After a brief stint last year at the AT&T Convention Center on the edge of the University of Texas campus, IKKiCON returned to the downtown Hilton Austin for the weekend before New Years, December 28-30.

You know, now that I don’t live there anymore,  I can really appreciate that there is basically a Texas convention for every month of the year, which means I can hit up a con (or two) every time I go down to visit. A-kon is the juggernaut that I’d go out of my way for anyway, but it lands nicely in the middle of the year, and IKKiCON is six months after that. How convenient and evenly spaced! Some people worry that IKKiCON being smack between two major holidays hurts attendance, but I’ve never gotten that impression…and I mean, a majority of other conventions are on holiday weekends too?

Fake Lemonade Stand @ IKKiCON 7

This report is 4,077 words long. I guess that’s about average, right?

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I like going to conventions. I really do. And that was why I scheduled my crazy cross-country move for the weekend after IKKiCON (December 30-January 2; Austin, TX). I didn’t want to miss the show, dammit! But that was also why I was scatterbrained and distracted all weekend — impending cross-country moves do that? And that is also why I’m writing a con report three weeks after the fact. Let’s see if I’m still ridiculously verbose…

Possibly the most awkward and amazing photo I took all weekend. An accurate portrayal of conventions everywhere.

…Yup. Still am. 3569 words. I’M NOT SORRY.

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I spent New Years in Austin working IKKiCON 5, where they denote the iteration of the con rather than the year because that would be too confusing! Though I am personally counting it as the first con of 2011 because IKKiCON 4 was wholly in 2010 (January 1-3) and because two of the three days IKKiCON 5 encompasses (Dec 31-Jan 2) were in 2011. :P Not that it really matters.

As it happens, the first IKKiCON in 2007 was actually my first anime con ever. I didn’t attend as an artist, but it was definitely a memorable experience. The con has grown tons and is pretty much unrecognizable to me now, especially with the series of moves from the Wyndham Garden Inn to the Hilton Austin, but there was still a weird sense of having come full circle. For IKKiCON 1, I was a freshman at UT and a normal attendee, wandering around the venue in a glorious daze. By IKKiCON 5, I was a SCAD graduate and had been working conventions as an artist for more than ten cons already.

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