dokomi-2022

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DoKomi 2022 | 4-5 June 2022

DoKomi (short for ドイツコミックマーケット, doitsu komikku māketto, Japanese for German Comic Market) is the largest manga and anime convention in Germany, EU. Since its inception it is located in the city of Düsseldorf, the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia, squeezed between two large metro regions – Cologne+Bonn and Ruhrgebiet.

Since the first edition in 2009, the convention's size rose from 1.8k to 55k in 2019 (10k increase in just one year!). Since 2012 it was organized in Messe Düsseldorf, either in the congress center or in the fair halls (or both). It is well-known for the plethora of special guests, important cosplay contests, a lot of independent artists and commercial stalls, among others.

This is the first Dokomi after the COVID-19 pandemic (well, technically speaking there is still a pandemic, but life is almost completely back to normal, including the events). And even though there was still, officially at least, a cap for 80% of the capacity, they were able to achieve a recod 70k guests (according to the initial count, source: Dokomi's official Discord). During the pandemic they had 28k (2020) and 30k (2021) guests (source), so I'm more than happy that they are not only back to normal, but they exceeded the expectations.

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In Hall 1 there was some space upstairs – where Workshops and Maid Cafe were located. You had to register for Workshops (nearby, but it was just a formality) and they were not just workshops, but technically speaking also discussion panels or just talks. I visited two of them (because talks are my favourite activity at conventions) and they were kinda underwheliming (and most of them were not interesting for me, but that's fine actually). The first one was about V-Tubers and although it was planned for an hour, it lasted about 30 minutes, including questions. It was made by some vtubing person, but it was rather superficial (although I learned something about German V-Tubing agencies, which is nice). The second one was a meeting with mangaka. It was fine. Both panels were obviously in German, the latter was being translated from Japanese.

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