This omnibus contains the entire 3-volume series.

Christie is an amateur manga author with vague dreams of making it big one day. In the meantime, she just wants to have fun at Yatta Con, her first big manga/anime convention. Unfortunately, her boyfriend and artist (they're co-creating original English-language/OEL manga) is being a jerk, practically drooling over every pretty cosplayer who comes to their table. Matt, the good-looking cosplayer manning the table next to them, annoys her with his snarky comments, but she finds herself turning to him more and more as things deteriorate between her and her boyfriend. Matt's attitude may be a bit abrasive, but he and Christie just sort of click in a way that Christie and her boyfriend don't.

Each of the next two volumes take place a year apart, at the next Yatta Cons, following the ups and downs of Christie and Matt's relationship, Christie's con-going experience, and Christie and her friends' prospective manga careers.

This was a reread, but my last time reading this series was so long ago that I'd forgotten a lot of specifics. I vaguely remembered thinking that the romance didn't quite work for me. My feelings about it haven't changed - Christie and Matt are cute together and all, but it bugged me that, by the end of the series, they'd spent a grand total of maybe 8-9 days in the same physical space. If they'd spent the time between Yatta Cons talking over the phone or online, it wouldn't have been quite as big of a deal, but they hadn't even done much of that. Christie tried calling Matt once between volume 1 and volume 2 but chickened out when someone else answered. Matt and Christie talked a little just prior to volume 3's Yatta Con, and Matt read Christie's blog (which mortified Christie when he finally commented for the first time), but there were still a lot of things they didn't know about each other and hadn't talked about when they met up again at the convention.

So, I didn't think the series' format worked well for its primary romance, but I at least felt other aspects of the series were much stronger. Chmakova's depictions of Yatta Con and Christie's experience of it, particularly her first time going, were great. Volume 2 was more dramatic, touching on folks who don't consider OEL manga to be "real" manga, racism, and fans who don't respect cosplayers' boundaries and hug or take pictures without asking - not inaccurate, but maybe a bit much in a single volume. There was also a nice ongoing storyline involving Christie's new artist, Bethany, who yearned for a career as a manga artist but whose mother wanted her to have a career that was more likely to produce a stable income.

Dramacon wasn't bad, but it didn't give its primary romance enough room to breathe and really feel like something that could last. As with Nightschool, one of her later series, it had a lot of promise but didn't quite hit the mark.

Extras:

This edition of the series contains a lot of previously unpublished material. I'm not sure which bits were new and which weren't, but I didn't recognize the multi-page comic featuring Matt and Christie's first real date (all in Matt's POV, which was kind of nice). There were also a few author's notes, comics featuring a little behind-the-scenes info, fan art, some four-panel comics, and an interview with Svetlana Chmakova with early concept art for the series. Even if you own the original three volumes, the extras in this omnibus are worth checking out if you're a big fan of the series. I only wish the fan art could have been in color.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

I actually finished this a few days ago. I still need to write a review for it.

My memories of this series were a bit vague, but I don't think my feelings about it have changed much over the years. The convention stuff was stronger than the romance, which is a bit of a pity since the overall story is about Christie and Matt's relationship. The format just didn't work well for it.

I'm wondering, can I count this towards Snakes and Ladders? The rules mention how to handle audiobooks, but I haven't been able to find anything in the rules or Q&A about graphic novels, although Tannat commented on one of my past posts about seeing something somewhere.

All right, that's the end of volume 2. One more volume to go and I'm done with this omnibus.

Volume 2 was basically the "dark side of fandom" volume: OEL manga creators being told that what they're doing isn't "real manga," people making fun of bad cosplayers, con-goers who don't know how to respect the boundaries of cosplayers and touch them or take pictures of them without asking, etc. It was a wee bit much crammed into a single volume, and maybe over-dramatized at times, but not inaccurate.

The series still doesn't quite work for me as romance. In volume 1, Christie and Matt got to know each other over the space of 2-3 days. At that time, Christie was dating her sleazebag of a boyfriend, who crossed a line and became her ex-boyfriend. In the year between the end of volume 1 and volume 2, Christie tried to call Matt once but never actually spoke to him. In volume 2, Matt is dating someone else, but there are still sparks between him and Christie.

By the end of volume 2, Matt and Christie have maybe spent a grand total of 4-6 days out of an entire year in the same physical space, and a good chunk of that time has been drama-filled, with one or the other of them dating someone else.

I have three days to finish this. It's technically a reread, but it's been so long since I last read it that I can't recall much about it, other than that I thought it was so-so. This one volume collects all three volumes of the original series.

The world of this series includes a manga publisher, Mangapop, that's a thinly veiled stand-in for Tokyopop. There's an OEL manga artist/writer that the main character and her boyfriend idolize because she's the first one to get signed by Mangapop for her OEL manga. It's weird reading this, knowing that Tokyopop imploded later on, leaving a bunch of OEL manga authors with no way to finish or republish their series because of difficulties with getting their rights back.