Mangafest 2013‘s events for the weekend was held at The Arts House and Kinokuniya at Ngee Ann City. The Arts House’s exhibit was from 10am to 8pm. I lurked outside, eating my Old Chang Kee porridge as I waited for my friends to arrive.
And good grief… It was Saturday morning and I saw lots of people going up to the second floor where the exhibition was held at the Gallery.
A survey I did! Do you know… the pirate edition? It took us a few seconds to realize this was in Engrish and they meant if we knew that there were pirated e-mangas.
Mind you, we were surrounded with manga and such so we wondered if they were meaning some special One Piece edition??
Free goodies! We got a bag like that and chose one item out of the three. I chose the cat cloth banner. I forgot the name but it looks super familiar, comment if you know what anime/manga it is from!
Anyway, we got to see how e-manga is like on various platforms. Kinokuniya has a special app called Kinoppy that can load up into various tablets and computers. It is in Japanese though, so hmm if you can’t understand it.
There was also vocaloid original works. The rare goods that they were keeping secret until you got there. Um, it was mostly artwork? Yeah.
Then we hit Kinokuniya since the autograph session and mini talks were there!
The first bit of the programme were representatives from Singapore polytechnics and a lecturer talking about manga in Singapore. It was like a fandom talk really and yeah.
My opinion? You wanna do manga, it’s never gonna be easy. Not just manga, comics and webcomics or writing stories. It won’t go poof and you are it. It will take a lot of work and stubbornness.
And then autograph sessions! I knew it was a Japanese mangaka thing, no photography of them because it’s not allowed so here is a picture of the queue!
Maybe this was a mini tester to see how a mangafest would fair in Singapore because it was “small” and the publicity was quite rushed? It was rather last minute at least from the Singapore side.
But there you go, last minute publicity and it being Chinese New Year weekend didn’t stop fans from attending so perhaps they’ll have a better showing next year so that more people can go to said exhibits, talks or sessions.
