

I would like to know what the most popular franchises of all time are, when
viewed through the lens of Comiket.

By "Comiket-related metrics", I mean things like: number of circles
participating; number of distinct doujinshi sold; total number of doujinshi
sold; or any other such metric that you think would make sense. I'm not sure
which of these metrics have data readily available, so any of them will do,
really. I'm looking for data taken in aggregate since Comiket 1 in 1975, or at
least as far back as data is available. I'm _not_ looking for information
about what was most popular at C87 (the Dec 2014 Comiket) or any other recent
Comiket in specific.

Now, that said, I'm fairly confident that the number-one most popular of all
time is going to be Touhou - it's been at the top of the Comiket "charts" for
a long time now (in the comments, Logan suggests it became really popular in
2002). So what I'm _really_ interested in knowing is what comes in second
place on down. I really have no idea what might even be on the list besides
Touhou - maybe something long-running like Nanoha or PreCure or Gundam?


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question
doujinshi comiket
In terms of Comiket-related metrics, what are the most popular franchises of all time? (Touhou and...?)


There is a small amount of officially-released statistical data in English
[here](http://www.comiket.co.jp/index_e.html). The "History of Comic Market"
section of the "What is Comic Market" PDF shows a chronology chart of the
number of participating circles (32 in the first Comiket, up to 550,000 in a
recent Comiket), and the following pages of the PDF list more specifics.

In terms of volumes of doujinshi sold and the types of them, I do not beleive
that the specific info you seek has been collected. Comiket is massive and
when I sold doujinshi there last year, all of the booths in my area just
started closing up shop near the end of the day, without (as far as I know)
being required to keep track of how many volumes we sold nor needing to report
that number to the organizers of Comiket.

The best way to attempt to measure which series are represented would be to
get ahold of the massive phonebook-sized program booklet from each year and
count the number of circles that used a particular series as its sole
illustration in the book to advertise its work. For example, how many picked
to use Cardcaptor Sakura, how many picked to draw Evangelion, etc. However,
this would only give you a general sense, since of course one circle might
draw doujinshi for more than one series, and might even not choose as its one
illustration entry in the guidebook whichever series that it sells the most
volumes of. From what I saw when I was there, and from looking through the
program book of that year, Nanoha, PreCure, and Gundam were not big
representations (Nanoha and PreCure are not long-running, anyway, as far as
Comiket is concerned - they're pretty new series when you consider everything
that's been produced since 1975). The ones I saw represented a lot were more
old-school ones like Evangelion and series from that era; this also makes
sense since the original otaku of such series would largely be in their 30s
and 40s, even early 50s now. It should be noted that about 90% of the
doujinshi I saw for sale was all hentai (not the tasteful, romantic sort, but
the explicit sort), so the target demographic would reasonably have some
bearing on which types of series are represented (i.e., what kind of series do
the people who like hardcore hentai tend to like?). Comiket would not attract
many of your average Japanese anime-watching demographics for that reason (I
ended up not finding anything to buy). People who like sweet fluff or sci-fi
action stories or any number of interesting genres that the realm of anime
offers us would not necessarily be interested in the very specific subset of
doujinshi that you can find at Comiket. Of newer series, Madoka Magica had
some representation.


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