With all the incredibly talented cosplayers sharing their costumes online, often those who achieve widespread recognition are recognised more for an uncanny facial resemblance to the characters they're cosplaying. While technically the point of cosplay is to resemble the character as much as possible, in practice cosplay is so much more than that. Now cosplayers are speaking out to say "I cosplay characters because I like them."

It's almost Halloween, and while it's nowhere near as big here as it is over in the US, you've probably got a costume party or two to go to. Want to have the best damn costume in the house, or maybe win a local costume contest? There's no one better to turn to for advice than the people who do costumes best, all year round: cosplayers.

While we feature a lot of incredible cosplay photos around here, it's usually the cosplayers who get all the recognition. But there has to be someone behind the camera as well as in front of it -- which is why we'll be featuring these five amazing people behind the photos that the cosplay community couldn't survive without.

Cosplayers have long done creative things to get the perfect fabric for their costumes -- whether it's getting fabric printed online or doing it all by hand with screen printing inks or fabric paint. Cosplayer Yaya Han has gone above and beyond, partnering with CosplayFabrics and Jo-Anns, a fabric and craft store in the US, to design the perfect range of cosplay fabric.

If you're at all interested in cosplay then you've probably heard the rumours of so-called "professional cosplayers" -- people like Jessica Nigri and Yaya Han who make costumes and fly around the world, presumably making bucketloads of cash from it. Yet the reality is that the number of people actually making a living from cosplay can probably be counted on one hand, for one simple reason -- cosplayers are expected to work for free.

Last year we introduced you to five awesome Aussie cosplayers you'd never heard of, and now it's time to meet five more. These are some of Australia's most prolific, most talented and most promising to watch as they do great things this year!

Australia is full of amazing cosplayers -- and that's not a point that's open to discussion. All you have to do is look around at a convention like PAX Aus, or Supanova, and you'll see the kind of quality that our relatively small community is capable of. Like every community, however, some of the people making amazing costumes are too busy well… making amazing costumes to ever seek the limelight they deserve.