Civil War cosplay (cont.)

Funny follow-up email from fellow blogger and anime guru Mitch Hagmaier on Civil War cosplay:

Hah! I used to run that anime convention. If the fanboy hordes we delivered to the Inner Harbor made your life ever so briefly more surreal, then our job was done.

In recent years, it's degenerated into an insanely bloated fun-house version of high school, and I got tired of playing bursar & over-aged hall monitor to a swarm of oddly-dressed, hypercaffienated teenagers.

If you want to see ACW-themed cosplayers, wait and see if somebody does a popular or semi-popular historical anime set during the period. There was Gun Frontier, but I think I was one of about ten people in North America to buy that series, to judge from their sale numbers. And the kids don't like to dress as random thug #2 (unless their costume consists entirely of a sign reading "random thug #2", which I have seen - lazy sod) but rather some distinctive supporting character or protagonist or love interest.

There is one guy on the artist alley circuit - he runs a fly-by-night manga adaptation company, or at least he did the last time I took note of him - who wears a butternut kepi. That's probably the closest you'll get to ACW cosplay - a Japanese guy named Bennett wearing a Confederate kepi & cross-dressing as "Sailor Venus".

[Shudder]

A Sailor Venus otaku, top right, minus kepi. Shudder indeed.