The Book

Here's how I hope the book to work out. It'll be a hardcover book about 7x9 size and run somewhere over 250 pages. I hope to have a combination of interviews and photos. I didn't want it to be totally just photos and I wanted this book to appeal to seasoned cosplayers, beginning cosplayers and folks who have no idea what cosplay is.

As you can imagine, this is probably the most difficult part - how do I walk this line ? How can I do it that it will work for everyone ? There's a huge responsibility on my shoulder to represent cosplaying here in America and I am aware of it. They're all so passionate about bringing to life their creations and I don't want to disappoint folks out there.

In the beginning of the book, I hope to have some essays on cosplay here in America. The subjects may change but currently I'm hoping to have one on the difference between American cosplay and Japanese cosplay, another on the recent history of cosplaying and other essays of note. I'll probably have more essays posted on the Cosplay in American site.

Oh, here's a cool feature that my designer Kyle had suggested : that the book will have Japanese text first followed by English so essays would be in Japanese followed by an English translation and the name/town of cosplayers be in katakana followed by English. ^^ I think everyone would appreciate this little twist, lol !

As for the photos itself - I plan on having the first name/cosplay name follow by town so it would be something such as "Michael (New York. NY)" or "Jenna (Kent, OH)". Obviously I doubt it'll be a good idea to print full name so just first name/cosplay name only. As for the town. I wanted to really show how cosplayers can be found anywhere from the big cities as Dallas or San Francisco to smaller towns such as Wichita Falls, TX or Bloomington, IN.

Another thing is I wanted to capture the con experience -you go there and get a chance to hang out with your friends or even your online friends from other states (or even countries !) So besides the cosplayers"in character", I'll have cosplayers just being themselves with their friends - throwing up "V", laughing, making silly faces, happy times ! That's one of the best thing about going to cons - laughing, enjoying yourself and just getting the kick of being there so I didn't want to bored readers with pages and pages of cosplayers just "in character".

All the photos are shot against for a grey backdrop because I didn't want people to look at the photo and say "That's Otakon !" or "That's A-kon !". I wanted a simple universal background that just frame the cosplayer. And of course I did it because I got tired of seeing photos of cosplayers with people walking in the background or just other things that would detract you from the photo. There were so drawbacks though - because the paper was about 4 ft wide I couldn't get larger more elaborate costumes into the small space. Point given, Lionel Lum's Bumblebee was amazing at Fanime but I felt disappointed I could only fit part of the outfit into the space. I also wished I could do full-length to better capture the outfits from head to toe but as you can tell, there were restrictions to what I could do.

Also, another thing - I hope to capture what you see at the cons so you'll get sort of everybody from Bleach to Star Wars (there's always a Storm Trooper or Vader !) to lolitas to gothic/industrial to steampunk to the occasional Jesus ! Simply, if you dress up and are at a con, then you are fair play for me , lol !

A cosplayer called the book "a yearbook" in an email and he is right in a way - this is a yearbook covering May 2009 to September 2009 in 6 cons across America. I hope everyone would enjoy looking at the book and perhaps reliving their memories of the cons of '09 :)