Reed Exhibitions' New York Anime Festival, which took place earlier this month, is a spin-off and follow-up to the two-year-old New York Comic Con. Unless noted, all images courtesy of Joe Strike.

Thanks to a surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 became "a day that will live in infamy." Sixty-six years later, however, December 7 th seemed like a perfectly fine day to begin a much more benign Japanese invasion of New York City: Reed Exhibitions' New York Anime Festival, a spin-off and follow-up to the two-year-old New York Comic Con.

"We never even thought of that, which is good in a way," says John McGeary, Reed vp and show manager for the festival. "I think it's a testament to our good relationship with Japan -- [the Pearl Harbor attack] is part of history now. Frankly, having the Festival in December was due to the availability of [New York's] Javits Convention Center.

"We noticed that of all the Comic-Con segments, we'd only scratched the surface of anime. There's so much more we can do with a separate event, all the panels and screenings, we decided to do a full show the first year right off the bat."

According to a Reed spokesman, the festival prepared for 10-15,000 attendees and actually topped the high number. While the Anime Festival is a latecomer compared to more established and larger gatherings like Southern California's Anime Expo and Otakon in Baltimore, its New York location gave the event an instant leg-up, in attracting both fans throughout the region and professionals from publishing and media organizations based in the city. The day before the convention began, the pop-culture industry news group ICv2 held a series of panels at the Javits Center for businesses eager to tap into the growing appetite for anime and manga, including sessions exploring prospects for digital/new media distribution and advice on tapping into the large female market for "J[apanese]-culture."

The festival took up a good portion of the convention center's lower level, with three massive, nearly equal-sized areas side by side: the first a vast gaming hall, the second filled by some 128 exhibitors, and a third devoted to screening and panel rooms. The first sight greeting contestants entering the gaming hall for the "Magic: The Gathering" World Championship was a giant-sized brain in a giant-sized jar, courtesy of Wizards of the Coast. As the company's Jeff Phillips explained, "It's kind of a joke. People used to say that our research and development department is run by a giant brain in a glass jar named 'Gleemax.' It kind of took off as an urban legend and when we put out 'Unhinged' [a surreal card-game send-up of card games] we included a Gleemax card. We just relaunched our website's message board with Gleemax as our mascot."

The exhibit hall was the hub of the Festival's activities, as thousands of otaku [dedicated fans], many dressed for "cosplay" [costume play] as their favorite anime characters, traveled from booth to booth. ADV and TOKYOPOP's oversized booths, side by side at the front of the hall, had first shot at the attendees and their spending money.

The vast gaming hall was a popular attraction at the festival. Contestants for the "Magic: The Gathering" World Championship were greeted by a giant-sized brain in a giant-sized jar, courtesy of Wizards of the Coast.

"Our biggest priority is Devil May Cry," enthused ADV head Chris Orr. "It's a new anime series based on the Capcom game franchise, and it's getting a same day/date release as Devil May Cry 4, the next-generation video game. We're here with Capcom demoing the game. People love it, they've been anticipating it for years.

"We're doing wonderful things with Capcom to bring anime to the gaming audience. Our fans know about the series, and we know gamers are open to anime -- they like animation in general. The series just finished airing in Japan a couple of months ago. We're combining our volume one disc [which contains the series' first four episodes] with their limited/collector's edition of the game. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide will get this thing. It's the biggest promotion we've ever done with another company."

Orr's other new import is The Wallflower, based on the 13-volume manga series published in the U.S. by Del Rey. He describes it as a "great comedy series" about a girl who adopts an ugly persona despite the ongoing efforts of a quartet of young men to beautify her.

On the other side of the aisle, TOKYOPOP marketing coordinator Joe Soriano plugged the sneak preview of Princess Ai, "our own project. We created it from the beginning and took it from manga to video." The notorious rocker Courtney Love is credited as co-creator of the project. According to the company's website, Love became a manga fan during her early career when she was performing in Tokyo -- and the half-human, half-angel Ai is the singer's fantasy alter-ego.

TOKYOPOP's other high-profile effort: using the festival as a location for the company's live-action movie project Van Von Hunter 100. Based on a tongue-in-cheek (and American-created) good-vs.-evil manga, the film is described by Soriano as a "real world meets the anime/manga world" adventure. "We filmed in our panel room and used our fans as extras."