Manga
Convention!
This is the page that has pictures
of the manga convention. If you want to see all the cool stuff I
bought,
CLICK HERE.
I
would have made two pages for my convention photos, but by the time you
read through this they'll have loaded. They are below.
So since I've known him my friend Satoru
in Tokyo's been telling me to come to one of the big manga conventions
in Tokyo, expecially the komike- the Comic Market that happens
twice a year, the biggest manga convention in the world. Well, I
finally cleared some time in December (the convention went down on the
28th and 29th) and decided to see the Winter Komike on its opening day.
I really wish
I had all the time in the world to convey my experience at the komike.
It was... well... really different. First of all, the event
is much larger than any event that I had gone to in my life. The
largest convention that I had ever gone to was GenCON, the world's biggest
gaming convention that goes down in Milwaukee every summer- it boasts about
20 thousand people over four days. This year's komike was 8 times
as many people in two days. And I hear that the summer komike is
even bigger. It was held at "Biggu Saito"(big site in Japenglish.
I would tease my friends by asking, "Who the hell is Saito? Is he
really that big?"- Saito is one of the most poular Japanese surnames),
the largest convention hall in Japan. Every time you see one of my
pictures below that shows a room stretching as far as the eye can see,
just remember that there are over eight rooms just like it, filled with
people and manga.
Now, you figure
that a manga convention would be a place to buy just about any manga, maybe
meet some famous manga artists, stuff like that. In Japan, manga
conventions aren't like that at all. The REAL manga conventions are
where original written manga and "dojin manga" are sold. Dojin manga
is manga written by no-names that take an existing, known manga story or
characters and make up a new story using those characters. In other
words, a REAL convention is a convention comprised solely of amateurs selling
amateur manga. You won't even find so much as a single "real" manga
there. What is sold is original manga, dojin manga, character goods
based on famous manga (like bookmarks and stationery), manga drawing goods,
original novels based on manga, etc.
Even in the
amateur comic world there are "famous" people. Satoru showed me the
catalog of the event- a book the size of a phone book with page after page
of little thumb-sized "portfolio-introductory" pictures that are drawn
by the artist. By looking at the picture you get a general idea of
what the person is selling. Also, the catalog is divided into several
sections, a section for each major publishing company that a dojin manga
was made from, as well as sections for "music manga", "cooking manga",
"sports manga", "video game manga", etc. So you might go through
this book and look for your favorite amateur manga artist, find what table
they're selling at, and head there during the convention.
All of Satoru's
friends read manga. Most of his friends draw manga (as amateurs).
A few of his friends are professional manga artists. It was his sempai(s),
though- the amateur manga artists- who enlisted his help at the convention.
A few of his sempais were drawing manga for the convention, and since he
is a kohei (the whole sempai-kohei thing) he had to help
them. So he made copies for them, helped transport manga to the convention,
helped watch the tables for a little while, that sort of thing. Those
sempais of his are rather famous amateur artists, though. They are
quite talented, and have many followers. The strange thing (to me,
that is) is that they all write porno manga. Like, one of
his friends (sempai) is really famous in the amateur world- as in,
many of the people who attended the convention have heard of him, and people
line up for hours to get his stuff. The manga he draws? Anal
fetish and piercings porn. Some of his stuff is the absolute nastiest
manga I have ever seen in my life (he gave me a book for free, and it remains
hidden in the bowels of some drawer so that no guest will ever see it.
I'd throw it away, but the garbage bags are see-through in Japan).
Anal sex, enemas, things up the anus (like vibrators, phones, Playstation
controllers), piercings EVERYWHERE (and I'll leave it at that). That's
the stuff that ends up really selling at these sorts of conventions, though.
The second day (the day that I didn't attend) was apparently the day that
most of the porn sellers vend their stuff, and the people that come to
the convention goes up by 50% for that day!
Back to the
dojin manga thing. This is a really hard idea for westerners to grasp
(maybe it was the reason that out of the thousands and thousands of people
I saw that day, I only saw 2 foreigners- that is, non-asian foreigners)-
you take characters from a famous manga, make your own story, copy the
artist's style, write a 20-40 page manga, and sell it at these conventions.
And it's totally allowed! In fact, in the manga world it's looked
on as an honor to have a following of people who like your manga so much
that they take the time to copy your style and use your characters.
I heard that famous manga artists sometimes hit these conventions to see
how many people copy their stuff- if many people use their characters and
styles, then they feel like they've succeeded. This would never happen
back in America. Imagine the president of DC comics going to some
huge comic convention in America, only to see that there's room after room
after table after table of amateurs selling DC comic character manga and
character goods for themselves. They'd go mad trying to sue everyone
in sight! Actually, to get a better picture of what is sold at manga
conventions, imagine that at the above hypothetical convention that there's
a ton of amateur Batman comic writers. Out of all those Batman amateur
comics, many of them (well over half) are sex stories, or stories with
strong sexual themes. There would be hundreds of amateur homosexual
Batman comics where Batman and Robin have sex with each other, the graphic
nature of those sex scenes left to the imagination and ability of the amateur
writer. A very strange and interesting world. Copyrights just
don't exist in the amateur manga world. I wonder how things would
fly if they started making large-scale manga conventions in the United
States?
I mentioned
that really popular manga are copied by amateurs, who make manga to sell
at these conventions. This year, there were a couple of manga that
were heavily copied. Like, the tables of dojin manga and character
goods just went on and on and on. This year, TRIGUN, Weiss Kreutz
and Final Fantasy 7 were by far the most copied. FF7 is a video game,
but there were hundreds and hundreds of dojin manga written about it.
I don't know Weiss Kretz. TRIGUN is a recently popular Manga/Anime
that mixes cowboy and scifi themes. The art is really good but the
story isn't super-good.
Well, onto the
story!
Satoru told me that the game plan was to wake up at about
5:00, get dressed and ready in like 10 minutes, and his friend would pick
up up in a van. I decided to take a couple pictures of the very start
of the day- right after waking up. I swear it was like my head hit
the pillow the night before and then a minute later the alarm was going
off.
After a bit of driving, we got to the apartment of one of
Satoru's sempais (here, below, with the white hair. The girl next
to her is either her assistant or friend or lover, I couldn't tell which).
She also draws porn (albeit more softcore than most of his other
friends). I helped load about 12 boxes of cartoon porn into the van,
and then we were off to Biggu Saito.
So here we were in a place that was more concrete and
asphalt than Singapore, but leave it to Satoru's friend (pictured on the
far right) to somehow get a nail wedged into his boot. It took us
10 minutes to yank it out.
The above left picture is us cutting in front of all
the manga peons. Since everyone Satoru knows deals with manga, he's
got connections. We got special passes so that we didn't have to
wait. A lot of people camped out since the previous day.
These pictures were taken from different directions.
There were more people lined up to get into this convention than there
are people in this world who saw the Rutger Hauer flick Blind Fury.
Here's Satoru and one of his friends. We went to
grab some breakfast before the gates were opened to the masses. I
had some... I forgot. It was bad, though.
The gates were opened, and the masses marched forth to
buy, buy BUY!
Here are some shots of the inside of one of the halls.
Remember, there were over 8 of these places. The inside of each is
larger than an entire stadium. That's a lot of manga.
A line of all men stretched for hundreds of meters?
What could they be waiting for?
Why T&A, of course! This was the line for a
very popular amateur manga artist's works. He specializes in kyonyuu,
or "large breast" manga. In America we would feel kind of self-conscious
about waiting in a huge group for stuff like this. But these guys
didn't seem to mind. No one was talking, though. I found that
unnerving.
Oh, I later discovered long lines of women at other locations.
They were waiting to get their hands on another artists' popular homosexual
works.
What komike is complete without kosupure-
"Costume Players"? Many people go to conventions, dress up as their
favorite comic or anime character, and pose while people take their picture.
In America, people dress up at fantasy conventions as like "barbarians",
or "wizards", or stuff like that. But in Japan, they dress as a specific
individual character that many people would recognize. More people
do kosupure during the summer when it's warmer out.
Of course there's the group shots. They didn't
turn out well because of the light in the back. I'd fix it myself
using Adobe Photoshop, but I can't figure out all the Japanese characters
for what I need to do... Anyway, check out that middle picture. Those
are the guys (minus Satoru) that I hung out with. None of them speak
English, but they're all RPG freaks so we could converse just fine.
After a hard day of manga vending, Biggu Saito closed
its doors for the day.
That's where I saw something both strange and ingenious-
at this point people had bought literally boxes and boxes of manga.
Right outside the convention hall was table after table of delivery services,
ready to deliver your stuff home at affordable prices. That was pretty
interesting.
As for us, after the day was done we went back to Tokyo
and ate some cheap food at a family restaraunt. That's when I realized
that I had been standing or moving for about 15 hours. I got on the
train home and somehow was able to stand again to make the long walk back
to my house.
Wanna see what I bought? Click HERE!