What is ‘Comiket’?
For those of us who have been following the Doujin scene for some time – Comiket is probably the most important event in the gaming calendar. A place where like minded fans and creators gather to show what they’ve been working on. Think of it as the Japanese indie scene’s E3 or TGC and you’ll be half way there, although Comiket is actually a much more varied beast and has a much richer history.
Comiket actually started back in 1975 (the name is actually a combination of Comic and Market) by a guy called Yoshihiro Yonezawa – who, in the early 1970’s became disolusioned by the state of the Japanese manga scene. He found that at the time, most published manga was becoming boring – with writers and publishers too scared to try new things. As a manga critic, he found increasingly that the best Manga were those in more underground publications – and so he founded Comiket, so that those publications could be more widely sold and read.
Since 1975 Comiket has grown in size to well over 500,000 attendees – and now features Anime, Manga, Games, Visual Novels as well as an army of Cosplayers.
It’s essentially a massive convention, where ‘Dojinshi’ – self published writers and developers of Manga and Games – converge to sell their wares over three days. It’s a great opportunity for people with great ideas and talent to get their products out there – without having to rely on traditional paths into stores.
Many artists and developers can be very successful by taking this route – and there are actually many stores in Japan now dedicated to selling doujin products, and many of the most prolific and talented doujin circles produce Manga and Games that can rival commercial products in terms of quality and production values.
The last Comiket was held back in August of this year – if you want to get an idea of the kinds of games that were on show last time around, you can check them out here!
The next Comiket will be held at the end of next month, from the 29th to the 31st of December – so expect us to be reporting back on some of the more exciting things to come out of that show.
If you’d like to know more about Comiket, there’s an English language version of their site here.
- Doujin Classics: Cave Story (PC) - January 4, 2013
- Doujin Classics: The works of Kenta Cho (PC) - December 28, 2012
- eXceed Collection Review (PC) - December 21, 2012
