Comic Market, known as Comiket, was inaugurated on 21 December 1975 with 32 circles and an estimated 700 attendees. It has since grown into a semiannual event drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors to Tokyo Big Sight.
Comiket is a not-for-profit, volunteer-run convention built around dojinshi, the self-published comics, novels and magazines that fans produce outside the commercial publishing system. Many of these works are derivative fan creations based on existing anime, manga and games, and the event is the central marketplace where their creators meet readers directly.
The first gathering in December 1975 was tiny by today's standards, with just 32 participating circles and roughly 700 attendees. It was organized by a dojin circle called Meikyu, founded by Yoshihiro Yonezawa, Teruo Harada and Jun Aniwa, and it grew out of frustration that a major existing event was favoring professional guests over amateur creators.
From those origins the convention expanded steadily, introducing a lottery system for booth allocation by the end of the 1970s and an event catalog in the early 1980s. Attendance climbed past 10,000, then into the tens and hundreds of thousands, until by the mid-2000s a single edition could draw more than half a million people.
The event is held twice a year, with a summer edition in August and a winter edition in December. Over time the run grew from a single day to three and then four days per edition, with a daytime schedule that opens in the morning and runs into the afternoon. Each edition hosts roughly 35,000 participating circles.
Most circle participants are amateurs and hobbyists rather than professionals, and Comiket's own surveys describe a community where the majority do not turn a profit. Alongside the fan circles, the convention also makes room for a smaller number of corporate booths run by game studios and publishers. It is overseen by the volunteer Comic Market Preparatory Committee.
Comiket is also one of the world's great showcases for cosplay, with elaborate costumed fans a fixture of every edition. The organizers manage the practice through behavior-focused guidelines rather than blanket bans, and the event has run charitable efforts too, including blood drives held in cooperation with the Japanese Red Cross.
Its home is Tokyo Big Sight, officially the Tokyo International Exhibition Center, which opened on 1 April 1996 in the Ariake waterfront area of Koto, Tokyo and first hosted Comiket that same year. The complex is the largest exhibition center in Japan, and its most recognizable feature is the Conference Tower, a glass and titanium structure resembling four inverted pyramids standing about 58 meters tall.
Reported by Wikipedia.
