TLDR⌗

The DoKomi is a really fun convention for Anime fans, held back by organization issues inconveniencing both visitors and vendors. Many artists selling art, but some were scattered to random buildings because the art-area was shrunk from 2 to 1 building this year. The app is essential and mostly usable, but also buggy and only partly available in English. Baggage-Dropoff exists, but only after the security check which confiscates some the stuff you bought at the convention, with only slim chances of getting it back. Information on the website is outdated. There is lots of delicious food, but prepare to pay a lot for it while having trouble finding a spot to sit and eat.

Overall, I can recommend visiting, if you don’t have to travel too far and aren’t short on money. Best take some friends with you and if you’re up to it, do a Cosplay, even a simple/cheap one will do.

Intro⌗

About DoKomi⌗

The DoKomi (“Doitsu Komikku Maketto” -> “German Comic Market”) is the largest anime convention in Germany, and with that one of the largest ones in Europe, hosted in the convention centre of Düsseldorf, the city with the largest Japan-Town of Germany. It’s visited by over 180k people over the span of 3 days (Friday, Saturday, Sunday).

In its 10 Buildings (mostly giant halls) it’s got “everything anime”: Artists selling their artworks, itashas (Cars with anime vinyls) on display, gaming booths, merchandise, thousands of cosplaying guests, V-Tuber meet&greets, live music, fan-meetups, you name it!

My Schedule⌗

After having a stressed schedule in 2024, my friends and I decided to travel by train on Thursday instead of Friday, where we had to take the first trains of the morning. A very good idea, but booking a train on Sunday was a bad one, as we had to visit the convention after checking out of our BnB. So we had to carry full backpacks and a travel suitcase, with all the items we bought before, leading to a stupid problem:

The confiscated Merch⌗

There was a booth at DoKomi selling a really nice, kinda expensive, Tea infused Alcohol. While it’s perfectly okay to carry this alcohol at the convention after buying it, it’s strictly prohibited to enter the con with it in your bag. As the security guard at the entrance told us, their “One Golden Rule” is “No Alcohol”, so they confiscated it. Kinda funny if that is your golden rule, if you break it yourself by selling it… Of course, we could not get it back after leaving, they either discarded it, or (probably more likely) one of the guards took it home with them.

DoKomi has a paid baggage drop-off, so you don’t have to carry all your travelling baggage all day long. However, it is located after the security check which confiscated the tea liquor. Also, they usually don’t check any unlabelled plastic bottles, so you could literally smuggle in a litre of supermarket vodka.

J-Rave⌗

The J-Rave is one of the 3 separate evening events of the DoKomi. It had several DJs, a dance area at the front and rows of cushioned seats bit further back and some stalls for drinks.

The music was good (My personal highlights were remixes of Yuusha, Bad Apple, U.N. Owen Was Her and Hacking to the Gate). Sadly, there is no information on who the DJs were. The app doesn’t tell you and the website is months out of date, saying “Stay tuned for the announcements of the DJs for the next Dokomi!”, which means the “previous” DoKomi by now.

However, there was one giant problem, that was apparent last year too:

Not enough stalls for drinks⌗

The event had just 2 (yes, two) stalls for drinks:

  1. Cocktails
  2. Beer and soft drinks

Considering the large amount of People, that quickly led to queues of over 35 minutes to get a pricy drink (10€ per 0.5l cocktail). That was unacceptable last year, and is still unacceptable in my opinion. We are antisocial weebs (me included) who desperately need a bit of alcohol to enjoy a rave. Heck, I’d say over half of the guests sat in the cushioned seats instead of dancing/socializing at the rave. Just double up the amount of bartenders next year and get a couple more security guards to deal with misbehaving drunks. The extra income from the drinks will more than likely cover for that.

Well, I guess it did have the side effect of toilets without any queues at all, which was nice for the singular time I had to go… I think not even the womens toilet had a large queue, which is unusual for the DoKomi in general.

The App⌗

To keep it short, the app sucks. While not strictly required, it’s an essential part of visiting the DoKomi. Let’s begin with the good parts:

  • It lets you search and favourite Artists, events, etc and highlight them on a map of the convention centre.
  • Said map can show you the ID of a location (e.g. 3E21 for Hall 3, Row E, booth 21) and the name of the corresponding Artist/Event/Vendor
  • You can load your purchased Ticket into the app, so you don’t have to open the PDF or carry a printout with you (which I’d still recommend in case your phone runs out of battery)
  • Vendors seemingly can add their booths themselves
  • Content is cached, so it works offline (though I think its updated as an App update)

So in theory, you have pretty much everything you need. In practice however, there are many problems:

Bad Localisation⌗

For English users, the app is a mix of German and English. Even important information like the Opening hours or directions/parking are only available in German. Bad Localisation and missing ticket names

If this was a small open source project, that would be fine. But this is a commercial app with hundreds of thousands of users, many of which don’t speak any German.

Bad Pagestack⌗

A pagestack is the common way of organizing apps with multiple pages. Whenever you tap on something to open a new page, it pushes it on top of the stack. Whenever you hit the back-button/gesture it pops the most recent page of the stack, enabling the user to go back.

The DoKomi app deviates from this, as sometimes the back button removes every page from the stack. Here is an example:

  1. Go to the list of Artists
  2. Open the page of Artist “A” you found
  3. Tap on their location to show it on the map
  4. Tap back button
  5. Instead of returning to Artist “A”, it throws you back to the list of Artists, having to search for A again.

Duplicated events and missing locations⌗

Some things appear more than one time in the app. An example is the “Gaming Stage”.

  • “Gaming Stage” has no image, no location, no description, but a schedule of events at the stage.
  • “Gaming Stage sponsored by [Sponsor]” has an image, a location, a description, but misses the schedule… Also, the name is so long that the sponsor name usually gets cut off by a “…”

Misc⌗

  • Some parts of the app show grey placeholder images.
    • This includes some artists pages, but this is likely the fault of the artists themselves
  • Lists are sometimes lagging when scrolling

Adding tickets is buggy⌗

My friend bought tickets for us. When he added them to his app via QR-Code, it correctly loaded the ticket, images, ticket-type, ticket-owner, etc

For me, it only loaded the ticket itself. That meant it was especially missing a display name, leading me to confusing the DoKomi ticket with the J-Rave ticket at the entrance. The ticket scanner apparently only showed “invalid”, so neither me nor the bouncer knew that I confused the unnamed tickets, unnecessarily holding up the queue.

Halls⌗

Hall 1: Exhibitors⌗

Personally, We didn’t spend much time here. There were many different kinds of stalls: Swords, Chopsticks, Books, DVDs and… Artists. Yes, they have their own Building, but were mixed in here too for some reason.

Weirdly, many of the Exhibitors here only provided their name and to the DoKomi app. No Logo, description or tags. One would think the large companies here would care the most for in app SEO and presentation, but they actually cared the least.

Hall 3: Artist booths⌗

A looot of time was spent here, slowly walking through the overcrowded rows of artists selling prints and keychains. For anyone who likes Anime-Style drawings, this is a Paradise where you can directly support Artists financially and even get something nice for your physical collection. Most Artists charged about 10-15€ for A4 prints, larger sizes a bit more expensive. And they are usually super happy if you buy their art.

Funny thing is, one of the most talented artists there had the most “I don’t care” attitude of the convention. The displayed artworks were sloppily hung up with brown duct tape, and when you bought his art he put it into a cheap, milky transparent cover and handed it to you without even a smile, let alone a “Thank You”. I met that same artist in Osakas “comic treasure” convention, where he acted exactly the same. Sad, but the one outlier.

Last year, there were 2 buildings filled to the brim with Artists and people wanting to buy their art. I’m sad that they cut that down to a single building and a few artists being scattered around the other buildings.

Hall 4: Fashion⌗

We didn’t spend much time here, but there was normal clothing, lolita-fashion, handmade catears, etc.

Looked like well-made stuff though.

Hall 5: Adult only⌗

One might think an “Adult Only Anime stuff” area was only Hentai and Lewd Cosplay. And yes, there was a lot of that, but also this is the only area where alcohol is sold and allowed to be drunk, so there was a quite a bit of that too. There was also a stage with presentations about how to safely do BDSM and other live stuff. There was also an 18+ gaming area with Hentai games, Counterstrike, etc if you felt like visiting a con to play hentai games for some reason.

Some of the Artists selling here were selling completely Seiso art (not 18+). I guess they had to be put here because there was only one dedicated artist building this year. Probably sucks for those artists, because people come there for Hentai but not for Seiso art.

Hall 9: Gaming⌗

Hall 10: Bring&Buy⌗

The only area with a longer entry queue than the J-Raves cocktail queue, so we didn’t visit. But in theory it’s really nice for sellers as the Dokomi buys their stuff and sells it to other visitors. So a seller can enjoy the rest of the day, without having to wait for a buyer themselves.

Hall 16: Black Stage⌗

An indoor stage for Music and Live content. We went to the live concerts of Koda (the guy who made the JoJo openings, and pretty much nothing else), Shiroku, a German-Japanese singer mostly covering Anime songs, and Burnout Syndromes, a Rock-Band from Osaka doing Anime covers and original music. All were really good, but can’t compare to last years Myth&Roid, in my very subjective opinion. It’s cool to meet these artists you’d rarely see out of Japan.

We also went to the “cosplay contest”. You’d expect there to be several dozen if not Hundreds of cosplayers presenting the fruits of their hard work: Sewing, painting and crafting their intricate cosplays. Instead it was a theatre for about 10 cosplayers with a voting who has the best presentation… The actual cosplay presentation was on the smaller “Live Stage” in the CCD-Building, but we missed that one (didn’t notice its existance).

The moderators of the Stage were kinda cringe and lame, but better than silence while the next event is being prepared I guess.

Hall 17: Itasha⌗

THE place for car fans! Even I, who doesn’t really care for cars, enjoyed visiting here. The building was filled with Itasha (eng: “painful cars”, because it hurts normies to see them in public), Cars with anime artworks on them. Most cars were quite expensive themselves and adorned with high quality, custom-made artworks on them.

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