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Lightbox Expo's Founders Talk to Anime Herald
🕑 Added 2025-10-12 04:34:50 +0000 UTCNote: Due to time constraints, this will be published on Anime Herald's main site on October 13, 2025. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Author: Seth Burn
Editor: Samantha Ferreira
Bobby Chiu
Anime Herald: A lot of artists know from a young age that they want to be artists when they grow up. For you, that was not the case. What were some of the first things you learned from artists you were able to talk with when you were seventeen?
Bobby Chiu: I think the most important thing I learned was that the foundation of art is a gathering of all sorts of information about how we see and absorb the things in our lives. It’s impossible to gather all the information yourself. The quickest way is to learn from others, because many of the things that are most worth teaching come from decades of experience at first, but can be taught in a small fraction of the time. So, gather as much knowledge as you can from the top level people in your industry. Many times we don’t have access to these high-level people, but we do have access to books they wrote or videos.
Anime Herald: You ended up spending a year in business school. Did you learn anything there that proved useful for (checks notes) co-founding Imaginism Studio, co-founding Schoolism, and co-founding LightBox Expo?
Bobby Chiu: I would love to say some things here, but it was quite a long time ago and truthfully, nothing that I learned from my time in business school resonated with me, strong enough that I would be able to point at it today. I think the most important things to learn about doing business are communication and empathy. If you’re an amazing communicator, you can negotiate better, have less misunderstandings and keep things productive and efficient. If you’re really good at empathy, it won’t just help you with communication because you’ll understand everyone much better but it also helps to build great teams, stronger partnerships and solve problems.
Anime Herald: Emil Faber famously said “knowledge is good.” Your history is a testament to the value of sharing knowledge. Where did this drive to pass along what you have learned come from?
Bobby Chiu: I've always really enjoyed sharing the things that I’ve learned, especially if I felt it could help someone. It makes me feel good to be helpful. However, at a particular low point in my life, when I really didn’t believe in myself, I was lucky enough to talk with one of my favorite artists at the time who has now become one of my very good friends, Stephen Silver. He talked to me for over an hour, motivating me, and giving me advice about being a professional artist. By the end of the conversation, I told him that he changed my life with this phone call, and I asked how could I ever repay him? He said when it comes to a point in your life where you can give back, give back to someone else and we will call it even. That moment had a profound effect on me.
Jim Demonakos
Anime Herald: To the best of my knowledge, most comic book store owners don’t find the time to create comic conventions. What was the impetus behind founding Emerald City Comic Con?
Jim Demonakos: At the time (2002), there were not hundreds of shows like there are these days, so there were only a couple of very small shows in the Pacific Northwest. You had to really make a trek out to something like San Diego Comic Con. I had gone down to SDCC (again, this is back when you could walk up and buy a ticket the day of) and thought that we could do a smaller version of this back in Seattle, and that’s where the spark for the show was born. We started the show, really made sure the local comic community knew about it, and it became quite a large event over the years!
Anime Herald: Similarly, most convention founders don’t earn director and producer credits as you did for Mike Mignola: Drawing Monsters. What was the vision for the documentary and are you happy with the final result?
Jim Demonakos: True, I have taken quite a circuitous path into directing. It was spurred on by my friendship with Kevin Konrad Hanna (who directed the documentary with me); he is a filmmaker and we were having lunch back in 2021 talking about what documentaries we were watching. Both of us are big comic fans and talked about how there weren’t that many quality comic book documentaries out there, and slowly (like with many other things I’ve done), we realized that if it didn’t exist, then we should make it exist, so we did. It was a real learning process and a fun journey, and I’m more than thrilled with the final result!
Anime Herald: What lessons did you learn working in the food service industry that still help you in a variety of different fields to this day?
Jim Demonakos: Customer first. Note, that doesn’t mean the customer is always right, because that’s not how you run a business. But if you keep your end customer in mind in all your decisions, you find that you create a more welcoming environment, a better product, you name it, but that the customer will feel the love and care you’ve put in thinking about what it is you’re doing/selling/creating, etc. That was my big takeaway that still influences what I do today.
Both Interviewees
Anime Herald: For Lightbox Expo to be a success, you needed buy-in from the artist community. How did you achieve that for the 2019 debut?
Bobby Chiu: There are a few things, but none of them were done on purpose. First, I really admire incredible artists, so naturally I want to help them when I can and get to know them when possible. I’ve also had incredible opportunities to work on big franchisees like MIB (Men In Black), Ghostbusters and the Super Mario Bros. movie, alongside many of these artists.
Anime Herald: If you were to found LightBox Expo in 2025 or 2026, what would you do differently?
Jim Demonakos: In a funny way, there’s not anything specific I’d do differently, but I would just avoid all the challenges and ‘first year’ learnings of creating a new show. I’d get right into the heart of making the kind of programming we know resonates, understand how best to curate the artist alley, how to present information in the best way possible to be easily digestible and understandable, and generally just skip the old mistakes and find new and interesting mistakes to make!
Anime Herald: What tips would you like to share with first-time attendees for 2025?
Jim Demonakos: We always tell people to plan out their days in advance, but be flexible. With all the amazing stuff going on in just three days, we recommend people prioritize the things you want to attend the most using our mobile app, and then make backup plans in case things fall through! LBX is a great place to make connections, so we tell everyone don't be afraid to socialize and network with their fellow attendees/artists - most artists (even the pros) are just as shy as you may be, so be patient, polite and genuine, and don't hesitate to spark up a conversation. After all, meeting other artists is what this event is all about!
Anime Herald: Finally, do you have any questions for us?
Bobby Chiu & Jim Demonakos: If you could put together an all-star panel of (living) animation directors, and you could only choose four, who would make it onto your panel?
Anime Herald: Takeshi Koike, Naoko Yamada, Maggie Kang, Kazuya Tsurumaki.
For Takashi Koike, I would want to honor his work on Redline. Also, I love Lupin.
I want Garden of Remembrance to get a US release, and inviting Naoko Yamada might help with that. Additionally, I love her work in general.
Maggie Kang created K-Pop Demon Hunters. ‘Nuff said.
Kazuya Tsurunmaki’s work on FLCL and Diebuster are seminal to my fandom.
