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DRESS TO IMPRESS!!

Ah, the simple fun of cosplay.  The act of dressing up as your favourite character whether you are a master tailor or an amateur seamstress.  Its beauty lies in the fact that, as you will see later in this feature, that anyone with access to cardboard and scissors and a few household materials can do it.  At this year's first MCM Expo the cosplayers were out in force,  so much so that we decided to do a separate feature on them since we met so many! 

We arrived on the first day to find a host of cosplayers already in the queue dressed up as characters from Bleach, Final Fantasy and more Naruto headbands then you could focus your chakra at.  We hadn't even got through the doors and already the Expo spirit was alive and kicking, there was even a guy in Fatal Fury cosplay!  This was only the queue so what awaited us in inside?  It could only get more random and impressive surely?  And boy - did it get random. 

RANDOM COSPLAY WINNER!



Henshin-a-go-go baby!  Although we were handing prizes out to cosplayers over both days of the Expo, on the first day we gave two lucky individuals special prizes if their cosplay proved random enough.  We just had to hand a prize out to Steve Gregson in this excellent Viewtiful Joe cosplay.  An anime based on the game has been made so it counts!

RANDOM COSPLAY WINNER!



OK, so Haru from FLCL may not be incredibly random but the quality of the hand-made guitar meant that Jessie Clinch was our random female cosplay winner.  Great costume Jess and we hope you enjoyed your Di Gi Charat bag of goodies! 

Once inside we explored and within only an hour we had met a guy who offered to dance for doujinshi, met one of our random cosplay winners and one of us had purchased a Kuroneko cosplay cap from TokyoToys.  And we still had the rest of the day to go! 

The more cosplayers we met that day, the more we loved them.  Their enthusiasm and friendliness combined to their down-to-earth attitude made the Expo a better place to be. It is a busy place which does get very crowded, so cosplayers really brighten the place up. 

We still had another day to go and, as you will see on the next page, the quieter second day became even better for cosplay spotting, plus some tips from the cosplayers.