Kemin Mangapäivä 2025 - Back in business!

Hello everyone and welcome to the second con summary of the year! ^^ 

Canva was strong with this one.

(All pictures of the post are taken by Shiro Samurai, thank you very much - I seriously wouldn't have had time.)

I think the title pretty much tells it all - Kemin Mangapäivä was held on 8th of March at Kemin kulttuurikeskus for the first time in 10 years! This event was quite popular back in the days but for several reasons it got buried under the sands of time until now. 

The story behind the resurrection pretty much goes like this: as I have mentioned several times, a bit over a year ago I moved to north because I applied for a vacancy (a librarian) here and actually got the job. Very soon I learnt that Outi, the person behind Kemin Mangapäivä AND Kitacon all those years ago, was still working at Kemi's children's cultural center. It took one phone call to arrange a meeting with her and Sanna (her colleague) - and in that very meeting we decided to host Kemin Mangapäivä once again and wake it from its slumber!

...and the decision was made in the beginning of January, literally two months before the con itself.

I would like to state that even though there were quite a few hiccups along the way - typos in the con program, problems with our social media account etc. - things went smoothly considering the time we had for organizing the event. In this summary I probably won't go into too much detail about things that need to be done for a convention when organizing one but I'm actually considering writing a post about those in the future. 

But yes, let's continue with the summary!

I woke up around 7.20 am. - Kulttuurikeskus is literally a two-minute drive or a ten-minute walk away from my apartment so yes, I wasn't really in any rush. I took a shower, grabbed the stuff I needed to take with me and drove to Kulttuurikeskus. I was there around 8.30, which meant I had plenty of time to put up to information signs. My colleagues Ilkka and Olli were already there and while they mostly didn't participate in the event stuff they also took care of the visitors and customer service! Ilkka had also promised to act as a second judge in the drawing competition that was held within the drawing workshop, hosted by Shiro Samurai. 

I was ready with the signs in about 30 minutes which in other words meant that I could enjoy my morning coffee in peace - and that turned out to be the last peaceful moment of the day lol. My third colleague Johanna - who was specifically there for the event and to help with the customer service - arrived at work during our morning break and I was able to give her the needed instructions. After this it was time to start putting on my costume of the day, namely Alicia. 

The entrance to the event venue.

I would also like to point out that even though there are not many people in the pictures below we had plenty of visitors. The lack of people is simply because Shiro Samurai took the pictures before he started hosting the drawing workshop/drawing contest which means it was in the very beginning of the event. 

When I was putting on my costume I got a message from said host who informed me that he had arrived at the library - literally when I was in the middle of doing my eyeliner lol :'D I told him to look for Outi to fetch the pens etc. he could use at the workshop and then Ilkka who would have the papers for drawing. I also told him I would check up with him soon and returned to doing my make-up which actually turned out okay-ish. When I checked the clock though I got a small heart attack; it was already almost 11 am! I felt the nausea hit me but tried to ignore it - I knew it was just my nerves acting up and I tried to soothe myself with some prep talk. Not sure how well I managed but because there was no time to have a meltdown of any sort I just... Kind of had to get my shit together and just roll with it lol. 

The children's and youth department of the library. At the end of the corridor is the gaming/hang out room where the drawing workshop was hosted - and yes, there are also gaming consoles!

The adult's section of the library. A sight like this - in a much smaller library but anyway - made me want to become a librarian. I was a kid back then so yes, profession-wise I am where I always wanted to be.

I practically ran downstairs to check up with Shiro Samurai. He had basically everything under control so I went to check up with Outi and Sanna who were hosting a non-stop pin workshop. In the same room with them was also Matsucon's promotion table and quite a few comic character statues lol. I chatted for a while with the people in the room and then walked to the lobby where the Artists' Alley was located - and ran into Sallukka, Dongrieg and Jefu. The latter one also hosted a program at Kemin Mangapäivä (he gave tips about 2020s anime series worth watching) and Sallukka acted as a second cosplay judge, me being the other. 

Speaking of the cosplay competition: we quickly agreed to scout for participants from the venue. You see, in the Saturday morning we had two contestants. TWO. It's a bit hard to have a competition with just two participants so yes, we needed to do something about this. To be honest: even though I'm quite known to be stubborn af I even considered cancelling the competition. However, some gut instinct told me not to and I'm pretty damn happy I didn't since we actually got four more contestants to participate! Being stubborn can be either a curse or a blessing and in this case, fortunately, it was the latter one. Two of the new contestants were actually familiar faces from Kummacon - we were all a bit surprised when we recognized each other :'D 

A part of the Artists' Alley, pictured from the front door.

A general hallway picture.

Same hallway, pictured from the library's door.

Around 12 pm me and Sallukka started the pre-judging of the contestants. Each one of them were given 10 minutes to tell about their cosplay; what techniques they had used, their favorite parts of the costume, which part was the most challenging to make etc. I must say that making the decision wasn't very easy; all of them had put so much effort to making their costumes, tried new techniques and everything! However, me and Sallukka had agreed that there would only be one winner, also known as other prizes weren't given. This may have had something to do with our budget which was a very lonely and round ZERO.

It took us about 50 minutes to judge everyone - not everybody had that much to tell about their cosplay - and after that we could finally sit down for a minute. And I could eat my lunch. We didn't have that much time though; I wanted to check up with Shiro Samurai AND I needed to give some new instructions to Johanna before we would start guiding people to the backstage... Or, well, to the upstairs corridor from which we could enter the big auditorium, also known as the venue of the cosplay competition. So yes, I ate pretty quickly and then we - also known as me and Sallukka - walked to the drawing workshop. Shiro Samurai told us that there were some entries to the drawing contest; all of them just happened to be from within the same age group so he and Ilkka would have to re-think a few things, namely who to reward and the criteria for that. For clarification: originally there were three different categories based on certain age groups but since all the entries were from within the same one... Yeah. 

After this it was time to gather the cosplay contestants and go upstairs with the elevator. There were eight people in the same elevator and someone commented "Considering how much Finnish people like their personal space we make horribly small elevators" and to be honest I couldn't agree more - it was so crammed! :'D Luckily the ride up didn't take more than a few seconds and we could exit our metallic cocoon. 

We checked the stage quickly, I gave the last instructions there, the contestants formed up a queue and soon it was time for the competition to begin! To be honest it wasn't a long one, about 15 minutes or so since we didn't have any entr'acte or anything of the sort. But we managed to host it, yay! <3 I'm so thankful to all of our brave contestants (and some of them even said that they would take part next year too which almost brought me to tears, no joke), thank you for taking a part to the competition! A special thanks goes to Sallukka: I wouldn't have managed without you and it truly was an honor to work with you 💚

Oh, we also had a photo booth, the photographer being a student from Lappia! <3 Too bad I didn't have time to get a group photo with my friends even though we talked about it.

When the cosplay competition was over I noticed that Shiro Samurai had messaged me. He and Ilkka were now judging the drawings and we figured we could tag along since we were already done with our duties. 

Eventually me and Sallukka became some sort of judges for the drawing contest too. Shiro Samurai and Ilkka had decided to reward two drawings, one as a winner and one with honorable mention. If judging the cosplay competition was hard, this was even more difficult since the entries were pretty much equal in skill! D: It took us quite a while to decide the two but eventually we came to an agreement and could host the small prize ceremony. 

After that it was time for me to host my program; I had decided to act as a filler and host a same panel about cosplay memories I had hosted in Mericon 2023... As a filler xD Yes, we had some hard time first to actually get people to host programs but in the end there were three panels, a drawing workshop/contest, a cosplay competition and the pin workshop (plus the Artists' Alley which was popular even with the library's regular customers)! The third one to host a panel was Hannele from Piiri.

I was checking the time since the clock on the wall definitely didn't show the right time lol.

And after my panel Mangapäivä was officially over! I felt so damn drained tbh; even lifting a finger felt like a mission impossible. The front door of the library was already locked at this point so my duty was to check there weren't any people inside anymore and turn off the lights. I hanged out with Shiro Samurai for a while since he was waiting for a ride back home and when his mother came to pick him up I also drove home. 

And slept until I went to have a glass of wine with Sallukka. We totally deserved it.

As you can see, it was one hell of a hectic day but we made it, yay!

The date for the next Mangapäivä hasn't been decided yet but I can say for sure that the event will be organized next year too! 💚 Even though Mangapäivä will (at least very likely) be a small event in the future too we will definitely take into consideration the feedback we have gotten and do some things even better next year~!

...I mean, now we literally have a year for preparations so yes, there is actually time to do things better next time. However, I'm still very pleased with how we pulled this year through; even though I'm a perfectionist by nature I do realize that we couldn't have done nothing more. And, at least sometimes, doing your best is more than enough. This time it definitely was.

My next blog post will very likely be a circle lens review 'cause the next con I will attend is in May so yeah, no summaries before that. Already looking forward to that though! 👀

Until next time.

-Firith