THE MCCCC

RisuCon is Montgomery County's Comic Con, but we're also a charitable organization dedicated to fostering a culture of awareness and appreciation for anime, comics, cartoons, and associated media. RisuCon is also the annual meeting of the Montgomery County Comic & Cosplay Club, a social club of people who are passionate about comics, anime, and cosplay - and everything related to it! Members come together at social events and on social media, and they host their annual meeting - RisuCon - a convention with media screenings, seminars, contests, cosplay, vendors, and more! Risu means squirrel in Japanese. Japan is the source of so much of our fandom and inspiration, and... there are a LOT of squirrels in Maryland.

The Montgomery County Comic & Cosplay Club is a 501(c)7 non-profit membership association. That means we collect dues from our members but don't use those dues to make a profit. No one gets paid in the MCCCC. Not our leadership, our board of directors, or our volunteers. The only time a person would get paid is if we contracted them to do a service (like audio visual services at our annual meeting). We use the dues to pay for event space and for things that make our club and annual meeting better and more fun for our members! We also use dues for our charitable work, such as scholarships and charitable giving.

The event space is 100% ADA accessible. There are several uneven level changes, slopes, weird bumps, and steep ramps in our event space, but they are navigable using different entry and egress. The fairgrounds are an older facility, but it was designed to handle large volumes of people, so entries and slopes are large. However, the space was obviously constructed before ADA guidelines had been made. The parking area can be uneven and has large areas of gravel.

Yes, Montgomery County's CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) team will have a tent outside the vendor halls. CERT staff are trained in first aid, AED, heat exhaustion, CPR, stop the bleed, and Narcan use. Some of their members are Maryland certified EMT-B's. Some CERT staff will patrol the RisuCon event space. RisuCon has Safety volunteers stationed throughout the event space who will summon the CERT personnel or escort you to them, or activate county 911. If you need to take medication during your time at RisuCon, you can visit the CERT tent for assistance and a place to sit. If you require a private space, please speak to a CERT or RisuCon safety volunteer and we will accommodate you.

Real weapons are prohibited at RisuCon. We advise you use foam, plastic, or wooden weapon props to complete your cosplay. If you have a bow as a prop, it cannot have a string or any real projectiles. Props that look like guns cannot be operational. We also encourage you to use a wood, plastic, or foam prop gun for your cosplay. All weapons are subject to safety verification by our staff, who will mark your weapon with a colored zip tie to identify it as safe. If, for any reason, the safety staff does not allow your weapon in the space, you'll need to leave with it and return without it. Please see our total attendance guidelines here: https://www.risucon.com/policies RisuCon will have many young children present with parents. Before bringing a weapon to RisuCon, think if it would cause harm, alarm or fear into our other guests before deciding to bring it with you.

Too many of the creators associated with RisuCon are hurt by the rise of AI generated art and images. Our policy is that vendors and exhibitors at RisuCon do not display or sell AI generated works. Personally, as the President of the Montgomery County Comic & Cosplay Club and the founder of MonkeyCon and RisuCon, I made the mistake of using some AI generated artwork for our website and advertising. For MonkeyCon, my daughter hand drew our Tanjiro monkey mascot using Adobe Photoshop. When we changed the name to RisuCon, she did the same thing for our Uraraka squirrel. A local comic book creator, Dale Rawlings drew our Satoru squirrel (thanks Dale!). But I wanted some more squirrels for the website, and not being an artist myself, didn't recognize the harm in using AI art. So I generated multiple images and used them in my initial marketing of RisuCon 2024 and on the website. When one of my comic book friends pointed out "the error of my ways" I immediately took down the artwork from the website. I did my best to scrub all our social media and internet images that used the AI art. However, it seems to persist, obviously thumbnailed by servers "out there" and I hope, over time, those thumbnails will get re-indexed using the non-AI art we now have on the website. Lastly, I had about 5,000 post cards made to leave at other conventions and these feature an AI generated squirrel on them. Once those are gone (I can't just throw them away, they cost way too much) any further cards will have a non-AI squirrel on them. If you have any questions about my use of AI, or if you find anything "out there" on the web that still has AI art representing RisuCon, please drop me a note so I can try and correct it at John@RisuCon.com

This is Montgomery County's Comic Con, and we thought "Monkey" was a good abbreviation of that. Montgomery County Comic Con = MonkeyCon. We also designed a loveable monkey mascot dressed as Tanjiro from Demon Slayer. But people didn't seem to get it. So we decided to pick a common animal from Maryland to represent the convention. Fox, deer, birds, even an otter was considered. But we decided on our mischievous, but adorable friend the squirrel as our new mascot. Then we selected the Japanese word for squirrel - risu - and christened next year's convention RisuCon.