Comiket 73 – Part III: Random Shots
I’m back in Singapore. I had fever yesterday. Gao. Anyway, I sorted through my photos and I realized that they were quite shitty. I blame it all on the lighting.
Because Japanese are completely asinine about getting their photos taken, and because the Comiket committee has my URL and I don’t want to get blacklisted, I went through the trouble of mosaicking all the faces.
The Queues
Queuing is Japan’s national pastime. In fact, you can say that going to Disneyland in Japan is about the same as going to Comiket. It all boils down to about two hours of queuing for a few seconds of gratification. Unless you go for the rides that no one wants to touch with a 10-metre pole, like “It’s a Small World”.
End of the line for T2 Art Works
Almost there!
The queues for popular booths are so long that the end of the line is generally in a totally different part of Japan from the actual location of the booth. This makes it a huge challenge for people who are rushing to queue for goods that are limited in numbers. Finding the booth itself is easy if you follow the maps, but by the time you get there the queue is already in Hokkaido. You have to anticipate where the queue will be by the time you arrive and head for the queue instead of the booth.
It’s like that Space Invaders episode in Futurama: shoot where he is going to be instead of where he was.
At the end of every queue is a guy holding a sign with the booth number that says 最後尾 to tell you that it’s the end of the line for that circle. Usually the guy holding it is the last person in the queue, so it’s common courtesy for you to take over by saying “mochimasu” if you join the queue.
The Booths
Did I mention how asinine Japanese are about photos? I did? Well I’m going to say it again: Japanese are completely asinine about photos. Despite having a press pass, I have to ask permission from every single booth that I want to take pictures of. This quickly bored me, so I ended up taking very few pictures. I don’t even know why they bother to give out press passes.
Interestingly, most people are more willing to have their pictures taken if you tell them that you are from overseas. According to the two cosplayers above, it’s because they don’t want to be recognized by their friends.
This appears to be some 3D game with characters from CLANNAD, D.C. and SHUFFLE!
Nice boat.
The 0verflow guys asked me for my website before letting me take a picture. I gave them my name card. Woot. 0verflow has my name card now! Anyway their C73 stuff wasn’t very interesting so I didn’t buy anything.
You can find more pictures of the commercial booths over at Danny Choo’s C73 coverage.
The Crowd
For some reason, I took a ton of picture of random crowds. I guess it’s because I was always rushing to my next destination and there wasn’t much else to take on the way.
The Location
See the orange cones? That’s where the Type-Moon queue was
The Cosplay
Canon 400D’s internal flash can only sync at a maximum shutter speed of 1/200, making it way too slow to take anything in direct sunlight without serious overexposure, so I had to make do without flash. The resulting pictures are terrible due to the shadows casted by the the setting sun. Oh well.
Thanks to the uneven lighting, everything is either overexposed or underexposed. I really need to get a proper flash.
You can find much better cosplay pictures from C73 on Moeyo!.
The Misc
The press gets a pink armband; Comiket staff gets a red one
Please rise for the Welsh anthem
It’s Shingo!
A bunch of Australians who were holding Shingo’s book
There were fewer Caucasian foreigners at Comiket than I had expected. I counted three or four groups in total after wandering around for the entire day. I bumped into a group from a Canadian radio station and talked to them for a bit. I think they were quite freaked out by a random Asian boy walking up to them and interrogating them in English. Ops.
There were plenty of Chinese around, in fact, quite a number of doujin circles were Chinese. But since we Asians pretty much look the same it’s kind of hard to keep count.
The Conclusion
Comiket was pretty fun, but I think all that queuing took a few years off my life span. I think I’m going to need a long rest…
This Comiket coverage was made possible by Danny Choo and Akihabara News.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:52 pm
I’d seen Genshiken but . . . blimey. Your crowd pictures, and your ‘aim for the end of the que’ explanation really drive home to me for the first time quite how big Comiket is.
[ir]relevant fact: the Welsh national anthem is titled ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’ (‘Land of My Fathers’). Though I’ve no idea what would happen if Louise got her little tsundere paws on it.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:01 pm
I LOL’ed at the Geass and Evangelion cosplays…
Wish I could have taken some pics of good cosplays like that too. ^_^;
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:02 pm
お帰りなさい
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Was great meeting you. Take me for some good singaporean food when I’m over ^^;
How about some Popiah?
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:37 pm
I wanna be there!
I don’t mind queuing though. It is worth every second!
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:10 pm
A Haj? Or a Jihad?
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Woah you have a namecard?!?!
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Thanks for the comiket coverage.
Welcome back.
January 4th, 2008 at 1:48 am
LOL, 2 hours queuing… What did you do for 2 hours? What do you do when you need to go to the little boy’s room? >_>
January 4th, 2008 at 3:52 am
:O The much revered PRESS PASS!
Nippon-withdrawl-symptoms? ): Welcome back & get well soon yeah!
January 4th, 2008 at 9:36 am
I saw some lucky bastards make out with the giant vocaloid poster that KEI had up, imagine having that thing hanging in your room :o~
January 4th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Now I need to make some Namecards for Comiket!
January 4th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Man where’s the other flag with the Gurren-dan logo? XD
January 4th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
BTW, for those of you who want to buy C73 stuff that we brought back:
http://www.riuva.com/?p=936
Trackback from
Gibts hier auch Cosplayer? ^^ - Anime & MangaJanuary 4th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
[...] Cosplayer? ^^ – vor einer Minute Hier gibts auch Bilder (auch Cosplayer) von der Comiket Comiket 73 – Part III: Random Shots – Ramblings of DarkMirage Lustig ist sein Comment weiter unten. Dass sich Cosplayer lieber fotografieren lassen wenn man [...]
January 5th, 2008 at 1:36 am
I am selling DM’s namecard too. DM fanboys may offer me a good price for it as DM probably won’t give you one.
January 5th, 2008 at 5:34 am
Holy cow.
I don’t think I’ll survive waiting in line for the conventions in Japan.
January 5th, 2008 at 10:57 am
I’ve always wanted to go to Comiket but now I’m having second thoughts. I hate super huge crowds but what I really can’t stand here are the freaking long queues!
You guys ought to get medals for going through the whole experience and reporting it back to us :D *salutes*
January 5th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Sounds like you had a hard time because of all the permissions you had to get and the time you took to edit all the faces @_@
January 5th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
DM, Riuva seemed to have got hacked… It keeps redirecting me to another site before Riuva loads properly and now it’s totally down.
January 6th, 2008 at 5:26 am
Comiket seems more like work than fun. It’s all for the character goods though.
January 9th, 2008 at 12:27 am
Sweet mama! You do realize that you have taken a photo of Arisa Mizuhara right??!!! Right?!
http://gallery.darkmirage.com/albums/2007tokyo/comiket-part3/IMG_6524.JPG
This Code Geass cosplayer is good! He/she managed to make a functional, wearable mask.
http://gallery.darkmirage.com/albums/2007tokyo/comiket-part3/IMG_6681.JPG
January 9th, 2008 at 6:55 am
Well, of course. I asked her for the shot. :P
January 13th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
DM ah,
do you know any singaporean manga artist went to comiket and sold over 700 copies? and a newspaper in singapore has an article on that artist how she was not well offered in Singapore but in Japan more offers
cause i’m looking for that article/comic book sold but i lost the article and failed to remember the title.
please help, onegaishimasu.
thanks
April 25th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Holy shit, this is a scary coincidence…
Check out your picture: http://gallery.darkmirage.com/albums/2007tokyo/comiket-part3/IMG_6560.JPG
Then check out this one of mine:
http://www.kilala.nl/Gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=611
Same location
Same spot on stairs
Different day
Same balding guy just a few feet ahead of you and me.
Spooky!
December 31st, 2008 at 9:29 pm
AAAAAAAAARGH arisa! Wish i was there T_T
January 6th, 2009 at 11:11 am
all i gotta say is… thats a lot of fucking people!!! its crazy
and i enjoy and thank you for posting these, to let us get a small taste of how miraculous, glorious, and hectic comiket is.