Comiket Outsizes San Diego Comic-Con With Record Attendance

San Diego Comic-Con has become a pilgrimage for geeks around the world. Known for its focus on all things comics, the huge convention took over Southern California earlier this summer, and thousands of fans gathered for the event. But if you didn't know, a massive convention in Japan just overshadowed the reported attendance of SDCC.

Last week, Tokyo welcomed Comic Market 96 to the city, and the event saw hundreds of thousands attendees come to the event. The convention, which is known best as Comiket, drew in 730,000 attendees across its four days.

According to Comiket, this attendance record marks the highest one noted for the summertime convention ever. It also marks the first time the comic convention welcomed over 700,00 attendees. The former attendance record was held by Comiket in 2013 as 590,000 fans attended in three days.

For Western comic fans, this turnout may sound surprising. According to the San Diego Convention Center website, it says SDCC brought in attendance numbers of 135,000. At the very best, Comiket pulled in an attendance number several times higher than the famous U.S. convention, but the Japanese event has been called into question. As reported by ANN, Comiket does not have passes made for each visitor, so a person who visited the event each day would be counted four different times.

Still, the math works in Comiket's favor. If you do the math, the event's record attendance divided down would mean 182,500 fans visited the event which still outdoes SDCC for 2019.

As for those wanting to know more about Comiket, it has become a true festival for comic books. The event focuses less on film and TV to lift up publishers as well as fan-drawn comics. The event regularly draws in hundreds if not thousands of vendors, and it appears this last Comiket was no different.