*On Site* Coverage of Road To Sofubi Tour 2016, Santa Cruz Stop!

This past Saturday, Sept 3rd, was the first stop of the Road to Sofubi Tour of 2016! With pieces from the highly lauded sofubi producers RealXHead, PunkDrunkers, and Goccodo, this was definitely something to not miss out on! One interesting tidbit about this event was that it was held at Magic Games, a local hang out that specializes in games, and has wide open spaces for people to come and play Magic, Warhammer, or the equivalent, together. So seeing a sofubi crowd was not at all expected (many of the game players kept staring at the happenings). When we arrived for this impromptu visit, some sofubi fans had been in line for several hours already, or driven several hours, and there was still two hours to go for the show! Many sofubi/kaiju fans and painters came by, including Candie Bolton, Obsessed Panda and Daniel Fleres. No photos of them though, was trying to play it cool! The event was very orderly; we all received numbers to purchase, and then three people at a time were allowed into the pop up shop to buy a small number of items. There were quite a few cool things for sale, spanning everything from small Darumas and Lucky Cats from RealXHead to Hello Kitty x Punkdrunkers and large painted and unpainted sumo frogs. The three artists / creative geniuses behind the sofubi were very polite and smiled a lot, but overall it was a very solemn affair, with people coming in quietly, pointing, and then quickly exiting. It was so solemn I didn't want to take too many photos of the tables with all the goodies for fear of being rude. So different from the craziness of DCon where it's just a free for all! Once everyone was able to do first rounds of purchases, they allowed folks to go back and make subsequent purchases, as well as meet with the artists and get signings. Unfortunately I couldn't wait for the signings and had to leave. Overall though, a very cool event to attend even just for curiosity reasons, and very neat to have what basically amounted to a very intimate show since it was the artists, a bunch of unique creations, and a group of drooling, happy fans!