The Old School Otaku Lounge

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2 ... ay/.191951

So sad to hear about the passing of Kevin Lillard, the man who put a staggering amount of work into the "A Fan's View" site for over 10 years. A real cornerstone of chronicling anime conventions, and thus helping to preserve part of North America's convention history. He will be greatly missed.

That guy was a constant presence at anime cons - if I didn't see him there I knew SOMETHING was wrong. It wasn't until the mid 2000s that the sheer volume of anime conventions meant that he was constantly having to pick one over another - and they were too far apart for him to hit three in a weekend, as he did a few times. He always had a friendly word for everybody and time to spend with every cosplayer, from the impressive veterans to the first-timers.

I was just thinking recently how at one time it seemed really important that I write a "convention report" after every anime con so that there would be a record of what exactly happened. At some point this sort of thing became less vital and I quit writing these reports. There were a few sites that did the same sort of photographic convention reports that Kevin did, but one by one they all went away. The big "news" coming out of anime conventions these days are mostly things like release announcements, and we get that on Twitter and Facebook and IG, but nobody's just wandering around with a camera taking photos of costumers and panelists and guests and attendees - or if they are, they aren't presenting that material in the handy format Fansview did. And that's a loss.

What will happen to his photos and negatives, I wonder? It would be terrible if they weren't preserved somehow.

it's my understanding that the bulk of his photos are archived at the AC Paradise site - they have 288 galleries of his pictures, which seems like a bunch

https://www.acparadise.com/acs/display. ... 2186&t=gal

So sorry to hear about Kevin's passing. I'm fairly certain that I didn't know him personally and am having trouble recalling if we'd met in passing but I've seen quite a few people I know outside of our forum group here that knew him. I do remember checking out A Fan's View quite a bit in the early 2000s. From what every one says about his personality and notable contribution to fandom, it truly is a loss to our fan community. May his memory be a blessing.