the new cosplay

First off, what is "cosplay"? In short, it means "costume play", where "cosplayers" (participants cosplaying) dress up in the costume and accessories of a particular character. The normal cosplays seen in Singapore are mostly Japanese-influenced (example: characters from Japanese animation, manga, J-rock, gothic, lolita, games, etc), and cosplay in Singapore is considered somewhat as a subculture that is growing increasingly popular as Japan continue to take over our media networks.
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EOY, which stands for "End of Year", is one of the anually-held cosplay events (the biggest event being Cosfest, usually held in June/ July) and hosted at Singapore EXPO. As you can probably guess it, this event is always held in December every year (latest was 13th December 2008). Basically, this is an event where people of similar interests would gather, and cosplay, rent booths to sell Japanese-related art and merchandise, take picture of cosplayers, or simply just to enjoy everything as a whole.

The little set back about this event would probably be the entrance fee of $12 for non-members of the organizing association. So what I've been doing the past two year's EOY, is attend the event as an event helper. We don't get much time to view the event as we have working shifts, but we get free entrance.






In my opinion, yes, EOY is a good event for cosplayer to showcase their skills and hard work. However, for the "skills", mostly new and not-very experienced cosplayers dominate the population of cosplayers who attend the event (might be due to EOY being not as big as Cosfest; not noticed so much in case the cosplay is bad). So for those who have attended both Cosfest and EOY, might note a significant difference in the cosplaying grade. Of course, the popular cosplayers who attend EOY always stand out from the new cosplayers.




Leading up to and following Comic Expoes I ask for CBOers photos of their own cosplay outfits. San Diego you’ll find over 600 photos for featuring cosplay. Even the Russians,as in these two photos,are heavily into cosplay. The Chinese love it! But why are the British so shy -we get some cosplay but it seems to be a case of “Excuse my costume,its for the event you know” and then goodbye!

So,I’ll try again.

Any of you out there got photographs of your cosplay outfits? Come on -don’t be shy –you do read comics and watch anime!!

Just send the photos to hoopercomicsuk@yahoo.com and every week I’ll publish a few on CBO under a new Cosplay category. Then again,there may be no photos submitted again and that’ll make it one empty category!