disclaimer; PLEASE CONSIDER SUPPORTING DEEP HELL ON PATREON! where soon you will find some of the cut and slop footage from this event, as well as…more??
The events of Saboten 2023 represent a type of possibility space. I remember, in the months leading up to, the grand master plan: I’d pooled resources and connections over the last year to strike up an interview with a famous, local figure. Uncle Yuhki runs a series of panels at a host of Arizona Conventions that are all late night, 18+ affairs. Drunk panels, at least ones where most of us, the audience, can be anywhere from buzzed to absolutely shithoused. Locked room affairs with no cell phones, no videos. Under the possibility of not ending up on social media, I, like the kind of person that gets banned from parties for wanting stories, was going to score a dramatic interview with Yuhki and get his take on the decline of the convention, a host of backwards assumptions already half up my ass.
For the last ten years, I’ve staked most of my experiences with subcultures on Comic Conventions. Comics are in my blood: I come from a fantasy artist, and was bathed in the scripture and provenance of artists like Frank Frazetta. Comics weren’t something about superpowers, they were about bastards with the will to live and a sword to do it with. A host of artists who got their start in places like Playboy and Mad Magazine touched the comic books I read. There I was, in my twenties, waiting in line to get a copy of Phantom Stranger signed that still sits in a lock up chest whenever I live somewhere that has the room to store it.
I had to chase those artifacts the first few times I got to go, always pledging to stay just one more day next time, to bump shoulders with more people. Conventions felt like strange possibility spaces. There were mostly empty rooms where people debated the merits of steampunk airships, true. Bleeding out into the hallways of cosplayers of every skill level, a five day carnival where you can be who you want. Like two rivers layered on top of each other, one real and one fake if you were standing in either. We’d panic and head out of broken into backrooms and into hallways where people waited to hear Brandon Fucking Sanderson talk about magic
.
While everything Hustled to Get Online, to kickstart and crowdfund or turn beleaguered overworked industry professionals who live on the convention circuit to pay their bills, I became a victim of my own cynicism and allowed it to turn into a type of work-addicted psychosis. I watched boys with undercuts carry four or five iphones from booth to booth, cataloguing hours of opinions of those same industry professionals with questions like “What attracts you to comic books?” for podcasts and YouTube shows.
I wanted to dig a grave for professional life and throw them in. Maybe, because I wanted to be them so bad. I did my interviews on paper, hand transcribed for websites that are no longer with us and zines that probably had even smaller circulation (from the hand, and directly into the trashcan) or I lugged around Wal-Mart brand voice recorders that ran on AA batteries and tape. I had a few good interviews out there, some of which can still be found online under long-dead names. It was all in some kind of hope I’d say something writerly enough to catch the spark or twinkle in an eye of some industry professional, swap business cards, talk about what I wanted to do with Batman.
The need for community pushed me back out into the streets for years, spending fistfuls of ever larger amounts of cash for hotel stays, convention badges, watching the people I’d attend them with drop them out as they juggled the responsibilities of children and budgets, and there I was: functionally a child with a budget.
SABOTEN 23’ is the latest in a long line of Party Conventions. Separate from the massive titan of industry that’s becoming our local Comic Book Convention (now booking more third string MCU and Netflix Anime Adaptation actors than ever), it’s a splendidly intimate convention that takes place in the Sheraton Hotel, Downtown Phoenix. It wants to grow, desperately, every year. More panels squeezed into two floors, more industry people and more voice actors. Spreading out into nearby buildings that turn the trek to your panel into a post-apocalyptic braving through the streets of radiating heat. I passed people on the second day that already looked tired.
The gaming Hall was the primary offender: located at least two and a half blocks away from the convention center. I couldn’t live with myself to make the cart-pullers sweat through downtown traffic to get me to a place where I could play a test copy of someone local’s cyberpunk tabletop roleplaying game. Multiple times during the week I’d make the trek to hunt someone down at The Cosplay Rave, a hallmark of Saboten that appears every year to exist as a function of a ghost-crowd. There, but also, dependent on you knowing where to be and when, otherwise it was a dark room where shades of cosplayers ambled to electronic music.
I spent those first two days chasing an interview with Uncle Yuhki still. Possessed by some perverse desire that it might illuminate something I’ve been missing: these aren’t fun anymore, “I just don’t know how I’d enjoy myself if I wasn’t working”. Everything had become words I wanted to put down for someone to read.
Yuhki is a god damned performer and he does it a few times a year for a crowd of a few hundred, some of which only take one vacation a year and use it to attend anime conventions. Every night, after 9PM, he’ll get up on stage and run skits, mic work, raunchy jokes and encourage partial nudity but never push it in a way where it’s something you know he, himself, wouldn’t do.
That’s part of the charm of these after dark panels more than anything. Yuhki is an experienced performer who cut his teeth on the venues and audiences he’s still performing for. Gorgeous cabaret drag-queens host cosplay hours right across the hallway promising everything he does but always seem to draw a fraction of the crowd, all of which still have a good time.
They don’t carry the gossip like Uncle Yuhki’s name does though, which has caused me to drop cryptic hints to the man that I wanted to sit down with him at all for years. It had to be a right place, right time sort of situation. We crossed paths at hotel parties and outside panels for at least a year or two. I showed up in the audience as a skeleton mask a dozen or so times. I made a facebook account earlier in the year just to reach out, and pick his brain. We exchanged words but part of being a performer for hundreds of people is wanting a little bit of time for yourself.
If someone, a celebrity the public likes, a local musician, an artist after a showcase at a venue, ever seems exhausted when a microphone is shoved in their face it’s because the last true thing anyone wants to do after showing themselves off for entertainment is to talk about why in fact they want to do it. I like shoving a camera in the bystanders face more than I ever do interviewing a real bonafide star, but Uncle Yuhki is a little bit of both, and that’s part of the charm.
In her trip to ANIME NEXT, 23’ for – wait, for us!, published on DEEP-HELL.COM Axe Binondo wrote: “No one here is getting laid, despite my mating call of playing Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari in the retro gaming room. If you reach out your hand to try and touch the spirit of fellow freaks selling CharMuro prints, you’re going to get a fistful of recent Jump hits and Toonami-core classics instead. “
And in that, Is the excess of an Uncle Yuhki.
These 18+ Panels aren’t just exercises in raunch and debauch, but the bones holding the entire convention together. The freaks are getting older, and new freaks replace them. Some kind of containment device had to be created: a place to act out brazen jokes and wild fantasies. For people to be put in lapdance chairs and anxieties to be dealt with painfully through comedy. I will see a young twink nerd who can’t stare at the crowd and only looks at the floor indulge in a rapid-strip contest. Friends will push the most shy and then the loudest of their group up on the stage during Anime Speed Dating. Elsewhere in the convention, crowds of people flock from mostly-empty panel rooms all day waiting in line for Voiceactors but turning over other rooms rapidly.
More to wit, to Axe’s point, anime conventions and comic cons have become a burning man style ground for the worst excesses of a decade of youtube video essayists hitting viral popularity. Now, everyone wants to be a star and is willing to tell you about it. There’s less of an impetus to share what we like about something as a way of relating to other people. Panels act more as closed acts of discussion for the groups that put them on, and the audience shuffles in and out in silence. I actually like it when someone shouts at the panelist, when hands stay raised.
I find out late Saturday evening that there’s no time for Uncle Yuhki and I to sit down, and I take it as gracefully as I can: at some point I am going to ambush him and at least get a few questions in. I scramble to throw together some kind of angle, getting my favorite footage of the weekend recording in the elevator at odd hours of the day and night. People are tired and dont want to talk, which I feed on like a parasite. I stand around the hotel Exhibitor Hall but nobody wants to play this year, as split up as the vendor hall is.
One giant ballroom reserved for independent artists and makers, one giant ballroom reserved for The Wall of Prints or The Guy Who Sells Destiny Weapons that are vaguelly disimillar from the ones on the other side of the room equal in size, splitting the difference so there’s never really a crowd in one place. Half of everyone sticks around the lobby – and this one is almost infamous for the way you can come as a tourist and not have to buy an expensive badge. Most of the people hang out, carouse, whatever it needs to be called, in the lobby between panels. At one point I catch someone saying nobody in the tri-city area can do a City Pop night without them, drunken, stumbling. I’m not so different, maybe a little worse. I spent money to be here, but for four days and three nights a lot of the laughter comes from the lobby.
It’s a dangerous lobby, too, all impromptu photoshoots and security guards. At one point, they approach me getting into an elevator. No, officer, I’m not filming in the elevator without the audience’s consent. It’s just cosplay.