Anime Expo, the biggest anime and manga convention in North America, is famous for its vast variety of activities and sheer number of attendees, and is bound to have an artist alley big enough to match its caliber.
For those unfamiliar with artist alleys, they are designated areas located typically in convention centers or events, where artists gather and sell their merchandise to the attendees. Artist alleys are a common occurrence within hobby events such as anime, game, and comic conventions.
In artist alley, independent artists come together to sell fan art, original creations, and more. Commonly found merchandise includes keychains, stickers, and prints. While it is fairly easy to find this sort of gathering within your area, there is one event that tops the majority of the competition.
Artist alleys give opportunities to aspiring artists to turn their passion into a career. Artist and content creator Henry, known on his YouTube channel as Stickerzoo, briefly spoke on how “Artist Alley is a super fun place” where he can make a career out of creating art.
“I do artist alleys and a lot of college-based events,” Stickerzoo said. “I make a lot of art that’s centered around videogames I loved growing up, and anime that I have recently been indulging in.”
Furthermore, he said compared to other events, Anime Expo “is a really wild convention with tons of amazing talent. Lots of people.” He describes the experience as “overstimulating and overwhelming, but it’s really fun.”
In the past few years, the number of artists permitted within the space has been capped at around 550 to 600+ artists per year. However, there was a slight change in Anime Expo’s rules this year. In the year 2025, event runners increased the cap to 900+ artists.
The higher cap brought both positive and negative comments from attendees and artists. Some favored the change to give more artists a chance to sell their art. Others were concerned about spacing issues in the walkways, overcrowding, and the artist-to-attendee ratio.
Eddie Kong, the artist behind thewrabbithole and a local LA artist who has sold his art at Anime Expo in previous years, voiced his concerns.
“I feel like part of what we agreed to purchase, as a part of these original 600 tables, was a certain amount of attendees to artist ratio. By suddenly selling 50% more booths, it takes away from what we were promised and what we paid for,” Kong said.
The event had initially allowed the usual 600+ artists by drawing lotteries. After choosing the initial artists, an extra 300+ artists were added. However, event runners did not offer to lower the already expensive table prices in exchange for the surplus of artists attending.
Anime Expo’s Artist Alley tables go for a steep price, ranging from $600 to $700 on average. It may not seem too bad off the bat, but considering some artists come from all around North America as well as flying in internationally, the overall costs to table at this event are jarring to say the least.
Along with raising the overall artist cap, Anime Expo has changed its way of choosing the artists. In the previous years, Anime Expo had a jury system where judges would select artists from a pool of applicants. This year, the event opted for a lottery system where artists would randomly be selected to get a table. This new change also brought up concerns.
“It kinda sucks because a lot of art tracers and AI artists have gotten into the artist alley. I did like the jury system, but I do also like the lottery because it means that everyone has a chance at the same time,” said Lorena Nealson, an artist alley veteran who goes by artpudding_.
It is a common saying that change is good, but in this case, is it for the better or for the worse? We’ll just have to wait and see.