Some of the biggest and most popular names in the anime and manga industry will be visiting this year’s Anime Expo and fans are excited to meet the creators behind their favorite series! Some names among this year’s Guests of Honor are Mokumokuren, creator of the hit series The Summer Hikaru Died, Peach-Pit, the talented female mangaka duo of Rozen Maiden, and Ogeretsu Tanaka, the artist behind so many beloved Boys Love manga, including Happy of the End.
Scalping is a prevalent problem in convention signing events and it affects true fans of artists and series negatively. Every year, the committees try different methods to prevent this issue, and one way to do that is to assign one ticket per signing session to one person
While this is a fair restriction to implement, some of the attendees were shocked to get an email from Anime Expo. In it, it is stated that having more than one Guest of Honor signing event tickets, even if you’re only getting one ticket to multiple events, is a violation of their Autograph Policy. As a result, all of the “duplicate” tickets but one will be canceled. One attendee claims the cancellations are done at random without giving the fans a chance to choose to keep the one they want.
One Reddit user argued that the clause stating one ticket and one Guest of Honor session per person wasn’t previously on the convention’s Legal page by retrieving the version available on June 1st. It appears that this limitation of each attendee getting one ticket to only one Guest of Honor signing event has been implemented recently and without an open, official statement. While attendees approve of limitations to prevent scalping, the sudden cancellation and not being able to attend multiple sessions, or at least, not being able to choose which of the tickets they’ll keep has caused upset.
There’s yet to be an official acknowledgment or statement regarding these cancellations from Anime Expo.
Sources: Reddit, X (formerly Twitter)
