Japan 2003 report

This was another big day at the Tokyo Big Sight. The entire Tokyo Big Sight was pretty much booked out with the HUGE girls' doujin show, Super Comic City (see the S. Comic City link for more), on the 3rd and 4th, but since May 5th was a holiday in Japan, there was an extra day for events! In all, there were 4 different shows at the TBS that day.

The first show I attended was the Comitia 64. That was a fairly small doujin show of all original comics by self-published artists. I looked around at everything, and of course there was a lot of great artwork and interesting looking stuff, but nothing really appealed to me all that much. The best thing I can remember seeing was a comic called Riot Girl. She was a cute girl with glasses, pigtails, and guns (just my type!). I really should have picked up a copy... because now I can't see to find anything about it online >_<

There was another show that looked exactly like the Character Carnival from the weekend before... just a buncha pervert computer games. I didn't bother going in there.

So after the Comitia show, I headed over to find the Dolls Party 9 that was being hosted by Volks (a big chain of toy and models shows). Instead, I found another event that was basically a giant garage sale/flea market. It was quite big, and there was more than enough miscellaneous stuff there to keep me rummaging around for the rest of the afternoon! A lot of stores brought their overstock and old stuff and tried to sell it off at a low price. You'd think that there was just a bunch of crap there, but there was actually a ton of great stuff!!

I probably spent at least 1 hour just looking through stacks of posters. I came away with a Tactics Ogre poster, a Rival School poster, a KoF '97 poster, and a set of VERY rare Lilith & Morrigan posters. I also found a 2 mini Cammy keychain figures. One of those was pretty common, but it's good to have as a present, and the other was very rare. Although I already had both, they were great finds! There were also a ton of animation cels. I found some really cool Samurai Spirits and Ruroni Kenshin cels for good prices (about $40), but I didn't get any of 'em. I also found a place selling off a buncha different SNK cards (KoF, Last Blade, etc.), so I bought a bunch of those for next to nothing (60 packs for $25). And of course there were millions of different toys... everything you can think of! If I die and go to heaven, I'm gonna be at a huge show just like this looking for cool stuff for ever and ever.

I never did end up going to the Dolls Party 9. I saw a sign for it, but I never did discover where the heck it was. Oh well, the other shows kept me plenty busy, so I guess it wasn't so bad. And by the time the day was over, I really couldn't carry any more stuff, so I had to head back to my hotel-apartment.