dokomi-2024

Dokomi 2024 | 28-30 June 2024

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.

It was my third time at the convention. This time it was organized during the UEFA European Football Championship, which in 2024 was organized in Germany, including Düsseldorf. This seems to be quite challenging, but the organizers nailed it really well.

This time, I have made plenty of photos and as I was only on Friday, I have only some remarks. I present them here, with appropriate photos. The rest of the photos are in the folders. It is not the recollection of something available in the convention book, so if you want to know more about the convention, please use the link above.

Ok, so, remarks. Well… I've been to the convention in 2022, so my main interest was the diff between these two editions.

First, the entrance organization was done prefectly. Since 2023, two entranes are available – the northern one (Eingang Nord) and the southern one (Eingang Süd). The southern one was organized in the same manner as in 2022, so I just left through it. I entered via the northern one. An interesting fact about this one is that it is close to the ~~Merkur Spiel-Arena~~ Düsseldorf Arena, which was, with its capacity of 47k people, one of the UEFA Euro 2024 venues. It seems to be a bad idea, buuut… there are two tram terminuses in the area – MERKUR SPIEL-ARENA/Messe Nord and Sportpark Nord/Europaplatz. The former was used for the stadium and the latter for Dokomi. Then people walked to the Hall 8b, where the queue was located and then we entered through Eingang Nord (with the entrance to the MERKUR SPIEL-ARENA/Messe Nord stop fenced oud) to the Hall 7.

And what a hall it is! Clearily, Messe Düsseldorf is well-aware that they should keep an amazing foyer at every entance, because the one at the northern one was pretty amazing. I know, it was already available in 2023, but it was new to me.

By the way, this time the newest addition was Hall 17, with the size of 8298 m². However, since 2022, two additional Halls were added: Hall 7 (3883 + 6.650 m²) and Hall 9 (12409 m²) (and of course iHall 8B for the queue). The Black Stage has been moved to Hall 9 and Hall 7 now houses the Seijin (18+) Area (moved from the corridor between Hall 3 and Hall 4) and Bring&Buy (moved from CCD Süd). Speaking of Bring&Buy, it was much, much more spacious than in 2022. It was also well-organized with its usual directional setting, although it was really not needed (and not enforced), because of the increase in volume.

Currently I think Dokomi occupies around 40-45% of the whole Messe area, which still leaves some room for expansion, but given how huge are there fair grounds, it is nonetheless really cool.

Hall 17 houses plenty of things, including itasha, but also the signing area. The queues for autographs were nicely organized, however, when Mion arrived, they had to strech the whole queue thoughout the whole Hall. Which was kinda amazing, but not surprising, because Mion was, as always, amazing.

The way Workshops were organized was also quite remarkable. With the event of this scale, if you don't want to keep quite a long queues, you need to establish a registration system. Some conventions try to make it all electronic, which is more self-organizing, but also means that the user has an entry barrier – a rather small one for rather technologically literate weeaboos, but nonetheless a barrier. Dokomi used a less comlicated method though – you can register on two desks, which issue you a card (in a size of a business card) with the room, the hour and the day. They have everything well-organized and so they issue these cards up to the certain limit. When you enter the workshop, you give the card to the Helfer and voilá. BTW, I've seen the workshop/lecture about the technical means of the SNES games. It was quite interesting indeed.

There was also, of course, a Maid Café, this time in CCD Süd, but it was unfortunately closed on Friday :(

Ok, so this is it. I think I am not planning to go there in 2025, but maybe 2026? Dokomi every two years has become some kind of a small tradition for me now, odd years mean TRAKO and even years mean Dokomi.