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The male cosplayers (and their occasionally faceless characters) of Summer Wonder Festival

Casey Baseel Jul 29, 2015
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Last weekend, we headed out to Chiba Prefecture to attend Wonder Festival, the world’s largest model and garage kit-building convention. Along with all sorts of inanimate representations of animated characters, we also checked out all of the impressive cosplayers who’d gathered from all over Japan for the event.

We already shared our photos of the female costumers, but we remembered to save some room on our memory card for the guys as well, and so we proudly present the male cosplayers of this year’s Summer Wonder Festival.

As we mentioned in our previous report on this year’s Summer Wonder Festival, the temperature during our photo safari was a blistering 35.4-degree Celsius (95.7-degree Fahrenheit). We’re not sure if the male cosplayers did as commendable a job of keeping their smiles going during that heat as their female counterparts, though, because so many of them were dressed as characters with helmets or masks, like Ultraman Zero and Tetsujin 28/Gigantor.

▼ The Bomberman characters only have faces by the loosest definition of the word.

While the female cosplayers at Wonder Festival were almost exclusively dressed as characters that originated in Japan, there were a few foreign favorites mixed in among the guys. For example, even though American superheroes used to have only a very small following in Japan, recent successes in live-action adaptations meant we ran into a few DC and Marvel icons.

▼ We guess Spider-Man has to run out of web fluid some time, and when he does and has to walk home instead of just swinging all the way back, he’ll be happy he chose well-cushioned footwear.

But no matter how much you might like seeing the cinematic adventures of Spidey and the Dark Knight, pirating them is wrong, as Japan’s Eiga Dorobo (Movie Thief) reminds us.

We’re not sure which is more frightening, this monstrous Tora from Ushio and Tora…

…or this disturbing rendition of Hokkaido Television Broadcasting’s On-chan, who looks pretty cute in his original, illustrated form, but decidedly less so here.

Either way, we’re feeling the need to protect ourselves. Mind if we borrow your sword, Dragon Quest hero?

Or, if you’re right in the middle of using it, we suppose we could make do with Yangus’ (from Dragon Quest VIII) ax.

Of course, famed manga artist Akira Toriyama didn’t just design the characters for Dragon Quest. He’s also the creator of Dragon Ball, and by extension Piccolo.

Times are tough for Pepsiman, the once high-profile corporate mascot for Pepsi in Japan. So tough, apparently, that he’s changed his brand loyalty to energy drink Red Bull.

Meanwhile, Metal Gear Solid’s leading man (for half the series or so, at least) chose to cool off with a can of iced coffee. After all, it’s not like Naked Snake could actually get naked in public, right?

Although this guy certainly seemed to come close…

It just goes to show, whatever your outfit, there’s a certain type of courage that’s necessary to do cosplay.