The crowds come out for summer Comiket.
The 104th iteration of Comiket took place at Tokyo’s Big Sight convention center on August 11 and 12. As Japan’s biggest celebration of independent manga and anime creators, there’s tons of amazing artwork showcased every year at the event, but Comiket itself is also a sight to see. The convention attracts massive crowds, which not only make for amazing photographs, but also mesmerizing time-lapse videos of the flowing currents in the sea of humanity.
130,000 otaku came through the doors for Comiket’s first day. As you can see in the images in the above post from the official Comiket Twitter account, the convention floor consists of neatly arranged folding tables for exhibitors, set up in a grid pattern that fills the halls. Despite attendees’ ravenous hunger for artwork from their favorite illustrators, however, there’s a remarkable measure of order in how people move from one booth to the next. Watching them mill about feels almost like those oddly satisfying videos of factory lines operating at peak precision.
There’s a similar sensation watching time-lapse clips of fans making their way en masse from Kokusai-Tenjijo, the nearest station to Big Sight, at the start of Comiket’s second day.
▼ Heading from the Big Sight entrance down to the show floor
Day 2 also drew a crowd of 130,000 guests, organizers say…
…but for all the big-scale energy, Comiket still comes to a close with a quaint chime and announcement that the event is over, which is met with polite applause from fans and exhibitors.
Of course, this only means that Comiket is over for guests. For the staff, there’s still the task of cleaning up the place, and there are a lot of tables and chairs that need to be packed up and transported elsewhere to get the space ready to serve as the venue for whatever event has booked it next.
▼ Seeing the hall empty really drives home how big it is, and just how many people had to be in it just a few hours earlier for it to be that packed.
But maybe the craziest thing of all is that this whole cycle will be repeating itself in just a few months’ time, with this year’s winter Comiket scheduled for December 29 and 30.
Source: Twitter/@comiketofficial via Otakomu
Top image: Wikipedia/Morio
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