Indonesia Comic Con 2015 Cosplay Championship - Field Report & Interview

Nicole Marie Jean is a cosplayer, artist, sculptor and designer from San Diego, California. Nicole began her journey into the cosplay and convention world in 2011. It was the previous year that she discovered what cosplay was. Nicole fell in love with the idea of being able to combine her love of comics and art to bring her favorite characters to life. During the past four years she has traveled around the country for numerous events and conventions as both an attendee and a guest. She has judged a number of contests and been a part of many panels. Nicole has won numerous awards for her costumes both at conventions and online.

Nicole has created nearly 80 costumes in the past three years and all are inspired by her favorite characters from comics, movies, books, video games and soon animes. Nicole is most well known for her take on Bane from the Dark Knight Rises film, which has given her the nickname throughout the cosplay community as “Lady Bane.”

When Nicole isn’t creating or debuting new costumes, she sculpts and makes items for her online store. She hopes to continue this journey for many years to come while meeting new people, teaching and inspiring others, entertaining those who follow her work and becoming better at her craft along the way.

Rizky started cosplaying in 2005, he has organised various cosplay event and competition in Jakarta. Been frequently invited as Cosplay judge and Guest Performance for local event. Rizky and his team focus on Cosplay Performance, he create all of the stunt act performance.

In 2009 Rizky and his team won the STGCC Cosplay Competition for group category. In 2014 he had been the Indonesian representative for Asia Cosplay Meet & SUPANOVA Brisbane and also ITGCC cosplay judge.

Olivie is a cosplayer from Hong Kong, and also the leader of Hong Kong’s top cosplay performance group “V-Project”. She has a passion for characters with strong personality, and also girls with blond hair 😉 Ever since she fell in love with LoveLive, she has done many versions of Eli Ayase. Her group, V-Project, has also actively produced many dance covers of the songs in the series, and has performed for ACG events in Taiwan, Macau & Singapore.

Pinky Lu Xun is the most famous Indonesian Cosplayer who also an icon and pioneer of Cosplay in her home country. Well known for her beautiful and elaborate costume work and being a role model of many other cosplayers, Pinky often honored as guest judge in numerous cosplay events both in her own country and overseas such as Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Australia.

In an interview with members of the V-Project, Miyabi, Luffy, and Olivie, they revealed that through cosplaying, they’ve met a lot of good friends that supports and influence them along the way to continue doing cosplay. They also claimed that the most important element is cosplaying is trying to really look like the character they are cosplaying in terms of make-up, setting up the hairstyles, etc. Material-wise, the materials used by Indonesian cosplayers are different than in the Hong Kong. Hong Kong cosplayers tend to use fabric as their base material whereas in Indonesia, cosplayers use plastic-like materials for their costumes which made it more realistic and successfully impressed the members of the V-Project.

In another interview with the iconic pioneering cosplayer from Indonesia, Pinky Lu Xun, whose been doing cosplay for 10 years revealed that her initial inspiration for cosplay started when she was into gaming. She found a random photograph of a cosplayer from Japan which happens to cosplay the character of the game she was playing. Although until now she didn’t know the name of that cosplayer, but that was what inspired her to first trying out cosplay.

Pinky also stated that for her the important elements of cosplay is to have fun and not to worry about looking really good in the first try because everyone starts out learning things step by step.
Besides cosplaying, Pinky is also known for creating her own costumes for cosplaying, she claimed to have made over 70 – 80 costumes, varying in weight of the costume and the time needed to make the costume altogether.

During the interview, she was cosplaying one of the characters from re:ON Comics, as Lay Lay Cat or “Kucing Garong”.