back up, it looked totally different, and one can see a new footer that reads, “THIS WEBSITE BROUGHT TO YOU BY: VOLUNTEERS DOING THEIR VERY BEST™” While this is unconfirmed, I can’t help but speculate (and I can’t emphasize enough that this is just speculation) that this could be the result of the con’s leadership failing to pay for its previous website, thereby making a number of volunteers have to (perhaps hurriedly?) make another one, lest the con be without a website.

Personally, I don’t get the impression that Powell is plugged in whatsoever to the anime fan community outside of his (former?) involvement with A-Kon—rather, in this writer and longtime congoer’s opinion, he seems more like an event manager who saw an event which consistently rakes in tens of thousands of devoted attendees, and let the dollar signs in his eyes blind him to the amount of time, money, effort, and resources that anime cons (especially one the size of A-Kon) require. And this makes me worry about what the clues suggest is a very real possibility: that a number of the members of this mystery board could be the same way. Not all—Davis, after all, is likely on this board—but a significant number all the same. If this is the case, then I worry deeply for A-Kon’s future. The volunteers obviously love this con very deeply, and likely want nothing more than to keep it alive. But whether the con’s board of investors—whoever they may be—will allow that, and listen to the volunteers, is yet to be seen.

What now?

As of time of writing, there’s no updates on when or where the next A-Kon could be. But given how long it takes to plan a con the size of A-Kon, it seems extremely unlikely that it’ll happen by, say, the end of the year. Admittedly, I have a soft spot in my heart for A-Kon. Its 2007 event was my first anime convention ever, and to this day, con-going remains one of my favorite things in the world to do and I consider it to be a big part of my life. And regardless of the sentimentality I have for this con, I think plenty of people would agree that it’d be a shame to lose the oldest North American anime convention still in operation. This is all to say that even during the rough times (of which this con has had plenty), I can’t help but root for A-Kon and hope that they’re able to overcome whatever internal issues they may be having.

Something else that Lummus emphasized throughout our discussion was that AnimeFest wanted to go out with a bang; they wanted to have one last big, fun event, rather than slowly fizzling out over the course of god-knows-how-many years. That’s why AnimeFest 2024 is still happening, and hopefully why it’ll be a great event for everyone present, whether they’re new to AnimeFest or not. The final large AnimeFest will be happening this very weekend (July 25–28) at the Loews Arlington & Convention Center. There’s yet to be any official updates on the smaller events that AnimeFest wants to pivot into; what, specifically, those events will be, where and when they’ll be, and so on. However, Lummus tells Yatta-Tachi that in addition to being much smaller than AnimeFest, these events will stay in the DFW area, and will be more focused on tabletop gaming than anime.

Disregarding A-Kon and AnimeFest, Texas still has a number of other anime cons whose futures aren’t so up in the air. Additionally, per AnimeCons.com, there are still a number of smaller anime-focused cons in the DFW area, as well as other, more generalized fan conventions with an anime presence. As mentioned earlier, Anime Frontier—whose fourth annual event will be later this year (December 6–8) at the Fort Worth Convention Center—is currently the only major anime-focused con in DFW until we have a better idea what’s going on with A-Kon (assuming they plan on staying in the area). When asked if Anime Frontier is familiar with A-Kon’s postponement and AnimeFest’s scaling back, Anime Frontier responded with the following statement:

“Yes, we are familiar with the unfortunate news. As a part of the events community, we deeply empathize with the organizers, exhibitors, and fans affected. We recognize the hard work and passion that goes into creating these types of events. Anime Frontier remains committed to supporting the community and ensuring that we continue to be a vibrant and welcoming space for all. We hope to see a strong recovery for these Texas events as we navigate these times together.”

Afterword from Katy Castillo, Owner/EIC of Yatta-Tachi:

Chris and I attended A-Kon and AnimeFest starting in 2011 and began covering them as press in 2015 all the way up until we moved out of Texas, so both conventions are very near and dear to us. Hearing the news of the state of both cons is heartbreaking. 2020 really did a number on many things, as we all know, especially to volunteer-run conventions. Convention volunteers have always put their heart and soul into keeping these conventions going, with no pay and consuming large amounts of their time, and I’m sure they will continue to try their best. We hope both conventions manage to find a way forward and continue producing fantastic events for countless fans.