Popcon Asia 2017

On Sunday, August 6th, 2017 I visited Popcon Asia in the afternoon at Hall B of Jakarta Convention Center. I plan to meet up with my friend from college and we were pretty excited to be seeing the arrays of people and medias who are a large contributor to today's trending pop culture in Indonesia. I was pretty excited to get new collections of local comics as well as to see Yoshi Sudarso, an Indonesian-born actor who plays Koda, the born-again caveman who was destined as the Blue Range in the Power Ranger Dino Force. We were pretty excited but nervous about the amount of crowd present in the area, but the convention itself is not as packed as I thought it would be. I observed Sunday crowd is also better than the Saturday, as seen from the ticket queues. The ticket price for one-day entry is IDR 95.000 and for the two-day pass IDR 180.000

We then began to explore the areas, strolling from looking to performances and talk shows on the main stage, visiting any booth that will present us with freebies as well as checking out the works of local artists selling their merchandises among the Artist Alley. There were plenty of spaces going around but it can get crowded at certain hours.

We got two strips of photos from Webtoon's booth.

#akucintagratisan

This funny speech bubbles (and a surprisingly random official portrait of Pak Jokowi, the Indonesian president for the 2014-2019 period is strangely random and witty and the same time) are seen in Cergaroma's official booth.

A fairly simple corner from Instagram.

As expected from such convention, people dressing up as their favorite characters displaying their best attempt at cosplay--costume play--can be seen in every corner. This event proves to be a good chance for many to be able to express themselves and unleash their inner alter egos. Some costume is even made by design according to one's imagination of their ideal original fantasy character. Too bad I didn't take many pictures that day because really everything was pretty hectic.

I had a commissioned portrait of myself drawn, credit to the illustrator pictured below. I didn't catch his name though, but whoever you are from Akademi Samali, I thank you for this!

I would also like to get my face drawn by other artists too since many had different styles that I'm interested in and that I was just simply curious as to how other would perceive my character from my appearance. Maybe another time. Really, with this kind of convention having its own crowd and seemed to be always in demand, we have lots of events to look out for.

Playing Candrageni, a board game created by a team of a local game design company. One of the designers is actually the one sitting on my left (second from left in the picture above) who kindly guided us through three of his games, starting with this one!

We spent most of our time in the gaming corner, where local game developers present their best work to the public through demonstrating their games and inviting people to have hands-on experiences. We tried out lots gaming apps, from a mobile app to one interactive game put on big screens, but it was until we found the board game activities titled 'Tabletopia' that made us certainly intrigued. Firstly thinking that we would just visit the spot to find decent seats while entertaining ourselves by playing board games, at the end, we were actually enjoying our times spending hours on games from one table of one type of board game to another more than anything we did that day. We were so honestly impressed and surprise of how interesting the local boardgames are and how it is growing rapidly. My respect to all the designers.

Funnily we were also featured on the community website! Imagine how surprised I was to see my face on the front page of the site that night while trying to explore more about the gaming scene in Indonesia. And yes, I bought their product as soon as I saw the variety of games that had been established.

Check out the article here at boardgame.id (Indonesian)

This is what Hall B looked like when all the visitor has gone home and when the sellers are tidying up their booths, closing down at ending the day as well as their venture at Popcon Asia. My friends and I were some of the last visitors inside the building, we even have to exit through the back door as the front entrance was closed down. We left the building right after finishing off our dinner--mainly from stalls selling Japanese food in one corner of the hall. I finished two plates of takoyaki because I was simply so tired of going around all day and had my energy depleted. However it certainly was a great day to be able to catch up with a friend and to have met other new friends. 

We were also taken aback by the surging amount of creativity we saw during the day and how the spirit of local and international artists was able to inspire us. It made me seriously jealous of their talent and determination. Tremendous respect for them, especially that this time I was able to explore more of the artists' products after previously only checking out official exhibits in the previous convention such as the Indonesian Comic Con 2015 which I wrote about here.

To end this post, a bit of a haul of some of my purchase (and some of the freebies I got) from Popcon Asia. To more years ahead!