2chan.us

Steps to attending Comiket:
1. Go to Japan.
2. Take the train to Kokusaitenjijouseimon. The rest is obvious.

There will be about 100,000 people ahead of you in line who all arrived at 5 AM, but don’t bother with that and just come at 10. ((Unless you want to go to an industry booth. なのは完売)) Do get a SuICa so you don’t have to stand in the ticket machine line. Get a map, or else you’ll get lost:

Mine is a bad example, because I highlighted every single circle in the catalog with an interesting picture (or an especially silly name) and then went straight past most of them.

Day 1 is relatively relaxed, mostly being anime/manga magazine/video game fan comics without any of the major attractions (male-oriented works, female-oriented works, Touhou). I managed to walk around with a group (kransom, shii, world famous chiptune artist Chibi-Tech) without getting lost, which is impossible in the later two days.

There is nothing interesting about the process of buying things, which is all we did, so here’s some things that were bought:

From upper left: a Mazinger comic of some sort by blue labyrinth (also did a newer Shin Mazinger Impact comic that’s not as good), a Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou copy-book, a short Aria book by CramNuts, an SRW book by otentomaru, an ICO anthology that I can’t be bothered to actually read, and a Yotsuba! book by, apparently, Do well!!!.

otentoumaru is a great circle, but half of their books are Sanger/Irui and the other half are Sanger x Irui, and it’s impossible to tell which from the covers, so make sure to check inside first. Also, a few of these turned out to be reprints because I forgot to ask which was the new work. ((新作 shinsaku))

I’ve been checking catalogs for a few years and there were always a few YKK circles, but these days it seems to be down to one or two, so it’ll probably be gone entirely in the future. Unless it’s reduced to people doing increasingly strange joke comics like Lain.

For some reason Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei doujin exist but are universally very badly drawn.

Unfortunately never got a chance to visit cosplay, or do much of anything but walk around the East Halls all day for the entirety of the event. Maybe in the future… but do I really want to own any more doujin?

Shii’s report

I’m going to have to go back to my diary to confirm what I did on this day. … Apparently I did not actually write any coherent sentences in my diary when I was in Tokyo. Instead, I have scribbled the words “wait in line” and “Akiba”. This was the day I held everyone up by waiting in line at the VisualArt’s booth. Important lesson for future Comiket visitors: The best time to get in line for an industry booth is at 5am or 2pm. The worst time is at noon; this is when all the ronery otaku leave the artist’s halls and decide it’s time to stand by themselves for some Nanoha goodness. Anyway, I waited in line for 3 hours to pick up a CD for my friend Mike. Afterwards we all went to Yoshinoya for dinner. Did MVB mention that? No. OK.

Other exciting things. If you arrive at Comiket at 10 the line will be slowly vanishing as people file into the Big Sight. I imagine 10:30 is optimal arrival time if you don’t have any super important things to wait in line for. Also, if you don’t use some sort of software to plan what circles to visit, you are insane.

The Card Captor Sakura and Rozen Maiden selection in December 2010 was nothing to write home about, but there are good Azumanga/Yotsubato universe doujins that don’t get resold at Toranoana, so look out for those.

Impress your friends with Comiket knowledge!

1. The largest demographic at Comiket is 25-29 year old women. (s)
2. Comiket used to be ~75% female. More recently it has grown closer to 60% female. (s)
3. Pornography does exist at Comiket, but only consists of about 20% of the total amount of works. (s)
4. As is the case with anime and manga in general, hardcore/perverted works at Comiket are often drawn and published by women. (You can confirm this by walking around Comiket.)

kransom’s report
Steps to attending Comiket:
1. Go to Japan.
2. Take the train to Kokusaitenjijouseimon. The rest is obvious.

Steps to succeeding at Comiket:
Repeat steps 1 and 2 until desired effect is achieved.

Convention was mostly eventless; there were an incredible number of boring panels on the schedule. Almost every time we tried to enter a panel room, it was full, because they’d put all the popular panels inside tiny hotel meeting rooms, and put all the unpopular panels inside the main events rooms ((One was a webcomic author retelling the plot to his comic, frame by frame, to an room about 1/10 full.)). Besides that, nearly all the convention seems to occur in the dealer’s room, so we walked around that for most of the weekend.

The FLOW concert (they did that one Eureka Seven OP) was delayed. Instead they put on SWEK, aka two old white guys on guitar and drums who seemed to be escapees from an 80s metal band and a woman wearing a nerd-joke shirt whose singing was even worse than the people at con karaoke. They butchered some assorted 2000s anisongs for an hour. I’m not sure the instrumentalists had ever heard the songs before. Was the “no cameras” rule meant to hide their copyright violation? Are they con staff? Who will solve this mystery?

Ex-internet forum moderator “Menacer” won a prize by completing the sentence “Where the hell is Jack…”. The prize was the Mecha Masters box set including the soundtrack to M.D. Geist II.

I mistook a Pokémon cosplayer for a Cyborg 009 cosplayer, which I found out when she complained that everyone she’d met that day had asked her if she was a Cyborg 009 cosplayer, and what was a Cyborg 009 anyway? I told her but I’m sure she forgot.

We went into a Vocaloid panel (there were two, for no reason, but of course one of them was full) where they spent the first half explaining “what is Vocaloid,” and then asked the audience “how did you get into Vocaloid”? If they can answer that, they didn’t need the explanation, right!?

The Madoka count was 4 Mami, 3 Homura, 2 Kyouko, 1 Sayaka, 1 Kyubey, 0 Madoka. Mami is the most American, I guess.

I had a really good steak. Half the group went to Alinea and never actually attended the convention.

Photos here.

Update: I happened to check the guest list for Fanime, the next weekend, and noticed both the X Japan guy and FLOW are also attending there, where you probably won’t have to hear any local con bands first.