Yesterday was a pleasant start to the public part of NYAF.

I walked around talking to the vendors and Industry and overwhelmingly, there’s a sense of hope, of doing more than just getting by. A number of vendors/industry told me that in the last few months sales have upticked (something that is true for ALC, as well.). It felt very good to hear that, and it’s motivated me to, perhaps, sit in on the State of the Industry Panel. We’ll see.

I am accompanied at NYAF by one of my chief lackeys for Yuricon, Guest Reviewer here at Okazu, Sean Gaffney. I want to say upfront that he is fabulous and, like everyone else on my staff, puts up with unbelievable crap from me. We were going to check our coats, but then didn’t (it was a tad chilly in the hall early on when there were less people). He asked me later if we were going to check the coats and I said no, you can just carry mine. …and being a good boy as he is, he did. So, let me just say right now at the beginning of this – thank you Sean. He later retorted that there definitely was an “I” in “Team Yuri.”. lol

Sean and I walked around the Vendor’s area, said hello and generally killed time. Media Blasters, Vertical and Del Rey have booths, Yen is significant by its absence. We sat in on an Intellectual Property panel, which was run by three lawyers, geared towards content creators. I was pretty impressed by their ability to render it all down into English.

Vertical’s Panel was also pretty good – I’m now looking forward to Yanni and Ed Chavez’s manzai routine. They are 100 years too early to compete with me and Sean. lol Sean tells me that Tokyopop’s panel had a few announcements, which I’m sure other people will blog about. They gave out ramen. :-)

The one thing I want to announce because Media Blasters doesn’t do panels is that Ikkitousen DD is coming out this November! They have a bunch of titles coming….I was going to joke about “Something called “Blade of the Immortal…” but I know that kind of humor doesn’t translate well to text. lol

Anyway, Yuri-ish things aside, so far the title I’m most looking forward to is Peepoo Choo by Felipe Smith. It’s *all* kinds of WTF. I cannot wait to see what Vertical does with it.

I’m in desperate need of coffee and must dash.