Anime North 2026!

I think 2026 is the 30th Anime North? I don't know, I wasn't there in the beginning. Where I *will* be is at the show next weekend, doing a bunch of panels! Seems like every year I make a post here about what I'm up to, and I have no idea if it helps people find my panels or not. What I do know is that this is a handy guide for me in the future, when I want to remember exactly what I was up to at any particular Anime North. 

Anime North is, of course, the annual Japanese anime convention in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Their first convention was back in 1997 and I managed to get some comments from some fans and staffers who were there at that first show, so I could write about it here. 

In a field of fan comic-cons and expos that's been largely captured by the professional event management industry, Anime North is still run by volunteers, many of whom were there on day one, and who still spend weekends binge-watching Japanese cartoons. It makes for a convention that still has that fandom feel, full of happy, slightly overwhelmed staffers and attendees trying to make things work with a mix of experienced know-how and newbie enthusiasm, and that's what keeps me coming back. Well, that and the fact that they've allowed me to throw all kinds of panels and events up against the wall to see what sticks. What's going to stick this year? 

Anime Hell returns Friday night for two hours of zany zingers and whacky whoppers, vicious video vagaries and kooky cinematic clunkers, all connected with Japan or Hell or Animation or all three, or neither. 

Saturday from noon until 6, Anime North is letting us program a block of unlicensed or out-of-license classic Japanese animation, in defiance of common sense and various copyright agreements. If you need something to watch you might have never seen before and might never see again, this is where it's at! 

Saturday at noon I'm hauling out some old fanzines and talking about how we used to have to fold and staple and mail all these episode guides and fan fiction epics by hand!

Saturday afternoon Neil Nadelman and myself take a doomer trip through the end of the world as portrayed in various live action Japanese films from the 60s 70s and 80s! Will this feature a special appearance by Mecha-May and Mew-Bot 5000?

Neil's back in the driver's seat for Saturday night's TOTALLY LAME ANIME, a big pile of the worst Japan ever committed to celluloid!

Followed at 10 by Jesse Betteridge's Anime Grindhouse, for all your late night trash cinema needs! 

Be sure to catch Jesse at 10:30am Sunday morning as he shakes off the cobwebs and delivers a report on what happens when anime meets pachinko!

Sunday at noon I'll be highlighting the work of the man who brought us magical manga girls and giant super robots, masked ninjas and psychic schoolboys, Mitsuteru Yokoyama! 

And we wrap Anime North up with a commentary-filled screening of the wild Toho sci-fi fantasy Latitude Zero, filled with super submarines, Hollywood royalty, monsters, laser beams, explosions, and Susumu "Ultraman" Korobe in a mustache. Like I said, wild!

And of course this is nowhere near even a fraction of what's happening at Anime North. Panels, workshops, raves, dances, interactive cafes, costume contests, the giant vendor's hall, video gaming, RPG gaming, Doll North, video screenings, and the Nominoichi swap meet event all are waiting for you May 22-24 2026! See you there!!

-Dave M

what I learned at the Super Happy Fun Sell

2025 was my last year managing the Super Happy Fun Sell.

Now you may be asking, what the heck is a "Super Happy Fun Sell" and what does it have to do with this blog, or with classic Japanese animation? Well, I'll explain, if you get your cotton-pickin' hands off me, you barbarian. The Super Happy Fun Sell, sometimes described as the “Super Happy Fun Sale,” or SHFS for short, is Anime Weekend Atlanta's garage sale, yard sale, flea market event strictly for fans to sell their previously loved anime and manga merchandise to other fans. By definition, the SHFS is full of older merchandise from older shows, and frequently is the only place at the convention to find out of print manga, old VHS tapes and DVDs, and the occasional LP, LD, Beta tape or animation cel.


The SHFS has been a Thursday fixture at AWA for so many years that honestly I can't remember when it started. But it happened this way. Like many anime conventions, AWA began as a Friday-Saturday-Sunday show, with a lot of setup happening Thursday night and a lot of attendees showing up Thursday to pick up their badges early and avoid the Friday lines. Naturally, the convention had thought about getting some events going Thursday afternoon and evening, not only to encourage that Thursday badge pickup and entertain the early bird fans, but also to help relieve the pressure on a weekend schedule that was filling up with programming. I’d been doing some Thursday evening panels already and was always on the lookout for new Thursday things.


 

Some of the other shows were already hosting swap-meet events. The idea was out there in the world, I know we weren't the first. It's my recollection that one of AWA’s founders, the inestimable Lloyd Carter, was the person that said “let’s make this happen here,” and I believe he also came up with the "Super Happy Fun Sell" name, which is a reference to the SNL fake toy commercial about Happy Fun Ball, Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball.

 

My immediate reaction was, "this is a great idea, I wanna run it." So there I was, on a Thursday night in September of 2008 in the Kennesaw room of the Waverly, watching it transform into something that usually happens on suburban Saturday mornings - a yard sale. At least I think it was 2008. Details are sketchy. As a Thursday night event, it was difficult to squeeze the SHFS into a program book that was firmly and deeply committed to Friday-Saturday-Sunday scheduling. Years would pass before the event achieved full AWA print recognition, which only helped to secure SHFS’s reputation as some sort of clandestine in-crowd night-market rendezvous, and incidentally, helped to shield the event from criticism by vendors in the vendors hall, understandably wary of any competition for attendee dollars. Relax guys, everything sold at the SHFS you probably already sold at least once already.


 

the only known photo of the first SHFS

That first year, things were casual. First come first served, pay at the door and take whatever table you want, sell whatever you got, whatever. The event went like gangbusters, but immediately I realized that we were going to have to formalize things a little, if only to keep the event an actual used-goods event and not let it be over-run by arts and crafts, self-published fantasy novel authors, and wannabe vendors who missed out vending in AWA’s vendors hall. I spent a lot of time explaining the event over and over again to people wandering in the door thinking it was registration or the dealers room, or that they could just stand in a corner and hold things and sell them that way. Don’t do that.

Every year we learned from the previous year and we'd find something else we needed to make a rule for. We added rules against bootleg videotapes or DVDs, outlawing "mystery bags" and blind boxes, and preventing the sale of home-made candles, embroidery, and jewelry. The idea of “yard sale” seems pretty simple, but a lot of people seemed unfamiliar with the concept; we are providing the space for you to sell used items in, and that’s it. No, we can't make change, we don't have any carts or hand trucks, no, we can't provide wi-fi.

 

Super Happy Fun Sell, AWA 2011

After a few iterations of the SHFS and a move to a larger ballroom space in the Waverly, the event had evolved somewhat. AWA added an online registration system built into AWA's web page, we wrote a FAQ and a list of do’s and don’ts, and we found ourselves with a devoted audience of both sellers and buyers, ready and waiting for Thursday. Myself included! I love yard sales, thrift stores, antique malls, used bookstores, anywhere there's a random factor skewing retail choices towards the offbeat and unknown. I also love Japanese cartoons and Japanese cartoon-related merchandise. Creating an event where all these items come to me, rather than me having to hunt them down one by one, well, that’s not the main reason we have the SHFS, but it’s close.


 

some of my SHFS finds from over the years

Also, and this is the important part, the SHFS is an event people absolutely love. I’m talking “lines down the hall and around the corner waiting for the doors to open” love. People love the feeding-frenzy vibe, people love bargains, people love cleaning out their closets and making a little scratch, and that love is infectious. There’s something unique or fascinating or nostalgia-inducing on every table and everyone is happy to be there, smiling at even the possibility of finding treasure and taking it home. Putting smiles on faces is the best thing; in fact, that’s really why we started AWA in the first place, and who can deny we all couldn’t use a few more things that make people happy?


 

AWA 2016 SHFS

So, if I love it so much, why am I stepping away? Well, first off, the SHFS involves arranging and coordinating and organizing. Not an untenable amount of work, but it’s work that is easier and more convenient if done by people in the area, which I am not. In addition to advance promotion, table layout, and the answering of myriad questions, the SHFS has to be integrated with the convention and all that convention’s moving parts like schedules, locations, and staff. That integration happens when staffers get together and talk this stuff out. And me, well, I haven’t been to an AWA staff meeting in twenty six years. In fact they aren’t even called “staff meetings” any more.

promo slide for AWA 2021's SHFS

There’s even more to do when the event actually happens. The seller’s tables need to be set out properly, and if they aren’t, they need fixing. Someone has to work line control, or at least find someone to work line control. We have to find the event signage and that involves someone who knows where all that signage is stored, and that someone definitely isn’t me. Someone’s got to move all the tech equipment out of the room because there's usually tech equipment sitting around in the room waiting to be moved. Often a guest or a panelist or someone on staff or someone staff-related has been promised a SHFS table by somebody else on staff, and that information never gets to me until the day of the show, because, again, the not-being-in-Atlanta thing, just one more last minute curveball hurled on the Thursday of an anime con, a day already filled with curveballs.

The key to dealing with these last minute switcheroos is being flexible, that’s the key to everything about events like this. Like the old saying goes, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Treat your carefully crafted plans as if they were merely casual suggestions and adapt as needed. And let everyone else know your plans have changed, because it’s teamwork that makes the dream, or the anime con, work.

 

AWA 2017 SHFS

And that’s my advice to the AWA team that’s taking over the SHFS. To be honest, that’s my advice for the staffers who run any event like this – and to the sellers who are schlepping their merchandise through the maze of the convention center and setting up their tables. Be flexible and adjust to the situation, have your goals in mind and let those guide your actions, instead of the process. And get one or two of those collapsible wagons, or at least a hand truck!

So I’m no longer running the SHFS. But am I through with the SHFS? No sir. You will see me there next time, prowling the aisles, looking for offbeat old anime stuff, chatting with friends, and marveling at all the stuff.
 

AWA 2019 SHFS

AWA isn’t the only anime con to throw a swap meet or a yard sale, of course. Anime Boston’s swap meet is strictly barter. No money changes hands, it’s strictly for the free exchange of goods from one fan to another. Anime North’s Nominoichi fills an exhibit hall with tables piled high with merchandise and that event absolutely swarms with customers. I’m told Colossalcon holds Otaku Flea Markets twice a show, and last I heard Fanime was still holding swap meets. Even without conventions, fandom swap meets and flea markets are popping up all over the place. There’s one happening in Toronto this weekend! My advice is to keep your eyes open for a happy fun sale near you – and remember to show up early, carry along a few shopping bags, don't be afraid to bargain, and bring cash!

-Dave Merrill

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Anime Weekend Atlanta 2025

It seems like just yesterday that a bunch of us anime nerds were sitting in some parents' basement somewhere in the Atlanta metro area, saying to ourselves, by golly, if we don't start an anime convention in Atlanta soon, then somebody else is going to, and that anime con we don't run will invariably suck. So we'd better get to work. It wasn't just yesterday, in fact it was more than three decades ago. Three decades where we went from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray to streaming, three decades of moving from small hotel to larger hotel to larger hotel to small convention center to larger convention center to the largest convention center we could find, three decades of arranging flights and finding hotel rooms and programming panels, three decades of assembling audio and video equipment and wrangling vendors and cosplayers and entertainers and voice actors and cartoonists. 

Costume Contest at the first AWA

  

That convention, of course, was and is Anime Weekend Atlanta, the premier (not "premiere", thank you) Japanese animation festival in the Southeast of the United States. Since 1995 a crew of anime fans has been working hard to make this three and now four day gathering a unique and lively weekend celebrating Japanese cartoons, Asian culture, the art of animation, and all the accompanying cultural artifacts and practices that have grown up around the fandom. AWA has survived pandemics, 9/11s, staff changes, location challenges, date relocations, and has constantly dealt with the changing tastes of an ever-evolving pool of attendees, a rotating cast ranging in age from five to seventy-five, interested in everything from karate to Kinikuman, from Demon Slayers to Devilmen, and as always engaged in a bitter struggle over whether or not the abbreviated name of the convention is pronounced "ei-wah" or "ei-doubleyou-ei." 

This year AWA is happening December 18-21 at the Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta, and I will, as I have been for the past thirty years, be presenting a wide, wild variety of panels and entertainments for the attendees. Will you be one of them? I hope so, and if so please take a minute and say hello! So, what exactly am I up to?

Thursday afternoon at 4 we'll jam a room full of preloved anime and manga merchandise and let capitalism run rampant. This is your chance to peek inside the crawl spaces and attics and closets and storage units of some of the Atlanta area's most notorious nerd merch hoarders, desperate to make space for more stuff. Let the bargains commence! 

Friday at 11am, Neil "I Translated Chargeman Ken" Nadelman and myself will be taking a tour through the wacky world of Knack, the studio that Ninja'd our Wonder Boys and Sued our Cats while Astroing our Gangers. 

 Friday night at 8 Reverend Neil will be once again delivering his popular sermon on the topic of "Totally Lame Anime" and how it affects your daily life. Don't miss it!

Dave Merrill's Anime Hell returns Friday night at 10pm for a guaranteed almost two hours of cartoon madness, live-action kookery, commercial ineptitude, and the sort of amateur animation buffoonery that is neither sanctioned nor supported by any official organization.

Ryan Gavigan's Midnight Madness returns at exactly 12:02am to pummel you senseless with a barrage of anime parody dubs produced by anime fans just like you, only funnier and with more free time and some technical equipment you may or may not have access to. 

What was anime like exactly forty, fifty, and sixty years ago? What influences are still with us today and what has vanished in the mists of time? And why does everything have a robot in it? The answers to these and more questions will be fiercely debated in this event Saturday at 10:45am. 

Sunday at 10am, some of the surviving founders of Anime Weekend Atlanta will assemble to dredge up old memories, rekindle old feuds, and generally talk about what things were like before everybody had their damn phone in their damn face all the time. If you have memories of the first AWA, you should definitely attend this panel, and you should also schedule a colonoscopy. 

Sunday at 3:30, Neil and Dave will put on their radiation suits, take their iodine pills, and lead us all into the coming End Of The World as seen in various Japanese films from the 1960s and 1970s and 80s. Space vampires, earthquakes, deadly diseases and nuclear war all struggle to see who can kill us off first - and no matter who wins, we all lose! It's a great way to send everyone home from the 30th anniversary of Anime Weekend Atlanta. 

Around the South and across the world people are getting ready for AWA. I'm putting these panels together right now even as you read this! So, don't be left out, make your plans now to be in Atlanta for AWA 2025! 

-Dave M

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The Northern Anime

 

It's May, and that means it's Anime North time here in Ontario!  And that also means that I've been doing what I do this time of year every year since, um, let me check, since 2005. That's a solid twenty years of me doing panels and things at Anime North, long enough for me to sit back and think, wow, that's a long time.

 

It helps that Anime North is staffed by understanding folks who took a chance on me showing up out of nowhere, who have let me experiment and trial-and-error my way through a wide variety of video formats, panel topics, and event rooms. It also helps that the attendees are a kind and accepting crowd willing to put up with technical snafus, schedule changes, and every other sort of problem endemic to the world of volunteer-driven pop culture events. 

Anime North is happening May 23-25 this year, mere days away as I write this, still with panel clips to edit and flyers to print. But the con will come whether I'm ready or not. If that weekend you happen to come down to the Toronto Congress Centre and the Delta Hotel over on Dixon Road out by Pearson Airport, you'll find yourself wandering through a wonderland of guest panels and autographs, the Doll North area, a dedicated show of Gundam model kits, the secondhand Nominoichi sale, giant vendor halls, gaming halls, artists' alleys, and exhibits. Vtubers, voice actors, artists, translators, guest speakers and experts hold forth on a variety of topics, while fashion shows, masquerades, late night outdoor raves and maid cafes will also distract your attention. Panel topics include Anime Northstalgia, The Food Of Spy X Family, Canadian Anime Heritage Minutes, Explaining Anime To Your Mom, Greatest Anime Deaths, and Fire Emblem War Crimes. 

 

But wait, you ask. Dave, what are YOU doing this year at Anime North? Well, I'll tell you. What I'm doing on Friday is hitting the Nominoichi. And then I'll be in the ballroom at TCC North for another edition of Anime Hell. 

 

It's roughly two hours of roughly edited shorts, clips, trailers, commercials, educational films, and unidentified and unidentifiable audio-visual materials pursuant to our interests in Japan, animation, Hell, or all three. 

And on Saturday noon I'll be looking at three very specific years and extrapolating  entire decades worth of artistic development out of them. Maybe this one's a stretch but it gives us a chance to look at a lot of different, sometimes rarely seen anime, as we speed through 1965/1975/1985: Decades That Shaped Anime.

Later Saturday it's time to explore one of Japan's most notorious anime studios and find out how they turned clunky ineptitude into viral marketing success!

Sue Cat, Ultra Granny, all the stars you know and love will be there to celebrate the unique style of Knack.  All of which may in some way prepare you for what's happening 8pm Saturday night, which is of course Totally Lame. 

Host Neil Nadelman will take you on a two hour tour through the lost worlds of really lousy Japanese cartoons! Worth the price of your Anime North admission alone. 

Sunday noon, myself and a panel of other middle-aged white guys will do what middle-aged white guys can't stop themselves from doing, which is talking about World War Two, specifically the battleship Yamato and how the real thing differs from the cartoon that blows up entire planets. 

And if that isn't cataclysmic enough for you, stick around and see Neil and myself provide live commentary to a newly restored version of the long-suppressed Toho masterpiece of apocalyptic cinema, Prophecies Of Nostradamus.

Ending the convention with the end of the world? Well, if there's a better way to wrap up a fun weekend, well, I'd like to see it. And we probably will. In the meantime, start packing your bags and putting the finishing touches on your cosplay, and we'll see you at Anime North!

-Dave M
 

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Let's Flashback 1993

 

By popular demand, another long-suppressed issue of the print Let's Anime is up at the Otaku Archive portion of the Internet Archive, complete with all the attitude, factual errors and translation mistakes you've come to expect from 90s zines! It's sure to be a fascinating look at what it took to put a fanzine out back in the days when Japanese translation was difficult, reliable raw information was hard to come by, and desktop publishing meant putting actual pieces of paper onto the top of a desk, trimming images and text by hand using scissors or an X-Acto blade, and pasting everything down with the old reliable UHU Glue Stick. 

You can easily see exactly where I pasted things into the layout thanks to those harsh shadows. I still have the original pasteups for this issue, which is not a thing I can say about several other issues of the print Let's Anime. The process of putting together an issue was labor-intensive. For this particular issue I found myself blessed with a variety of submissions - Wilfredo Segarra sent me a terrific long-form Mazinger Z piece, Darius Washington wrote about Macross II, and Matt and CB delivered a rant about both the depressing state of then-current anime and the dismissive attitude the American fan sphere held towards the classics. Lloyd Carter gave me an installment of his long-running anime column "Beer Can Missiles," fake advice columnist The Beast offered yet more fake advice to fake correspondents, and I managed to throw in pieces about Giant Robo, a top ten robot anime list, scene reports, fanzine reviews, and because it's the 1990s, an article about Shonen Knife. The Nausicaa drone article came from an aviation magazine, the title of which has vanished into obscurity. Rounding out the issue were flyers for Project A-Kon 4, Anime America's Dojinshi contest, and I-Con's anime experiment "Chibi-Con"

 

All this text was keyboarded into a desktop publishing program, the name of which I cannot remember; all I know is it worked on our Windows 3.0 box. All the headlines, page numbers, and text blocks were printed out on our home inkjet printer. Illustrations were provided by hauling a load of manga, magazines, and books up to the Kinko's Copy at Windy Hill & 41, which was open all night and had free coffee, and I'd photocopy whatever I thought I was going to need for that particular issue.

Raw materials in hand, the next step was putting it all together and pasting it all up, one page at a time, trimming illustrations to fit and building collages of different images as necessary. This is kind of the fun part, as long as you keep a supply of sharp X-Acto blades handy. The pasted-up 8.5x11 pages would then be assembled into 11x17 signatures - a 28 page zine would require 7 signatures - and then that 11x17 mockup would be brought back to the Kinkos, or maybe the self-service copiers at Office Depot. That's where the actual printing of the book would be done. Then I'd take the pages home, assemble the books, staple the books with my long booklet stapler, and fold them. All by hand.  

 

This stack of finished Let's Anime zines would be sold to the general public at anime club meetings, at anime fan tables at local conventions, and at the artist alley/promotional tables at Project A-Kon, which at the time was the only anime convention we were making it out to. And of course I sold issues through the mail via the PO box; anime zine publishers would swap zines and promote each other's publications, and there was a slow but steady amount of letters coming into that PO box from people who'd read about Let's Anime in another fanzine, picked up a flyer at a convention, or heard about us at a club meeting somewhere. 

Did an issue of Let's Anime ever get a print run of more than 100 copies? I don't think so. I quit doing print issues of Let's Anime in 1999 for a multitude of reasons, mostly because on top of all the actual zine writing and layout work is all the extra work of simply getting that zine into the hands of readers. Distribution is the key word here, it's a job in and of itself, and one that I simply did not have time for.  I enjoy making fanzines, I enjoy creating physical printed books, and as we sometimes see decades of internet work vanish in an instant, the permanence of ink on paper has become surprisingly valuable. But self-distribution requires a self dedicated to that and only that, and, well, I have other things to do. In the meantime, my writing about classic Japanese animation can reach an audience tens, hundreds, thousands of times wider than it ever could when it was limited to whatever I could print, staple, and fold one at a time.  

-Dave Merrill

 

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