I think that may have been an understatement.
Running alongside the ACFM at Tokyo Big Sight was Super Comic City 15. It’s a huge manga event that happens every so often at Big Sight, where independant manga creators try to sell their books and get more people hooked on their stuff. It’s not a big, commercial thing, and none of the major manga publishers are there. It’s not even small press.
It’s more like “micro press.”
Of course when you multiply “micro” by several hundred, you get something like this:
And that’s only half of the space Super Comic City took up!
The event was using 6 halls worth of space (the photo only shows 4-6), all jammed full of small tables, each one holding two dealers. I don’t know how many they had in total, but it was a ton.
So many, in fact, that the “guidebook” they gave out was around 400 pages. 267 of those pages were filled with the directory of sellers, and they were crammed 36 to a page.
Whoa – up to 9,612 dealers!
Now, not every page was full, and some had spaces for guide info, but you get the idea. That’s a massive amount of self-published manga.
And maybe 2/3 of it was about boys kissing boys.
Those comics are still massively popular here, though it’s more a girl thing than a gay thing. There are original manga with boys kissing. Fan manga of games, anime and mainstream manga with boys kissing. Crossover manga (like characters from Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest together) with boys kissing….
Compare this to comic conventions in the US and you’ll get an idea just how different the comic culture is between the two countries.
As cool as all the self-published stuff is (and how they can get away with such blatant copyright infringement), I’d still rather there have been some mainstream presence there.
At least then I might have bought something.