On a hot Saturday morning in December 1975, roughly 700 people gathered in the gymnasium of the Tomonokai hall in Toshima, Tokyo. They had come to buy and sell dōjinshi — self-published manga and illustrated stories, made by fans for fans — at an event called the Comic Market, organized by a small collective of university students. The event lasted a single day and fit in a single room. The founders hoped it would become an annual tradition. It became, instead, the largest regularly scheduled fan convention on earth, with twice-yearly attendances that peaked at 750,000 people before COVID-19 imposed physical limits. The history of manga and anime events is a history of fandom scaling beyond anyone's expectations.
Comiket: The World's Biggest Fan Convention
Comiket's growth across five decades tracks exactly with manga's expansion from niche subculture to mass medium. Through the 1970s and 1980s, attendance grew steadily as manga readership grew, reaching tens of thousands by the mid-1980s. The 1990s brought the first attendance crises — crowds so large that Tokyo's convention spaces could not safely contain them — and the eventual move to Tokyo Big Sight, the massive exhibition complex in Odaiba that remains Comiket's home.
What makes Comiket structurally unique among conventions is its creator-centred philosophy. Unlike American comic conventions, which increasingly became commercial showcases for major publishers, Comiket has maintained throughout its history a strict amateur ethos: the approximately 35,000 "circles" (creator groups) that exhibit at each event must all produce original or fan-made work. Major commercial publishers are not permitted to have booths. The event's purpose is the circulation of fan creativity, not commercial transactions — though the commercial reality is that a successful circle can sell several thousand copies of a single dōjinshi in a weekend, generating real income.
The cosplay culture at Comiket has grown as large as the comics culture itself. The outdoor cosplay areas outside Tokyo Big Sight host thousands of cosplayers on each convention day, representing characters from manga, anime, video games, and increasingly Western film and television. Some cosplayers spend months and significant sums building elaborate costumes; the outdoor areas function as a secondary convention within the convention, with cosplayers posing for requested photographs and fan-photographers building careers on the resulting images.
Jump Festa: The Industry's Annual Reveal Machine
Jump Festa, held annually in December at the Makuhari Messe convention centre in Chiba, is the official showcase for Shueisha's Jump imprint — which means it's the annual reveal event for the most commercially significant manga anthology in history. Anime adaptation announcements, new season announcements, game tie-in trailers, and creator stage events make Jump Festa the single most concentrated event in the manga-anime announcement calendar. A single Jump Festa can generate more internet traffic and fan excitement than months of ordinary news cycle.
The event is notable for its direct creator access: mangaka appear on stage for question-and-answer sessions, drawing demonstrations, and promotional interactions with fans that are rare in the otherwise mediated relationship between creator and reader. Eiichiro Oda's Jump Festa appearances are particularly anticipated — the One Piece creator, notorious for his reclusiveness outside his Tokyo studio, uses the event as one of his primary points of public contact with his readership.
Anime Expo: North America's Flagship Event
Anime Expo, held annually in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles Convention Center, is the largest anime convention in North America and one of the most important commercial events in the international anime industry. Founded in 1992 — when American anime fandom consisted of a few thousand dedicated enthusiasts with shared VHS tapes — it now draws over 100,000 attendees per day and functions as a genuine industry event, with major Japanese studios, American licensors, and streaming platforms all using it as a venue for international announcements.
The economics of Anime Expo illustrate how conventions have become industry infrastructure. Booth space, badge sales, merchandise licensing, autograph session fees, and hotel partnerships generate significant revenue. Industry guests — Japanese voice actors, directors, and composers — are flown from Japan for industry panels and fan events, treating the convention as a formal part of their promotional obligations. The relationship between the Japanese industry and American fandom, once mediated entirely by distributors and licensors, now includes this direct, in-person dimension that neither side has any interest in abandoning.
World Cosplay Summit: The Olympics of Costume
The World Cosplay Summit, held annually in Nagoya, Japan, is the most formally competitive cosplay event in the world. Begun in 2003 with participants from five countries, it has expanded to include over 40 national delegations, each sending a team that has won their national qualifying competition. Teams compete on craftsmanship — the technical quality of their costumes — and on stage performance, presenting choreographed scenes from the properties they represent.
The Summit's existence reflects something interesting about how cosplay has evolved from its fan convention roots into a competitive, internationally organised activity with national representatives, formal judging criteria, and media coverage in both cosplay-specialist outlets and mainstream Japanese entertainment news. For the most dedicated practitioners, cosplay is not a hobby but a craft discipline requiring the skills of a costume designer, prop fabricator, makeup artist, and performer simultaneously.
The Digital Convention and What Survived It
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2021 eliminated nearly all physical anime and manga events for the better part of two years. Comiket went partially online, offering digital dōjinshi sales through web storefronts. Anime Expo and other major conventions held virtual editions with streamed panels and online merchandise sales. The digital conventions worked well enough to demonstrate that much of the informational content of conventions — announcements, panels, Q&As — can be delivered online effectively. What they could not replicate was the physical experience: the crowd atmosphere, the spontaneous encounters with fellow fans, the haptic pleasure of browsing a creator's table, the ability to buy a physical book directly from the person who made it.
When physical events returned in 2022 and 2023, they returned to record attendance. AnimeNYC, launched only in 2017, exceeded 55,000 attendees in 2023. Japan Expo in Paris, the largest anime event outside Japan, returned to its pre-pandemic 250,000+ attendance. The conclusion the industry drew from the pandemic experiment was unambiguous: digital distribution solved the access problem but not the community problem, and the physical event remains, in 2026, irreplaceable.