I never intended to collect Gundam Wing doujinshi. Everything else, sure--Gundam Wing was the first TV anime series that had really grabbed me in a good few years, so I happily nabbed up the CDs, the CD singles, the LDs, the tapes, cels, books, manga, pencilboards, the Official Duo Maxwell Hat--even the Official Duo Maxwell synthetic braid (scary but true!)--and doujinshi anthology books!
But individual doujinshi? I knew better than to ever go
there--there were billions of 'em being done, a ton of which were sure to be crappy. All the
good stuff had likely already been reprinted in the doujinshi anthology books, so I probably wasn't
missing anything. Plus, I'd never seen a Gundam Wing doujinshi offered for sale in the U.S.,
making temptation all the easier to avoid.
But then, in mid-December of 1997, I made my first trip back to Japan since 1980 (when I'd been a high school exchange student in Osaka). The morning after arriving, a friend and I journeyed to the Osaka branch of the used anime goods shop Mandarake--where, not far from its second-floor karaoke stage, I spotted the huge section of dozens of bookshelves stuffed full of used doujinshi in sealed clear plastic bags.
The Gundam section was easily visible from the center aisle, and as I glanced over, a shopper
was pulling out a handful of the books at a time, thumbing through the stack to look quickly at the
covers, and then pushing them back in and pulling out the next handful. On the front book of one
handful, there was a glint as the light caught the gold foil of its title--"Hell's Angels"--and the book's
cover immediately caught my eye. As soon as she replaced the stack, I wandered over and fished
that doujinshi out. And started looking through the rest of the couple thousand other
Gundam doujinshi on the shelves.
"I'll just buy whatever looks good, and that will be it," I assured myself. "There are so many of these things, I'd never be able to remember which ones I have, anyway."
Later, loaded with a few dozen doujinshi, too many manga, and a good 40 pounds of CDs, LDs and toys, it was an excrutiating trip back through a labyrinthine underground mall and two train stations to reach the hotel--I can match any mule on carrying a backpack, but the twine handles of full-to-bursting shopping bags will saw into your fingers! Too pooped to enjoy my haul from anime heaven, I boxed everything up and mailed it home the next morning to avoid having to keep dragging around the consequences of my crazed shopping excesses.
I didn't see another doujinshi until visiting a friend the following week in Tokyo. She has an astounding collection of doujinshi, and I started to regret not having at least unbagged the doujinshi I'd bought and looking at them before mailing them home. All I could do was hope I'd bought some as good as hers, right?
Wrong! The next day she took me shopping at the Ikebukuro branch of K-Books, with its glorious floor of used doujinshi. The Gundam Wing section filled several bookcase sections from ankle level to arm's reach overhead--and based on the shelf space that my current collection takes up, I'm not exaggerating to estimate K-Books' crop of used Gundam Wing doujinshi at over 8,000 books!
With all the doujinshi bagged so that you've got only the cover to judge by, I had a mind-frying amount of art styles and unfamiliar circle names to select from, but with observations from my friend on those groups she knew, I wound up with a top-quality stack of books that kept me absorbed all night long. I was hooked, hard!
Soon after that, my friend took me to the winter Comic Market, or "Comiket" for short--a twice-yearly gathering of doujinshi circles and buyers at the vast Tokyo Big Sight convention center in Ariake. Roughly 300,000 people in all attend the event, which is usually held for three days in August and two to three days in December.
A hefty catalog (over 1,200 pages!) is printed for each Comiket, showing the table assignment for each of the thousands of participating circles. Fortunately, by then I was starting to get a handle on the names of the circles whose work I liked most, thanks to the used doujinshi I'd bought and being able to peruse my friend's tremendous collection, so was able to mark those circles on the map provided in the catalog and hit them first before their latest doujinshi sold out.
Comiket seeds its table assignments by placing the most popular circles along the walls, to make more room for their buyers to form lines. These kabegiwa ("wall-side") circles are top-quality, and the wait in line for many can be an hour or more...as you pray that their book won't sell out before you reach the front! But there are only so many slots along the walls, so some other fine circles can be found on the regular aisles, too.
New doujinshi cost markedly more than used ones, but the advantage of buying them new at Comiket is that you're able to take a look inside the book (thanks to a sample mihon display copy) before deciding whether or not to buy. That provided a fast introduction to the work of several more outstanding circles!
There's absolutely nothing like the day-long adrenalin rush of being in such a huge crowd with great doujinshi all around for the buying, and it's a thrill to get to meet some of the artists, too! I've subsequently gone to the Winter 1998-2003 and Summer '98 and '02-'04 Comikets, and hope to attend them both in 2005, too.
Since that jaw-dropper of a December day when I saw that first Gundam Wing doujinshi, my collection has expanded to include doujinshi on a variety of other subjects--but Gundam Wing remains one of my very favorites.
This page was created August 30, 1999. Last
updated November 23, 2004.