Over the past decade, cosplay has exploded in popularity. Once a niche pursuit of folks at the fringes of fandom, it’s now a worldwide industry, attracting countless new devotees and fans every single day.
In that time, our coverage—and my coverage in particular—of cosplay has evolved as well, to the point where I’ve gone from simply posting a weekly gallery of images to overseeing our own website dedicated to the craft (and, *plug*, writing a book with Brian).
That site, which you’re on right now, is simply called Cosplay.
Cosplay operates, and will continue to operate, on a number of values:
- Cosplay is for everyone, of all ages, genders, colours and body shapes. Our coverage reflects this.
- Cosplay isn’t just about images, it’s about people and their stories, of a 21st-century artform and a scene in constant upheaval. So in addition to photos and galleries, we also run big and important features on cosplayers; some previous stories include an ambitious excursion to Iceland, an experiment in cosplay photography and a report on what it’s like working as a paid cosplayer. If you’re a cosplayer with a story to tell beyond just “look at these photos”, we’d always love to hear about it.
- Crediting is important! Cosplay images aren’t YouTube videos, with their own embedded source and information, and as such can easily become anonymous Tumblr/Reddit fodder. That’s not fair on the cosplayers who worked hard on their outfits and the photographer who took the images, so wherever possible we’ll credit everyone involved. And if we can’t, an editor’s contact information will be provided in a post, and we’ll update a post the second we can.
While you’ll often see stories published here also cross-posted to Kotaku, Cosplay also operates independently as its own site, with new stories and images that you won’t see on Kotaku.com.
Top image/Twitter banner credits (l/r): Laura Sánchez (photo by JLMfotografo), Ladee Danger (photo by Dave Yang Twitter/Instagram/Facebook), Omi Gibson (photo by Ryohei Takanashi), Julian Checkley (photo by Kamil Krawczak) & Meagan Marie (photo by Anna Fischer)