I didn’t really get a lot of pictures during Worldcon, there wasn’t much to photograph other than the Dealer’s room exhibits and occasionally some of the panel discussions. I wanted to show the Art Show but like most of them at other conventions, photos weren’t permitted.
One of the biggest exhibits at Worldcon was one produced by Comic Market, nicknamed “Comiket”, a convention held twice a year at the Tokyo Big Sight convention center. The latest Comiket had over 500,000 visitors in 4 days, and this exhibit provided a history of the convention since it started in 1975. The convention is centered around fans of anime, manga and video games, who love to write and draw their own comic books, called “doujinshi”, often using characters created by others, including copyrighted characters. Many professional creators and their publishers allow these fans to produce doujinshi, because they are doing it out of love and not out of desire to make money, and because many current creators got their start producing doujinshi. Companies often scout the best doujinshi creators and hire them to work on new manga. This display shows each of the floors at the last Comiket. Each square represents a table, which is rented by two groups of creators, called “circles”, where the circle can display and sell a handful of copies of their doujinshi. A circle usually consists of one or two artists, a writer, and an editor (sometimes one person does all of this), and they usually produce one issue for each Comiket. These are covers from a handful of circles from different years, and you can see the variety of styles and artistic skills these circles have.
Of course, no convention would be complete without people wearing costumes of their favorite characters. There were others, but I didn’t get the chance to photograph them.
Since there wasn’t much to photograph, I decided to eat lunch at the bayside park down below the convention center. It was a beautiful day, and there were families enjoying themselves, eating lunch and playing. The giant wind turbine was working, generating electricity, but I don’t know where it was being used.