The third and final day of Asia Pop Comic Con 2017 dawns bright and cheerful. Running from the 25th to the 27th of August 2017 at the SMX Convention Center in Pasay City, expect exclusive sneak peeks at Hall M, the grand finals of the CAGE cosplay competition, and exclusive creator panels by Shouji Kawamori and Stanley Lau.

We spent a good chunk of the afternoon attending talks by the gentlemen we just mentioned. Shouji Kawamori’s talk was mostly about the seminal group of Japanese creators that include our other childhood heroes Haruhiko Mikimoto and Ichirou Itano. Misfits in school and rebels at heart, they pioneered a lot of modern anime tropes simply because they refused to take “No!” for an answer.

The rest of the afternoon was spent frantically scouring the rest of the exhibition floor for some last minute items from local creators and fan artists. We snagged a couple of books, some Catzilla t-shirts (don’t ask), and prints from fandoms such as Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Marvel. There is a definite uptick in the quality of merchandise and artwork on offer at our local Manila cons, and we are very optimistic that this trend will keep going for years to come.

APCCPH 2017 was a complete blast! It may not have been perfect, but for a young con it is definitely getting a lot of things right. There is always room for improvement — say, a paid Meet and Greet to control numbers for the more popular creators, or perhaps a numbered and timed ticket to enter the top free attractions (NETFLIX T^T). We will definitely make the flight to next year’s event, but til then we have fond memories of their 2017 edition.