Manga Ichiba Event Report

take that! my victory lap around all the nonbelievers who doubted manichi's success. and some revelations on kinship.

This past Memorial Day weekend I attended the much anticipated Manga Ichiba, where freshly printed English-language doujinshi was collectively sold for the first time in the US. It was held in the DoubleTree hotel in the “Bayshore Foyer”, a roughly 10 minute bus ride from the main convention center. There were six time slots total, and I was lucky enough to be able to attend each one. Kan and I were tabling at the Night Market, so we were going to be around for every evening slot by default.

We stayed at the Residence Inn. It was a nice location - roughly a 15-20 minute walk from the DoubleTree and a part of the Fanime shuttle bus route C (this is different from route A, which connects to the DoubleTree). They also had a complimentary breakfast buffet as long as you woke before 9AM. For the morning timeslots, I stuffed myself with free muffins and took the leisurely walk to Manga Ichiba. Once my bag was heavy with doujin, I used an electric scooter to get back to my hotel, which cost $5 and took about 10 minutes. In the evenings, Kan and I used Uber to get to and from the Doubletree in the interest of safety. Next time I’ll try to get a room at the DoubleTree directly, but if it’s too pricey I wouldn’t mind staying at the Residence Inn again.

Overall Manga Ichiba blew past my modest expectations for the event. In all ways it was an immense success. I had a blast buying peoples’ humble books and meeting others who were excited to be there. Though my haul was big, what I valued most from the experience was having a space to be with like-minded passionate people. I have lots of scattered thoughts and reactions, so this blog post will be a bit of a hot mess.

Expectations vs. Reality

Thinking back to the week leading up to the event, I was fairly optimistic. Fanime had finally started to promote Manga Ichiba circle cuts. My freshly printed debut doujins had arrived with a lot of time to spare. I had won a protracted fight with the Mixam production team to get my illustration book to the con on time, and I had the UPS tracking number to prove it. More importantly, chatter online about Fanime and Manga Ichiba sounded good; the enthusiastic grassroots promotion artists had done for the event was bearing fruit. One person tweeted: "Any oomfs who are going to fanime? … haven’t heard much besides manga ichiba”

But I was still worried! Because Manichi was the very first of its kind! There was no telling how it would actually go. I was worried especially for folks in the daytime slots. In previous years, the DoubleTree already attracted a healthy amount of people in the evenings because of the Oasis adult programming. Even if people didn’t know what Manga Ichiba was, they’d be forced to walk through it on their way to the popular Night Market. Not only did the daytime slots not have that benefit, they also had to compete with the rest of the con—artist alley, exhibit hall, cosplay gatherings, panels, and more.

Our plan for Friday was this - have a lazy morning and grab some coffee and breakfast at iJava cafe, then walk to the con, maybe say hi to some Artist Alley friends. The daytime Manichi slot lasted from 10am to 4pm, so I was thinking of going there closer to 2pm.

Then discord messages started to roll in. People reported a healthy amount of traffic. Someone said that it felt like a doujin event in Asia. A little before noon, circles started to sell out of their stock. We cut our con visit short and decided to head over early. As we approached, we noticed a large group of people standing around… was that the line to the shuttle? And it was. The bus was packed! Sitting on that bus, it really hit me that there was nothing at the destination other than doujinshi, which meant that doujinshi was what everyone around me wanted. Manga Ichiba was not going to be a place people passed through on their way to something else. I had severely underestimated the desire for this kind of event.

By the time I got there, most of the books I had mentally planned to get were sold out. I was elated by this fact, and picked up plenty of other books anyway. The busload I arrived with was probably going to wipe out a couple more tables. After I made my rounds, which didn’t take very long, some tables had already completely vacated. The empty tables were a familiar sight to anyone who’d ever been to a JP doujin event late.

Notes on inventory/stock

Part of the reason people sold out so quickly was because nobody expected this kind of turnout. Many artists played it safe; while selling out too fast can feel bad, the opposite is demoralizing—bringing 50 copies of something to a con and only selling 10 means 40 copies to lug home. Books are heavy. Your disappointment can literally crush you. Many artists I spoke to shared that they’d brought only 10-20 copies of stock based on how well they’d sold before.

To put things in perspective, I personally have never sold more than 10 books at a US con, which usually spans 3 to 4 days of 8 hours each (24-32hr total). I rarely even sell more than 20 copies of a keychain unless the fandom is at its highest hype, and I never sell more than 5 copies of anything original. For Manga Ichiba, an event where I would be selling only within a single 6 hour time slot, I had decided to bring 30 copies of my original BL doujin. Like I said, I was optimistic!

Notes on table displays

One charming thing about Manga Ichiba was the simplicity of peoples’ table setups. In Artist Alley, the six foot table transforms into an elaborate, often-times towering shopfront. Print walls down the whole aisle. Overstimulation. Every inch of the space must be covered in product in order to vie for customers’ interest. You may see the artist, but only if you can find the little window hole they’ve made to stick their head out in. Otherwise, you only get a hand and a square reader.

At Manga Ichiba most people only had a couple of books for sale, and books themselves do not take up a lot of room. It was very easy to shop as well as chat with the artists. From the artist perspective, it was so much more manageable. AA setup for Kan and I takes around two hours if we are prepared, and more if we’re not. Together we sell almost 100 different products. My Manichi table took me about 10 minutes. I had one tablecloth, and laid flat my 4 books neatly. I had one sign with my name on it and another showing my 4-book menu with details and pricing. The simplicity was nostalgic. I was reminded of the first few cons I did, back when my stock was just a couple of prints, 5 charms and 10 buttons.

Notes on my selling experience

My timeslot was Friday night. I had an amazing time! My only wish was that I had come a little earlier and was more prepared so that I could buy some books from fellow circles in my slot.

I will write the rest as bullet points because it’s easier:

• My stock: 30 Possession Session, the debut doujin. 30 Bound Boys, a reprint of an illustration book. 15 Diplomacy AU, a small illustration book of me and Kan’s OCs. 3 Dimilix Art Log Books.

• I also had a “Zine Event Info Mailing List” sign-up sheet at my table! I still have to compile the emails, and hopefully it can come into good use. My first order of business will be to grow the mailing list so that it’s ready when the next doujin event gets announced.

• I priced all of my books as multiples of 5, so I never had to deal with single dollar bills. It was an amazing choice. I’ve never had it so easy with cash. Actually, I noticed that most of my customers, especially in the first half hour, had cash in hand.

• Possession Session sold out before the first hour was up! I was blown away! Please take care of Vincent’s first edition bussy, he is with you all now…

• Shoutout to Nids for grabbing my Molly Tea order when my doordash arrived. Read her event report here!

• Shoutout to the person who I handed money to and bought me the two Heated Rivalry doujins that were being sold that night. They were innocently buying my book, and then I noticed the HR doujins they were holding and asked if they’d do me a favor. It was really nice of them to buy the doujins for me, I didn’t realize there was a line at one of the tables. Eternally grateful!

• Shoutout to the person who was thumbing through my illustration book and asked me if I was a fan of Harada. Harada is my hands down favorite BL author. i was really impressed that they surmised it from Bound Boys and not Possession Session, which was already sold out at the time.

• I had a lot of fun conversations! I enjoy watching peoples’ expressions as they flipped through my doujin. Y’all have a really good porn-reading poker face.

• Thank you to everyone who came by and visited me that night! If you missed the book, I’m sorry, but at least I do have it up for preorder now. I’m doing one more print run and that’s it.

The haul & Notes on pricing

My haul for Manga Ichiba was tremendous. I bought around 50 books. Unfortunately, I did not keep good track of how much I spent.

hehehehe…

I was happy to note that this haul rivaled and exceeded some of my hauls from Asia. All of the money I made at Manichi went back to Manichi, which was the best situation I could have hoped for. This is not a flex by the way, I have disposable income and a very trigger happy shopping impulse. I would love to leave notes on some of these books, but there are a lot and I haven’t even finished reading them all. Maybe in another post I’ll mention some of my favs.

Now the next thing I say might offend some people, but I hope my words are considered carefully by people interested in selling doujin at future events in the US. This is not a callout post or intended to criticize anyone’s choices. I am going to talk a bit about pricing. All of this is my opinion, and not any enforced rule or etiquette.

The average “thinbook” doujinshi in Japan costs around 600yen which doesn’t even reach 4 US dollars at the time of me writing this blogpost. Now, you’ll be lucky if you can print for that much in the US. The price of doujinshi in the US will always be higher than in Japan due to higher costs. At Manga Ichiba, the majority of circles priced their work within the modest range of $5 to $15, which I thought was very reasonable.

The average “thinbook” fanzine sold in US Artist Alleys is priced around $20-25. There were a couple circles that carried those prices over to Manga Ichiba. Some of these circles did very well and sold out of their stock, especially if they had a strong fandom community to support them.

I strongly support reducing the price of thinbooks to below $20. It costs around $5-$10 to print in the US, so while such a price reduction would reduce profit, it would not eliminate it. My reasoning for this is simple and based mostly on math, not on any moral grandstanding about profit or artist motivations or anything.

• Firstly, attendees have limited buying power. If an attendee budgets $120 for doujinshi, then an average doujinshi price of $10 allows them to go home with 12 books, whereas an average doujinshi price of $20 allows them only 6 books. In my experience, going to a doujin event is as fun as it in Asia because of how much you get to have at the end - how heavy your bag feels on your shoulder. Each doujin you buy is not just a product but a story of the artist’s mind, and having the ability to collect many of those stories gives people a sense of “strength of spirit” or community around the genre or fandom they’re collecting. The haul pic is an expression of: “look at all the crazy shit we’re making about A and B, we are so alive”. It’s the same as being proud of your fandom when they rise in the the AO3 rankings.

• Secondly, at doujin events, each circle typically has one featured “debut” doujin for sale rather than dozens of products. That makes a price disparity more jarring, because each purchase that goes towards a pricier book directly affects the attendee’s ability to buy the book of another circle. In AA, the diversity of products allows attendees to adjust their spending between artists accordingly. For example, if an attendee has $120 budgeted for merch and decide to buy 3 $20 posters from 3 different artists, they only have $60 left. But they have choices. They could spend their remaining $60 on additional $20 posters, or they could spread it out by buying $10 sticker sheets and $5 dollar photocards.

Manga Ichiba will only grow year after year. I know it’s a difficult topic, but in the event’s infancy, it’s important to have conversations around it, because I think depending on what standards get adopted, it will crucially change the type of event it grows into.

Reflections on fandom, niches, and kinship

With how sprawling Artist Alley has become, it has become very difficult to shop in. AA’s strength is that you can find almost every kind of merch within its halls. (Even books!) But if shoppers can actually find what they’re looking for is another matter. Catalogues can only do so much. Stamp rallies can only do so much. Even if you stand right in front of the very thing you’re looking for, you could miss it. People online complain about AA artists only selling the same merch from the same fandoms, but it isn’t even true. Niche merch is there. Good luck finding it.

The realization I had on the bus - that doujinshi was in of itself the destination, and not just something you might find in passing - solidified a notion that had begun to form in my mind while I was prepping for Manga Ichiba. Fandom now is bigger and more varied than ever. Anime is mainstream. When I first started going to anime conventions as a young adult, the most exciting feeling I had was kinship. I could be confident that everyone near me knew the same jokes, watched same shows, heard the same songs, and these were all things we couldn’t easily share with other people in our lives. Cons still give me that feeling, but fandom is pop culture now, and monoculture is dead; it’s become too vast for a one size fits all to actually work as perfectly as it did before. I can’t turn to the person sitting next to me and talk about the best anime ever made (Fullmetal Alchemist) because they may not even know what that is (ouch); they might be only into Gacha Games, or Vtubers, or TCGs, or Danmei, or Webtoons, or they might have only watched Demonslayer. And you know what? I haven’t watched Demonslayer. That puts me at an extreme disadvantage.

On the bus to Manga Ichiba, I knew that the people sitting around us all liked doujinshi. That was the same kinship I used to get in AA, when it was hard to get official merch of any kind of your favorite anime unless you went to a con. If you read my post about prepping for Manga Ichiba, you’ll know that in the midst of my busiest drawing time I decided to take a week off in order to go to Final Fantasy XIV Fanfest, an official convention for the MMO video game. The kinship was overflowing there.

What I’m finally getting around to saying is I think it’s not just doujin events we are ready for in the US, it’s “only events” as well - doujin events for a specific fandom or niche. I kind of see it happening already with the popularization of “cupsleeve” events. Cupsleeves are fandom-specific meetups hosted at boba teashops, and more elaborate cupsleeves will have activities and vendors too. In privileged, weeb-dense Southern California, there’s a cupsleeve practically every other weekend now. People want that kinship! And we should give it to them.

Reflections on momentum

Personally Manga Ichiba has really motivated me to tell more stories. I’m really glad that this event happened when it did - in 2024, I got into a fanfiction-heavy fandom and began to write again, and it made me realize that I actually do enjoy telling stories. Seeing the enthusiasm around comics and around original work, especially original BL work, has been incredibly enabling. My next doujin-related goal would be to refine/expand Possession Session, since it was made in a rush, and possibly translate it to JP so I could sell it at JGarden next year, maybe? We shall see. Now that it’s written on this blog it’ll be embarrassing if I give up.

Now that there has been one doujin event in the states. The question is… when and where will the next one be? I hope that event organizers everywhere see the success and the enthusiasm and get to work! If there’s anyone out there who’s feeling energetic about doujin events and wants to try hosting one in their area, feel free to reach out to me, I have a lot of resources at hand.

I believe doujin culture continues to grow stronger here. News of Manga Ichiba’s success spread to Japan as well, and they celebrated with us. Someone pointed out the irony that Manga Ichiba just means Comic Market in Japanese, and that the languages are flip-flopped. It feels right!