News

Comic Market 99 Scheduled as In-Person Event on December 30-31

The Comic Market Committee announced on Monday that the planned Comic Market (Comiket) 99 event will now be held on December 30-31 at Tokyo Big Sight in its East, West, and South Halls.

The staff stated regarding the announcement:

While there still is a high degree of uncertainty, with infections again on the rise, we are today announcing our plans for Comic Market 99 in 2021 Winter, given the necessary time for preparations such as application by circles, looking at the effects of vaccination, and the increase in cases in recent weeks, we are trying to predict the situation a few months into the future. Therefore, we can't deny the possibility of another postponing, in case that vaccination does not sufficiently improve the situation by the end of the year. However, if we don't plan and start with preparations now, there will certainly be no Comic Market.

The committee stated it plans to "implement all necessary precautions against COVID-19," following a guideline that the "Doujin Japan 2020" coalition put together for dōjinshi events under COVID-19.

Additionally, instead of a 200,000-participant-per-day event as in previous years, the event will likely restrict participation to several tens of thousands of people per day. The staff said it will probably implement a lottery system for passes to purchase in advance.

The event was originally planned for last winter, but was then delayed to the Golden Week holidays in 2021 (which took place in April and May) due to the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) situation, and scheduling issues considering Tokyo Big Sight's East Exhibition hall will remain unavailable until fall 2021 due to the Olympics. However, the Comic Market Committee postponed the event again in March due to COVID-19.

The Comiket 98 event that was planned to take place from May 2-5, 2020 was canceled to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. The event was planned for May 2020 instead of the normal August timeframe due to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics' original schedule in July-August 2020.

The last in-person Comic Market event was Comic Market 97 in December 2019, which attracted a record 750,000 attendees across four days.

Sources: Comic Market's English Facebook page, Comic Natalie via Hachima Kikō