Among the contents of the West Side home of Lance Davenport and his daughter, Katy, are a 25-foot dragon, a human-sized Fuzzball, and a kingdom's worth of scepters, wings and instruments of pretend combat.

At age 16, Katy Davenport has won 17 major awards at "cosplay" conventions across the nation, the youngest person to win so many honors, and has a growing reputation as a prodigy in the field. Cosplay, or "costume play," is the spawn of the hugely popular Japanese animation industry, or "anime," which has caught fire across the globe, mostly among people in their late teens and early 20s. Anime is now an industry worth several billion dollars, and is one of the most downloaded forms of entertainment on the planet.

In the United States alone there are as many as 400 cosplay conventions each year, attended by hundreds of thousands of spectators and competitors. "But the convention that's like the Olympics of cosplay is in Japan," said Katy, who hopes to compete there eventually.

To compete, participants recreate costumes of characters from anime, then act out scenes, or create original scenes for the characters they're dressed as. Awards are presented for such things as workmanship, performance, props and music videos. Participants have invented the verb "costuming" and other words that dart back and forth between English and Japanese, and define the alternate realm of animated videos and games, as well as graphic books similar to comic books that are based on the animated characters. Competition rules include no jumping off the stage, and no "unannounced combat."

Anime covers all sorts of genres, ranging from those suited for children to the pornographic. Katy competes entirely in the PG-13 realm and ignores the rest. "Anime is nothing like (American) cartoons," she said. "There are so many levels of meaning in them, and they reflect ancient culture."

Katy, a junior at Shabazz High School who is also studying Japanese at West High, aspires to a career as a voice actress in anime. In one skit she was the voice of three characters, comfortably using a British accent for one of them. "A lot of people doing this are college theater students who plan to go into costuming," she said. Many cosplayers are also interested in technology.

Artisic beginnings

Katy began drawing when she was about 6, and became fascinated with Pokemon characters about the same time. But it was at a comic book conference with her dad at age 10 that her costuming impulse took hold. Lance Davenport recalls how his daughter saw someone dressed as her favorite character at the convention and asked him, "Papa, could I do that?"

"I told her I didn't know, but that she could try," he said.

The result was the character Ansem from the Japanese video game Kingdom Hearts, made when she was 11, Since then, she's created up to 25 costumes every year, making costumes for each of the six people in the group she competes with.

"It's hilarious to watch them get ready, because I'm the only one who knows how the costumes work," she said.

She also makes costumes for characters drawn from her own imagination, which her troupe wears when they're at conventions but not competing.

Papa Davenport, a retired special education teacher, threw himself into his daughter's hobby since it began. He hired sewing tutors to augment sewing lessons from her mother, taught her how to work with fiberglass and persuaded the owner of Routed-4-U in Sun Prairie to turn his daughter's drawings into things like wooden dragon horns and princess wands. He also forks out about $2,000 a year for the food, lodging and gas for their old Buick, with a trailer hitched to it, which is used to drive to four or five conventions a year.

And then there's the cost of the costumes themselves.

"People who have kids in soccer easily spend $2,000 a year on that," Lance said. "This is her passion, and with every costume she makes she's learning a skill. This will give her a shot at what she wants to do with her life. And we're doing this on a shoestring."

Costumes galore

The living and dining rooms of the Davenport home are Katy's workshop. The basement, Katy's bedroom and a sun porch are filled with costumes from past conventions. Lance is ever on the lookout for Dumpsters and curbs that may yield things that just might come in handy some day, like an enormous blue plush snake he found recently peeking from a trash pile. He is also willing to go on stages dressed as Fuzzball, and hunch beneath the head of Haku the dragon in order to push the shopping cart that propels the beast.

Katy's costumes begin with sketches on paper, to which she then takes an air gun that sprays ink from colored markers. Then, she searches her imagination, as well as kitchen and craft stores, for items that can be used in the costumes. Candle plates became dragon eyes, lined with false eyelashes. Fuzzball's head is a plastic Halloween cauldron topped with a baseball catcher's cap, with feathers made of fake leaves. "The Guardian," a villain from Kingdom Hearts that won a best prop award, was made with surgical masks, paper towels, duct tape, fiberglass, wax, vinyl, and a swimming tube.

Katy, who also styles the wigs for the characters, describes her approach to costuming as "trial and error." Her latest creation is for the Trinity Blood heroine Seth, who will compete in a Queen of Hearts-type gown that took two months and 5,800 yards of gold thread to sew, and burned out a sewing machine in the process.

"I'd start working at 7 a.m., and sometimes I'd still be working at midnight." She would not allow Seth's costume to be photographed because "judges at the next convention want to be surprised."

Katy turns downs requests from fellow students to make them Halloween costumes, or borrow from her inventory. "They take a really long time to make, and I don't want them trashed."

Still, Katy never questions her investment of time in her costumes. "I went through a really rough time in middle school that lasted into ninth grade, and doing this really helped me." Describing herself as quiet and introverted in real life, she says all traces of shyness disappear when she's in competition.

"I get nervous for about five minutes right before a performance," she said. "But the minute I step on stage it's gone."